6 ms·

Finding the laws that govern us

82 points by epi0Bauqu 17y ago

eggoa 17y ago
"full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts" If it's actually comprehensive, this is a very big deal. I don't know how LexisNexis Westlaw are going survive now that Google is giving away a huge chunk of their services. (Of course, this stuff has always been technically in the public domain; and much has even been online in disparate and badly organized sources.)
- duke_sam 17y ago
  This is a very big deal. In the past getting ready access to this information required a lot of free time or handing _very_ large sums of money over to the aggregators. The next step is to hook these decisions up these decisions the pieces of statute that they effect.
- stinkytaco 17y ago
  West has keycite. Keycite, Westlaw's case history features and the West Digests/summaries are enough of a value added service that it will enable them to continue to thrive, even if they can no longer hold the legal industry by the nuts.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    I am a lawyer and I have read enough of the West annotations over the years to know that one must still read the full text of decisions, brief them personally, and THINK about what they mean, as the West annotations are often flat wrong. To begin with, most of the time they fail to distinguish dicta and holdings. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_holding_and_dictum http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_hol... West certainly provided added value in the beginning, but that kind of service needs relentless quality control of a kind that West hasn't served up for a long time.
- rdtsc 17y ago
  > I don't know how LexisNexis Westlaw are going survive. I don't think they will. I interviewed with them and there was a general atmosphere of desperation, suggestions of needing to work weekends and hollidays. I mentioned Google to them and how Google will eventually want to get access to _public_ court records, and it seems like that question made them really uncomfortable. Well, they enjoyed their (virtual?) monopoly for so many years, now Google gets to enjoy theirs.
  - grellas 17y ago
    West Publishing goes back to the 1890s and had a long-time franchise, gained through official channels (the courts), by which it had exclusive rights to publish the "official" versions of virtually all the case law in America. Mead-Data (Lexis) came in during the 1970s with its Wang-style dedicated workstations and its newly formed databases and had a huge disruptive effect by offering the first system of electronically retrievable legal authorities ever. The system was very clunky when I used it in law school in the 1976-78 era but has since been highly refined and is highly useful for those willing and able to pay the high price associated with the service. Lexis eventually undercut the West monopoly and sent West scrambling for a competitive response (hence, Westlaw). The competition between Lexis and Westlaw did lead to far better pricing for some users, from the old "x dollars per minute" model to flat-rate pricing for users in specific categories (e.g., small firms), but this still involved hundreds of dollars per month at minimum (anything beyond the specific categories remained x dollar per minute). Of late, other services have cropped up (LawNet) that have made a lot of the case law available at much cheaper fixed pricing (e.g., under $100/mo) but their offerings were incomplete. The trend is unmistakable. For Lexis and Westlaw to compete, they will eventually have to lower their pricing considerably. Even then, there is a serious question whether their resultant margins will leave them with a viable business model. Only time will tell on this. By the way, the downward trend for Lexis/Westlaw is tied to the vast disruption that has occurred with Big Law, which, in its heyday, was a massive user of such services that paid little attention to the cost aspect (costs were simply passed on to clients). In our cost-conscious era, Big Law is reeling in the short term, as are Lexis and Westlaw.
- slapshot 17y ago
  Four ways that Lexis/West will survive for now. None are permanent, but this is not a perfect solution yet: 1 - Lexis/West both allow lawyers to search based on jurisidiction. If I am a lawyer in Florida, then I want to see results from Florida front and center. A decision from a state court in Arkansas is not directly relevant. It might be interesting, but I don't have time to sort through 50 state courts just to find the one Florida case that affects my client. 2 - Lexis/West both have access to the "official" versions of opinions. Many courts release opinions subject to a lot of technical revisions (fixing typos, changing citations, etc). The opinion is considered final only after all the technical revisions are complete. Many online sources do not reflect the technical revisions. I don't know where Google is getting its data, but lawyers (who value certainty and hate risk) would be willing to pay $5 to Lexis/West to make sure they have the absolute most final version of a case. 3 - Lexis/West have PDF versions that show the proper pagination/column-ation of the cases as they appear in print. This seems silly, but when you are in court talking about a case to a judge, you need to make sure that you can say "I win because of what the case says about halfway down the right column on page 451" and have the judge open his copy of the book and find the statement in the right column of page 451. Eventually, judges will move to line-numbered books and this will be irrelevant. But in the meantime, lawyers want to have the identical version as the judge. 4 - Both Lexis and Westlaw employ people who summarize and categorize the cases. Keyword search doesn't work if the court does not use your keyword. If a case is about landlord/tenant law, the Lexis/West will categorize it and tag it as "landlord/tenant" (as well as a LOT of other things) even if the words "landord" and "tenant" never appear (maybe the opinion calls them "renter" and "rentee").
