Google Scholar Adds Free Legal Research

Google Scholar just added free journal and case law legal research to its search engine. I tried it and it works! It is, of course, not as comprehensive as Lexis or Westlaw, but it may be a way to get a quick cite. I now predict that many more clients will be doing legal research on there own. While I hesitate to state that this is a bad thing, in my experience, when clients do research they often bring irrelevant material to you and you have to spend time explaining why that lower court case from Texas in 1940 has very limited application to a different New York statute.

It would be interesting to see if Google changes the face of legal research. I suspect it will, but I am not sure that will be a good thing. 

Mitchell H. Rubinstein