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Harvard Project Aims To Put Every Court Decision Online, For Free (google.com)
Techdirt comments approvingly on a new project from Harvard Law School, called Free the Law, which is a joint effort with a company called Ravel to scan and post in nicely searchable format all federal and state court decisions, and put them all online, for free. As Techdirt puts it,
This is pretty huge. While some courts now release most decisions as freely available PDFs, many federal courts still have them hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system, and state court decisions are totally hit or miss. And, of course, tons of historical cases are completely buried. While there are some giant companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis that provide lawyers access to decisions, those cost a ton -- and the public is left out. This new project is designed to give much more widespread access to the public. And it sounds like they're really going above and beyond to make it truly accessible, rather than just dumping PDFs online. ... Harvard "owns" the resulting data (assuming what's ownable), and while there are some initial restrictions that Ravel can put on the corpus of data, that goes away entirely after eight years, and can end earlier if Ravel "does not meet its obligations."
Anything that helps disrupt the stranglehold of the major legal publishers seems like a good thing.
Court decisions are a matter of public record (if not explicitly sealed), doesn't matter if the involved object.
Someone tell us what the "ton" is that Westlaw and LexisNexis charge.
For a small practice it is in the order of magnitude of $10-20k per year. That only comes from two lawyer friends who I have helped set up IT systems for. They both have very small practices of 2 & 3 lawyers respectively, and this was about 5 years ago. The pricing is hardly a flat and easy to calculate price, however, so different law firms probably pay wildly different amounts based on how they use it.
Think of these companies like Oracle if there was no MySQL for the little guy to use instead.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I must not understand. Why wouldn't all decisions be free already? If we paid for them with tax dollars, wouldn't the decisions belong to the public?
The decisions themselves are public, but finding them online is not.
The major legal publishers--Westlaw and Lexis--charge ridiculous costs to access them, and accessing them through the publishers is the only practical way to do a lot of legal research because of their systems for tracing ideas and the fact that they have collected all of the local court cases that historically were never indexed unless a snippet happened to be printed in a legal periodical, for example. They add billions of dollars of value by indexing the ideas and legal points in the cases (called "Shepardizing") and writing short summaries of what the case decided about each point. Also by showing you where the cases were cited after that for each point. So they are very useful and add value, but their high expense, opaque pricing model, and strong duopoly are well-entrenched and problematic.
These major legal publishers--especially Westlaw--have an even more opaque pricing system than the insurance companies. IIRC they contractually prohibit purchasers from revealing the amount paid for the services, letting them have radically different pricing for different firms depending on what they think they can weasel out of the firm and without allowing anyone to even reasonably study the economics. Meanwhile they basically charge government and law schools nothing, so government and law students use them heavily, reinforcing their structural duopoly.
Mere access through PACER to the federal cases online doesn't cost much (free for small amounts of stuff) and courts are underfunded everywhere, so that's a lot less absurd than what happens with Westlaw and lexis. The cost of using one of them pushes legal research further out of reach of even successful small businesses, to say nothing of the consumer (nonexistent except for the quite wealthy and above, or common problems they have no choice but to pay money to deal with, like domestic violence, divorce, real estate sales, etc...).
Finally, I've heard that especially with westlaw the pricing model tends to be by-the-time-unit-spent or by-the-case, or a flat model per quarter that winds up being computed based on those, so either way law firms teach their lawyers to be thorough but not to make that extra search that costs extra money. So it's like being told to search google for the right answer, but be very sure about every keyword combination and only click on a link if you really need to. The flexibility depends on the client and their wealth, their need, their relationship to the firm, etc..., but ultimately you're talking about incentive structures that wind up with worse client representation for most clients. Despite all those downsides which make people hate them, the major publishers do a good job with their indexing systems and really do add value--when your client can afford them.
What you're missing is that WL/Lexis charge PER HOUR (hundreds of dollars an hour) to search the system. So what it means is that you usually can't do more than a cursory search because of the cost. Very few court cases are the kinds of multi-mega-million cases where large companies will pay anything for their defense.
Honestly at this point Google does a good enough job for most purposes. I literally don't use WL or Lexis for months at a time. It's very rare that you're looking for the needle in the haystack that exactly addresses your concern and this needle is so obscure that no law firm has mentioned it in a memo on their website.
What WL and Lexis are great for is when you do in fact need that needle in a haystack. Suppose you have a postal worker making a claim he was discriminated against for having AIDS. Well, it turns out there is exactly one case in the 9th Circuit on point. If you're representing him and you find that case you have a much much stronger case than if you tried to appeal to the district court judge's sympathies without clear law backing you up.