Carl Malamud’s vision of a new Law.gov “would give public easier access to all kinds of documents” — and not force us to rely on LexisNexis and Westlaw for access to what is, after all, public material.
Jan 262010
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.
Aug 212009
The cloud consists of data and services that live on someone else’s servers. Although the term itself is new(ish), the basic idea is embodied by traditional legal research services like LexisNexis and Westlaw — data lives on someone else’s servers, not your own. Thus, someone else controls the data, not you. And someone else can delete or modify the data, and you’d never know…
California courts are turning over attorney work product to for-fee services like LexisNexis and Westlaw, which then resell them (or merely make them available?) to customers. Does this violate copyright law?
Jul 132009
Cost is a major element of this: online access to a treatise (a compendium of legal research, opinion, etc. that’s an extremely useful resource for understanding an area of the law before diving into more specifics) can run to around $825 an hour, while the print version of the same treatise costs $499 per year (or less, if you don’t mind out-of-date treatises). But it’s more than simply the straight-up cost of access – print research can be more effective and time-efficient for many tasks.
Follow me on Twitter 