Beware of Discrepancies Between Google SLOJ Opinion Texts and Texts from Other Sources

On Legal Writing Prof Blog, Nova's Jim Levy reports on how a Google SLOJ user found a discrepancy when he compared the Google-provided opinion text with the official text of the opinion he was using in his brief  -- the footnote numbers were off! How? Why?

The source of the discrepancy quickly became apparent. In the official version of the case (as in all official versions of Wisconsin cases), the filing of a petition for review in the Wisconsin Supreme Court gets noted in the caption with a footnote placed at the end of the name of the party that filed the petition.  The symbol for this footnote is a dagger, not a number.  Google Scholar, however, designates this footnote with a number (in this instance, the dagger became "1") and renumbers the remaining footnotes accordingly.

See Levy's To all legal researchers: Be aware of possible discrepancies between Google Scholar and commercial research tools for details. [JH]