Google Scholar – RIP Lexis Nexis and Westlaw

The legal profession is stuck using two legal indexing services, Lexis Nexis and Westlaw. Both are prohibitively expensive and practically required for lawyers. David Manes and I had a recent conversation about the absurdity that court information had no free central indexing service – like a universal public interface. In other words, provide people with the case law that they are expected to follow as citizens. We believe that a single free portal, combining legal content from the courts and legislatures, is in the public interest. Deferring to a prohibitively expensive content management system drives up the cost of legal representation while also making it unavailable to non-attorneys. With this in mind, it is also relevant that the private companies do provide case briefs and hierarchical structure of “good law” or Shepardizing. But then again, is it not intuitive that governments convey laws of society to the public by providing this service?

On a quick detour, it is shocking how deeply rooted these two services have become in legal education. On the first day law students are given items, more realistically bribes gifts, from the twin agencies in an effort to buy allegiance. In just about every law school they have printers where students are encouraged to freely print any case (with an unlimited document count). Further, they encourage use by letting students earn points to get “Rewards”. Mandatory classes are taught by the representatives demonstrating the tools they offer, free as a student of course.

Thanks to Google, a new service has been launched that will begin to index “legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts”. This integration of cases into a single portal is the beginning of an Open Movement in the legal profession. A giant like Google has the potential and capability to reshape the industry. Introducing the newest service, Google Scholar Legal Opinions:

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the “How Cited” link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html

This is only a first step in widespread aggregation of legal opinions. I have high hopes for this product. I imagine that this system will eventually integrate law journals,  subsequent treatment by courts, articles, blogs and other relevant material that could greatly improve the overall access of a case to the public.

“If it keeps expanding, it could envelop all the private scholarly article databases that are so prohibitively expensive right now. That would be great.” David Manes

Good Luck, Google.