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I'm curious how LexisNexis is going to attack this breach of their monopoly. Do they have patents on case law search?
Patents expire in 20 years, and Lexis-Nexis has been doing this for decades now.
I can easily imagine the USPTO approving silly things like "A method to search case law using IPV6".
Didn't a Stanford student already do this, posting XML of all federal/state judge opinions on his blog? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7026960 (discussion) https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/ (free mirror, looks like) It's a great concept, and more/newer is better, but it seems odd for Harvard to act like they're the first to pull it off.
No, not "freely accessable online", not until the 8 year exclusivity agreement with Ravel expires. It's a pay service with a free tier.[1] "Under the Harvard-Ravel agreement, Ravel is paying all of the costs of digitizing case law. HLS owns the resulting data, and Ravel has an obligation to offer free public access to all of the digitized case law on its site and to provide non-profit developers with free ongoing API…
Ok, that's complicated enough that we took "freely accessible" out of the title above.
No, not "freely accessable online", not until the 8 year exclusivity agreement with Ravel expires. It's a pay service with a free tier.[1] "Under the Harvard-Ravel agreement, Ravel is paying all of the costs of digitizing case law. HLS owns the resulting data, and Ravel has an obligation to offer free public access to all of the digitized case law on its site and to provide non-profit developers with free ongoing API…
I didn't use a copyleft software example by intent. Copyleft doesn't fit because the law itself is in the public domain [IANAL] and that is why The texts can be put under license by Harvard.
Anyway, it looks like an improvement over the current state of affairs. YMMV.
No, not "freely accessable online", not until the 8 year exclusivity agreement with Ravel expires. It's a pay service with a free tier.[1] "Under the Harvard-Ravel agreement, Ravel is paying all of the costs of digitizing case law. HLS owns the resulting data, and Ravel has an obligation to offer free public access to all of the digitized case law on its site and to provide non-profit developers with free ongoing API…
Try searching for cases that interest you, and you can read about them and lots of comments from attorneys.
Disclaimer - I know most of the team, but I think anyone would agree after reviewing casetext.com, ravel and the other companies trying to do this that casetext is by far the most open and the only real free option for everyone.
They are projecting to have Federal and CA, NY, MA, IL, TX done in 2016, and the rest of the states in 2017. I'm curious why those particular states are being done first. In particular, I'd have expected Delaware to be in the first group, because so many public companies are incorporated there, and so the decisions of its courts on corporate and stockholder issues have major national importance. Offhand, I can't thin…
[edit: acknowledging DE is in the hopper.]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No doubt LexisNexis and WestLaw have certain value added services that have certainly been developed through the years based on their positions as industry leaders, but you can't deny certain business practices that box out any potential free competitor. Reflect back on your law school days. I bet you received a free student account to either or both LexisNexis and WestLaw (accounts worth thousands of dollars given f…
My agency just dumped Westlaw for cost reasons and now we are exclusively Lexis. Lexis is inferior in many ways. The subject indexes are not nearly as comprehensive or usable (makes sense, since West has a huge head start with this with its Key Number System.) The case summaries are too wordy. Westlaw and Lexis both get big bucks to invest in their databases but then they are not at parity. So I doubt that some free…
But try search for a case on Google - not by citation, not by case style - by natural language or connectors like Lexis or Westlaw. Results are worse than useless, because you just lost time. Any startup could do case law search 10 times better than Google, but they could never compete in the market because lawyers were trained on Lexis and/or Westlaw are entrenched in law schools training the next generation of lawyers.
No, not "freely accessable online", not until the 8 year exclusivity agreement with Ravel expires. It's a pay service with a free tier.[1] "Under the Harvard-Ravel agreement, Ravel is paying all of the costs of digitizing case law. HLS owns the resulting data, and Ravel has an obligation to offer free public access to all of the digitized case law on its site and to provide non-profit developers with free ongoing API…
If you want free access to all the law, YC's Casetext.com provides it and they provide it for free for everyone right now. Try searching for cases that interest you, and you can read about them and lots of comments from attorneys. Disclaimer - I know most of the team, but I think anyone would agree after reviewing casetext.com, ravel and the other companies trying to do this that casetext is by far the most open and…
In the for-profit space, FindLaw has been around forever.
There's still nothing yet that really competes with Westlaw or LexisNexis for professionals though. It's not simply a matter of indexing all the decisions and adding a few hyperlinks. The stuff they are redacting for copyright reasons is stuff that you want when you are doing real research.
So one truly fascinating aspect of legal practice is that we tend to operate in the gray areas. However, the traditional way of researching case law – reviewing a list of cases returned based on your query – does little to help you sort through the mess.
With data visualization, you not only see the cases, but you see the relationship between cases, and how the cases work together. Among the most significant benefits, the data visualization elements of Ravel Law will help you narrow your research to the most relevant cases more quickly, while also helping you find those cases and arguments that, for whatever reason, didn’t rank in the top of your search.
http://www.thecyberadvocate.com/2015/09/30/data-visualizatio...
The value in this appears to relate concepts from one case to others through the visuals on the graph. The larger the circle, the more important the case will be. Lines connect one circle to another circle and it’s very easy to see which major cases are connected to other major cases. This is like a citator on steroids in my opinion as one can get to this point with a simple search. That means multiple steps in developing the analysis that finds the value and use of related cases. The snippets help immensely in determining which related cases are of value.