dtf 17y ago
Is this what Aaron Swartz got into trouble with the FBI for trying to help set up? (freeing the contents of the PACER database.)
- pmichaud 17y ago
  http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile Link for those interested in that case.
igurari 17y ago
This is a huge deal. Having worked in this space for 1.5 years, I can say definitively that Google's ranking algorithm works extremely well. Their UI is solid, though it has room for improvement. They tackled a number of other huge problems relating to document formats (pdf's, footnotes, etc.), and citation formats. In any event, this is most definitely a game changer, and I am sure Lexis and Westlaw will see an immediate hit to revenue in 2010.
- stinkytaco 17y ago
  Honest question: I don't know what exactly you do, but do you think you could do it without keycite?
  - igurari 17y ago
    I am a lawyer and programmer. I put together a site - www.tracelaw.com - which I launched last week. Almost every innovation that I came up with, Google has put into Google Scholar. There is one key technical aspect where what I have done is better, but aside from that, I would say Google Scholar largely does everything extremely well. I was not saying in my above comment that Google will replace Lexis/Westlaw. What I am suggesting is that they will change how lawyers perform legal research. What this does is separate case search from case hosting. And case search is the really expensive part. Basically, as I see it, lawyers will start their searches on Google, and eventually migrate to Lexis/Westlaw when they've narrowed their focus, or run into a dead end. And if that happens, all those searches that migrated to Google, are searches that are no longer run on Lexis or Westlaw (and for which they can no longer charge a fee).
    - stinkytaco 17y ago
      I guess I didn't think of the "per search" charges. That said, Using West's Digest and their case histories is a neccessary step in legal research for me. I can see this for general searches on a topic, but for the real nitty gritty you need to get into West/Lexis. To summarize, I think West will do just fine. It might mean one less leather portfolio for law librarians every year.
simon_ 17y ago
As long as they're out to disrupt complacent information aggregation businesses, I hope they have Bloomberg and Reuters in their sights. Like Lexis and Westlaw, they reap enormous profits from providing structured access to mostly free information.
jorgem 17y ago
I still can't tell which laws apply to me, specifically (my state, for example). You have to know a lot, just to know which decisions could possibly apply to you.
- igurari 17y ago
  That is very true. The value in this is for lawyers; lay people have always had a hard time finding and understanding the law. This may help a lay person, but Google's implementation appears to really be focused on lawyers.
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. Google has a really optimistic definition of the "average citizen". :) In all seriousness, this seems like a pretty cool development for legal folks, but if I'm looking for info on a particular case or general legal topic, why wouldn't I just use Wikipedia?
- riffic 17y ago
  this is a primary source, wikipedia is not.
  - jmtulloss 17y ago
    Also, wikipedia articles can now site the relevant cases through google. This means you can actually verify the information you find on wikipedia, which is crucial to wikipedia's credibility.
grellas 17y ago
The potential value of this offering is great but it is nowhere close to competing with LexisNexis/Westlaw in its current form. For example, I had clerked for a federal judge in the Northern District of California in the 1979-80 era. I tried searching for published opinions by that judge and could not get any to come up. I also worked on a large securities class action while at a large firm thereafter and this resulted in a major opinion by another judge in that matter - couldn't get that one to come up either. Don't know if it is me fumbling around with inept searching techniques, or if it is the search algorithm, but I do know that I can easily retrieve these items through the major legal search services. Thus, my initial impression is that this Google service is full of great potential but is still at too early a stage to be of use as a systematic legal search service. As one who supports the idea of law being made broadly available to average people, and as one who pays a lot of money for the Lexis/Westlaw type of services, I look forward to the further development and refinement of this service. For the moment, though, it appears to be still too immature to be of real help yet, at least when one is looking for specific things.
clistctrl 17y ago
Great potential, but still couldn't find something to get out of my gym membership contract.
rfreytag 17y ago
Imagine a statistical correlation of the semantic content of briefs versus the deciding opinions. The result might highlight the outliers holding attorneys and judges to consistent standards of professional practice heretofore hidden in the court records. >If< it can be done what a wonderful result for the betterment of the practice of law.
coreyrecvlohe 17y ago
This has amazing potential. It would be interesting if someday you could ask Google if something were legal or not, and it could give you an exactly correct answer, with an interpretation on par with or better than a professional lawyer. Google needs to do this with the entire United States Tax code, Federal Statutes, and work with States and Counties to get their legal texts online and into their index.
anigbrowl 17y ago
Now if we can just wikify the US Code, then we can do away with those irritating legislature things and techno-utopia shall be ours. Seriously, I can see some great possibilities for integrating this with the Google visualization APIs for statistical purposes, or for business intelligence (eg try searching for cases to which Google is a party).

