Challenging the big two in legal research

There have been sev­eral new entrants to the legal research mar­ket­place, includ­ing the now-​​established Fastcase, along with free alter­na­tives like AltLaw and FindLaw. Google recently entered the pic­ture by adding legal cases (fed­eral and state) to Google Scholar, and now Bloomberg (known for business-​​focused research tools) is exper­i­ment­ing with a new legal research product.

Meanwhile, the “big two” — LexisNexis and Westlaw — are not stand­ing still. Both are intend­ing to release new inter­faces to their sig­na­ture prod­ucts in the next year, and both will focus on elim­i­nat­ing com­plex search query require­ments in favor of Google-​​like nat­ural lan­guage search­ing and “arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence” based sort­ing of results: “Both com­pa­nies claim to be cre­at­ing a legal research expe­ri­ence that will mimic the ease of use their cus­tomers have come to expect from the lead­ing Internet search engine, Google,” wrote the Jill Schachner Chanen in the ABA Journal on Jan. 24th.

This shift in search strate­gies can’t come soon enough for me. Even when I was rou­tinely using Lexis and Westlaw, I fre­quently found an ini­tial Google search — even with­out the new Google Scholar fea­tures — would do a far bet­ter job and get­ting me ori­ented on a case topic than any­thing Lexis or Westlaw could pro­vide. Once I had some spe­cific search terms, the big two would let me drill down, pull up case his­to­ries and related cases, and seek legal back­ground infor­ma­tion in trea­tises. But that ini­tial search­ing was much eas­ier and pro­duc­tive — not to men­tion cheaper! — using Google.

Improving this aspect might help keep cus­tomers. Not doing it will cer­tainly lose busi­ness, at least.

I don’t think I could, in good con­science, charge a client for legal research done entirely in Lexis or Westlaw at this point, with­out first start­ing out with free (or lower cost, at least) options like Google Scholar or Fastcase. The cost dif­fer­ence is stag­ger­ing, and I would feel uneth­i­cal to charge a client for the cost of exploratory research using the big two (but not for using them to Shephardize, for exam­ple, for which a paid ser­vice is sim­ply required).

Personally, I am far more excited by Google Scholar than by these poten­tial changes by the big two, but any inno­va­tion in this space would be welcome.

For more, see:

• Exclusive: Inside the new Westlaw, Lexis & Bloomberg Platform (ABA Journal)
• On the Lexis and Westlaw of the (Very) Near Future (Wall Street Journal Law Blog)