Westlaw and Lexis Killer

Westlaw and Lexis have transformed legal research. There use of technology in legal research predated the advent of the internet. I can remember sitting at a Lexis terminal before there was an internet or personal computers.

However, the internet has changed things. Now legal issues can be researched on the internet. The problem is that not all the courts place their opinions in one place. This is beginning to change. As Robert Ambrogi's Law Sites reports a company called Public.Resource.org and Fast case plan to publish 1.8 million pages of federal court decisions. As Bob states:

Carl Malamud's nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org and the legal research company Fastcase today announced an agreement that will allow Public.Resource.Org to publish 1.8 million pages of federal case law in the public domain. The archive, which will become available sometime in 2008, will include all U.S. courts of appeals decisions since 1950 and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. I wrote in August about Malamud's charge to crash the Wexis gate with his plan to create a public-domain repository of all case law, federal and state, and I first wrote about him a decade ago in recognition of his work to bring the SEC's EDGAR database to the public.

If this works, this might be the begininng of the end to Westlaw and Lexis-at least with respect to federal caselaw research. We will, however, have to wait and see.

Mitchell H. Rubinstein