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Monday, August 20, 2007

Law - "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free"

John Markoff, technology reporter for the NY Times, writes today about "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free." As he notes, this effort has been ongoing for years now. "The two companies control the bulk of the nearly $5 billion legal publishing market. (A third, but niche, player is the Commerce Clearing House division of Wolters Kluwer)." More:

[Carl] Malamud is not the first person to attempt to unravel the control of West and LexisNexis. The issue of whether the companies have copyright protection over the published and online versions of the legal research reference materials led to legal challenges in the 1980s and ’90s. During the ’90s, a New York lawyer, Alan D. Sugarman, successfully challenged West, winning a ruling in a copyright protection lawsuit. However, Mr. Sugarman’s company, Hyperlaw, ultimately failed.

“It cost me a lot of money, and when it was all said and done I was wiped out financially, so I went back to the practice of law,” Mr. Sugarman said.

West’s electronic and print influence over the legal profession became so valuable that Thomson paid $3.4 billion for the company in 1996. The West books contain major court decisions, and they have been adopted as the standard in the nation’s courts and law firms, and the West method of identifying cases has remained the standard for citations in decisions and legal briefs.

However, Mr. Malamud and a diverse group of backers argue that the control of publishing court rulings subverts the original intent of the framers of the Constitution by making the nation’s laws difficult to obtain by those outside the legal profession.

In a letter to West Publishing last Wednesday, Mr. Malamud said his intent was to make federal and state court decisions available to a population that cannot afford the subscription costs.

Legal codes and cases are the “operating system” of the nation, he said. “The system only works if we can all openly read the primary sources,” he said in the letter. “It is crucial that the public domain data be available for anybody to build upon.” * * *

The Public Resource effort is one of several attempts to make the nation’s laws more accessible. One project, AltLaw (altlaw.org) is a joint effort by Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons program at the University of Colorado Law School to permit free full-text searches of the last decade of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions.

“I’m a legal academic and I woke up one day and thought, ‘Why can’t I get cases the same way I get stuff on Google?’ ” said Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor who is one of the leaders of the project. “People should be able to get cases easily. This is a big exception to the way information has opened up over the past decade.”

The challenge faced by the various public interest and commercial efforts is the lack of standardization in the court system that makes it a technical nightmare for those who want to place information online for the public.

Actually, as many ILB readers are aware, much of the nation's statutory and caselaw is freely accessible online. However, one has to know where to look, there is no overarching system as there is with West and Lexis, who make finding the law "as easy as Google." And they offer consistency and quality control.

The ILB rarely has to turn to West or Lexis, and as each year passes more and more caselaw and statutory law becomes accessible. West and Lexis, I'm sure, see the day coming when they may lose their grip on this material. In the meantime, these companies wisely keep broadening their bases to include other materials, such as "enhanced" regulatory files, brief banks, trial and administrative rulings, and the like.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 20, 2007 12:00 PM
Posted to General Law Related