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Friday, April 02, 2010
Letting a Thousand Legal Research Flowers Bloom
Thanks to Dan for letting me overstay my visit a little. To continue my series on legal research, I wanted to focus next not on the giants--Westlaw and Lexis--nor the giant new entrants--Google and Bloomberg--but rather on the other end of the long tail, on the small companies, start-ups, and solitary programmers who are developing new tools for legal research. I'm thinking of companies like Justia and Fastcase, nonprofits like public.resource.org, LII, and computationallegalstudies.com, small entrepreneurs like my former student Mike Boucher, and solo hackers like Robb Schecter.
The tools and techniques we use today to do legal research are so outmoded, mired in old, creaky technology, and desperately needing innovation, that it won't take much to do much better. Walk around the orchard of "things we can't yet do" and you'll find lots of low-hanging fruit, so much in fact, that a small start-up or even a hacker in a garage can create a great new advance on a shoestring. We don't need to rely on two or four giants, because we should be able to harness the collective innovation of a thousand different companies, each competing with one another for the legal research killer app.
The incentives are there. Your potential customers are lawyers with big IT budgets, high billable rates, and astronomical subscription fees to Lexis and Westlaw. Build a tool that will make law firm associates 5% more efficient, and you should make millions. (VC's: Are you listening?)
But there are many barriers to entry, and none more significant than access to data. Unless and until the garage hacker can easily and cheaply (read: for free) download caselaw, statutes, and regulations, she won't be able to test, much less launch, her new tool, so she's probably off building a new Facebook or Twitter app instead.
It's an embarrassment that so much supposedly "public" law is so hard to access, but the times are changing. Thanks to the Law.gov movement, and others like it, and thanks to the work of people like Carl Malamud, free, bulk access to the law is coming. If you want to learn more about this, and if you happen to be near Boulder, Colorado, today, come join me and Carl, as we continue the Law.gov conversation.
Posted by Paul Ohm on April 2, 2010 at 01:57 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Hi,
I appreciate your interest on legal research....Thanks to law.gov.
http://lawwave.com/
Posted by: lawwave | Apr 16, 2010 9:01:54 AM
Just gone through your blog and found it wonderful. It was nice going through your blog. keep it up the good work. Cheers :)
Posted by: Flowers | Apr 3, 2010 1:16:01 AM
Paul: I agree and I really want to see innovation and more players involved in legal publishing of both primary and secondary authority. Competition is a great thing.
I would like to add that private publishers not only create technical applications but they also provide content through authors and editors. Those legal treatises and West headnotes don't write themselves.
Posted by: pchuck | Apr 2, 2010 2:18:52 PM
pchuck,
Fair point, but if we release the primary sources online, I'm sure innovators will find new ways to annotate, and I'm willing to bet they'll find many ways to do it that improves on what the traditional, corporate, big-money, human-driven model has accomplished.
Posted by: Paul Ohm | Apr 2, 2010 1:32:43 PM
Sure primary authority should be freely available in print and online; however, effective legal research also includes using secondary sources and tools like finding aids and citators.
In addition, private legal publishers add value to the primary authority that they publish. For example, the United State Code (USC) in print is really a piece of crap (same with the online products at GPO Access and the Office of the Law Revision Counsel in the House.) It is unannotated and the updating of it is very slow. That is where the private publishers come into the picture. The United States Code Annotated (USCA) and the United States Code Service (USCS) in print and online are so much better because they have annotations to case law and secondary sources and are updated in a much better and timely manner. Now West and Lexis Law Publishing aren't doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, they charge a lot of money for the the USCA and USCS.
There is a difference between an uncooked piece of bacon and a bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich.
Posted by: pchuck | Apr 2, 2010 1:02:10 PM
...and if you can't be in Boulder today, you can follow the tweets at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23lawgov
Posted by: Paul Ohm | Apr 2, 2010 12:23:38 PM
Another data point for your study of small, start-up law web sites: www.veteranslawlibrary.com.
Posted by: anon | Apr 2, 2010 9:28:37 AM
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