Google's To-Do List To Compete With WEXIS in the Online Legal Research Search Market

If Google really wants to compete with Westlaw and LexisNexis, the Company's next steps should be (1) to fill the holes in the primary legal resource collections that it indexes; (2) to build an effective, automated legal citator; and (3) to develop a good quality, automated knowledge representation system to provide subject access to individual primary legal documents according to Robert Richards in his very thorough Thoughts on Google & Legal Research blog post. Richards writes "If Google takes those further steps, then I think it could take a big share of the high-end CALR market. At the very least, its efforts, coupled with Bloomberg’s, should result in increased competition, lower prices, and more innovation yielding better retrieval tools for users in the U.S. CALR sector."

For much more, check out Richards' post on Legal Informatics Blog. He cites to Andrew Plumb-Larrick's blog post, Case Law in Google Scholar, which is also highly recommended. [JH]