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

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").