82 points by epi0Bauqu 17y ago

eggoa 17y ago

"full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts" If it's actually comprehensive, this is a very big deal. I don't know how LexisNexis Westlaw are going survive now that Google is giving away a huge chunk of their services. (Of course, this stuff has always been technically in the public domain; and much has even been online in disparate and badly organized sources.)

duke_sam 17y ago
This is a very big deal. In the past getting ready access to this information required a lot of free time or handing _very_ large sums of money over to the aggregators. The next step is to hook these decisions up these decisions the pieces of statute that they effect.
stinkytaco 17y ago
West has keycite. Keycite, Westlaw's case history features and the West Digests/summaries are enough of a value added service that it will enable them to continue to thrive, even if they can no longer hold the legal industry by the nuts.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  I am a lawyer and I have read enough of the West annotations over the years to know that one must still read the full text of decisions, brief them personally, and THINK about what they mean, as the West annotations are often flat wrong. To begin with, most of the time they fail to distinguish dicta and holdings. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_holding_and_dictum http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_hol... West certainly provided added value in the beginning, but that kind of service needs relentless quality control of a kind that West hasn't served up for a long time.
rdtsc 17y ago
> I don't know how LexisNexis Westlaw are going survive. I don't think they will. I interviewed with them and there was a general atmosphere of desperation, suggestions of needing to work weekends and hollidays. I mentioned Google to them and how Google will eventually want to get access to _public_ court records, and it seems like that question made them really uncomfortable. Well, they enjoyed their (virtual?) monopoly for so many years, now Google gets to enjoy theirs.
- grellas 17y ago
  West Publishing goes back to the 1890s and had a long-time franchise, gained through official channels (the courts), by which it had exclusive rights to publish the "official" versions of virtually all the case law in America. Mead-Data (Lexis) came in during the 1970s with its Wang-style dedicated workstations and its newly formed databases and had a huge disruptive effect by offering the first system of electronically retrievable legal authorities ever. The system was very clunky when I used it in law school in the 1976-78 era but has since been highly refined and is highly useful for those willing and able to pay the high price associated with the service. Lexis eventually undercut the West monopoly and sent West scrambling for a competitive response (hence, Westlaw). The competition between Lexis and Westlaw did lead to far better pricing for some users, from the old "x dollars per minute" model to flat-rate pricing for users in specific categories (e.g., small firms), but this still involved hundreds of dollars per month at minimum (anything beyond the specific categories remained x dollar per minute). Of late, other services have cropped up (LawNet) that have made a lot of the case law available at much cheaper fixed pricing (e.g., under $100/mo) but their offerings were incomplete. The trend is unmistakable. For Lexis and Westlaw to compete, they will eventually have to lower their pricing considerably. Even then, there is a serious question whether their resultant margins will leave them with a viable business model. Only time will tell on this. By the way, the downward trend for Lexis/Westlaw is tied to the vast disruption that has occurred with Big Law, which, in its heyday, was a massive user of such services that paid little attention to the cost aspect (costs were simply passed on to clients). In our cost-conscious era, Big Law is reeling in the short term, as are Lexis and Westlaw.
slapshot 17y ago
Four ways that Lexis/West will survive for now. None are permanent, but this is not a perfect solution yet: 1 - Lexis/West both allow lawyers to search based on jurisidiction. If I am a lawyer in Florida, then I want to see results from Florida front and center. A decision from a state court in Arkansas is not directly relevant. It might be interesting, but I don't have time to sort through 50 state courts just to find the one Florida case that affects my client. 2 - Lexis/West both have access to the "official" versions of opinions. Many courts release opinions subject to a lot of technical revisions (fixing typos, changing citations, etc). The opinion is considered final only after all the technical revisions are complete. Many online sources do not reflect the technical revisions. I don't know where Google is getting its data, but lawyers (who value certainty and hate risk) would be willing to pay $5 to Lexis/West to make sure they have the absolute most final version of a case. 3 - Lexis/West have PDF versions that show the proper pagination/column-ation of the cases as they appear in print. This seems silly, but when you are in court talking about a case to a judge, you need to make sure that you can say "I win because of what the case says about halfway down the right column on page 451" and have the judge open his copy of the book and find the statement in the right column of page 451. Eventually, judges will move to line-numbered books and this will be irrelevant. But in the meantime, lawyers want to have the identical version as the judge. 4 - Both Lexis and Westlaw employ people who summarize and categorize the cases. Keyword search doesn't work if the court does not use your keyword. If a case is about landlord/tenant law, the Lexis/West will categorize it and tag it as "landlord/tenant" (as well as a LOT of other things) even if the words "landord" and "tenant" never appear (maybe the opinion calls them "renter" and "rentee").

