
Finding the laws that govern us - epi0Bauqu
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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eggoa
"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.)

~~~
rdtsc
> 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
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.

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grellas
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.

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igurari
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
Honest question:

I don't know what exactly you do, but do you think you could do it without
keycite?

~~~
igurari
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
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.

~~~
htsh
When I worked at a biglaw firm a few years back, we were told that the shelf-
price of one of these wide searches was upwards of $800 for the firm and we
were encouraged to narrow down the search as much as possible. The cost for
recovering a single case: $6. They didn't actually pay these fees and had an
umbrella agreement, but the cost of this umbrella agreement was determined by
how widely the firm searched.

However you look at this, this is a big blow to Lexis/Westlaw and their
monopoly position has taken quite a hit. I agree that they add a ton of value
and will still be around, but its hard to overstate how big of a deal this is.

Its especially big for non-profit legal clinics and independent lawyers
practicing on their own, which had difficulty doing any sort of legal research
without coming to an agreement with one of these duopoly actors.

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simon_
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.

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dtf
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
<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile>

Link for those interested in that case.

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coreyrecvlohe
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.

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ryanwaggoner
_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
this is a primary source, wikipedia is not.

~~~
jmtulloss
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.

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rfreytag
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.

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anigbrowl
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).

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jorgem
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
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.

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

