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I wonder what would happen if this happened to Westlaw, one of the 2-3 industry standards for law firms. Incredibly expensive. The irony alone in the law profe
by aridiculous 15y ago
I wonder what would happen if this happened to Westlaw, one of the 2-3 industry standards for law firms. Incredibly expensive.
The irony alone in the law profession would be tremendous. It'd be interesting to see if law firms would illegally access it: It would be obvious they were if they previously only subscribed to Westlaw, but the reality is most law firms subscribe to more than one database for emergency backup.
- gwern 15y agoIronically, one of Aaron's previous projects was about legal files: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/PACER_%28law%29#Reception https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/PACER_%28law%...
- rdp 15y agoState and federal court opinions are freely available from the courts themselves. Westlaw, LexisNexis, etc. gain much of their value from tools they provide for analyzing the opinions. These companies manually produce headnotes, case histories, and citation history (i.e., "shepardization"). Collating this value-added data would be vastly more difficult than automatically pulling opinions out of the PACER database (or even JSTOR). Not that I wouldn't like to see somebody try it . . .