dtf 17y ago

Is this what Aaron Swartz got into trouble with the FBI for trying to help set up? (freeing the contents of the PACER database.)

pmichaud 17y ago
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile Link for those interested in that case.

igurari 17y ago

This is a huge deal. Having worked in this space for 1.5 years, I can say definitively that Google's ranking algorithm works extremely well. Their UI is solid, though it has room for improvement. They tackled a number of other huge problems relating to document formats (pdf's, footnotes, etc.), and citation formats. In any event, this is most definitely a game changer, and I am sure Lexis and Westlaw will see an immediate hit to revenue in 2010.

stinkytaco 17y ago
Honest question: I don't know what exactly you do, but do you think you could do it without keycite?
- igurari 17y ago
  I am a lawyer and programmer. I put together a site - www.tracelaw.com - which I launched last week. Almost every innovation that I came up with, Google has put into Google Scholar. There is one key technical aspect where what I have done is better, but aside from that, I would say Google Scholar largely does everything extremely well. I was not saying in my above comment that Google will replace Lexis/Westlaw. What I am suggesting is that they will change how lawyers perform legal research. What this does is separate case search from case hosting. And case search is the really expensive part. Basically, as I see it, lawyers will start their searches on Google, and eventually migrate to Lexis/Westlaw when they've narrowed their focus, or run into a dead end. And if that happens, all those searches that migrated to Google, are searches that are no longer run on Lexis or Westlaw (and for which they can no longer charge a fee).
  - stinkytaco 17y ago
    I guess I didn't think of the "per search" charges. That said, Using West's Digest and their case histories is a neccessary step in legal research for me. I can see this for general searches on a topic, but for the real nitty gritty you need to get into West/Lexis. To summarize, I think West will do just fine. It might mean one less leather portfolio for law librarians every year.

simon_ 17y ago

As long as they're out to disrupt complacent information aggregation businesses, I hope they have Bloomberg and Reuters in their sights. Like Lexis and Westlaw, they reap enormous profits from providing structured access to mostly free information.

jorgem 17y ago

I still can't tell which laws apply to me, specifically (my state, for example). You have to know a lot, just to know which decisions could possibly apply to you.

igurari 17y ago
That is very true. The value in this is for lawyers; lay people have always had a hard time finding and understanding the law. This may help a lay person, but Google's implementation appears to really be focused on lawyers.

ryanwaggoner 17y ago

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. Google has a really optimistic definition of the "average citizen". :) In all seriousness, this seems like a pretty cool development for legal folks, but if I'm looking for info on a particular case or general legal topic, why wouldn't I just use Wikipedia?

riffic 17y ago
this is a primary source, wikipedia is not.
- jmtulloss 17y ago
  Also, wikipedia articles can now site the relevant cases through google. This means you can actually verify the information you find on wikipedia, which is crucial to wikipedia's credibility.

grellas 17y ago

The potential value of this offering is great but it is nowhere close to competing with LexisNexis/Westlaw in its current form. For example, I had clerked for a federal judge in the Northern District of California in the 1979-80 era. I tried searching for published opinions by that judge and could not get any to come up. I also worked on a large securities class action while at a large firm thereafter and this resulted in a major opinion by another judge in that matter - couldn't get that one to come up either. Don't know if it is me fumbling around with inept searching techniques, or if it is the search algorithm, but I do know that I can easily retrieve these items through the major legal search services. Thus, my initial impression is that this Google service is full of great potential but is still at too early a stage to be of use as a systematic legal search service. As one who supports the idea of law being made broadly available to average people, and as one who pays a lot of money for the Lexis/Westlaw type of services, I look forward to the further development and refinement of this service. For the moment, though, it appears to be still too immature to be of real help yet, at least when one is looking for specific things.

clistctrl 17y ago

Great potential, but still couldn't find something to get out of my gym membership contract.

rfreytag 17y ago

Imagine a statistical correlation of the semantic content of briefs versus the deciding opinions. The result might highlight the outliers holding attorneys and judges to consistent standards of professional practice heretofore hidden in the court records. >If< it can be done what a wonderful result for the betterment of the practice of law.

coreyrecvlohe 17y ago

This has amazing potential. It would be interesting if someday you could ask Google if something were legal or not, and it could give you an exactly correct answer, with an interpretation on par with or better than a professional lawyer. Google needs to do this with the entire United States Tax code, Federal Statutes, and work with States and Counties to get their legal texts online and into their index.

anigbrowl 17y ago

Now if we can just wikify the US Code, then we can do away with those irritating legislature things and techno-utopia shall be ours. Seriously, I can see some great possibilities for integrating this with the Google visualization APIs for statistical purposes, or for business intelligence (eg try searching for cases to which Google is a party).