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Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

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Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#31

Post by TZubiri »

chaps wrote: post #8

I do a lot of IL criminal courts research and it's really, really fucking bad out there. Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently. FOIA: IL Judicial…

>"Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently."

That doesn't sound right, are you sure that wasn't a bribe?

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#32

Post by chaps »

TZubiri wrote: post #31
chaps wrote: post #8

I do a lot of IL criminal courts research and it's really, really fucking bad out there. Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently. FOIA: IL Judicial…

>"Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently." That doesn't sound right, are you sure that wasn't a bribe?

You seem to have faith in the courts still. It was not a bribe. Here's a short exchange between me and the court reporter who did indeed sent me the transcripts after payment:

  "Out of curiosity, is it normal to pay court reporters over venmo like this? To be honest I was pretty surprised when I heard this. And funny enough when I asked folk on twitter, a scammer tried to "help out" with some "scam recovery" service for $500."

  "That's hilarious!  Since the pandemic, it really took off because we were working remotely, and some of the Cook County judges and reporters remain remote to this day and may be permanently working on Zoom.  I work at 26th Street so we've worked through most of the pandemic in person, but the courthouse was not open to the public.  Zelle is a way you can get payment to us quickly to get your transcript faster.

  Most private attorneys use Zelle now because they want the reporter to start transcription sooner rather than later, but we also accept checks or if you prefer to send a check in the mail, you can do that.  Very rarely does an attorney come into our office these days.

  It's just a matter of preference."

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#34

Post by yxhuvud »

burner420042 wrote: post #33

If someone wanted to do business research for Mexico or any other LATAM country, while in the US and using English source data what resources would you look to?

Depends on what kind of business research you need. But there are at least collections of all tax treaties that exist available from a single source somewhere. I don't remember what the source is off the top of my head unfortunately.

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#35

Post by AlotOfReading »

akudha wrote: post #23
atlanta90210 wrote: post #15

The state of Georgia tried to copyright its public written laws. They lost. https://www.bfvlaw.com/supreme-court-rules-georgia-cannot-cl...

How does one decide what should be in the public domain for the good of society and what should be commercialized? These are a couple of examples that I learned recently 1. In the UK, Royal Mail owns the postal addresses data. I was looking at UK's open datasets - apparently lot of datasets that have addresses can't be used without paying Royal Mail. There are some exceptions - but I am no lawyer. It is depressing to…

It's not a question of "how do you decide which public standards should be freely accessible". That's easy: all of them. The public benefits more from freely accessible standards whether they're building codes, legal codes, ISO standards, or HDMI. The effect of not having them publicly available is that people make-do without having read the standard and the public has no way to validate things against the standard afterwards.

The question we don't have an easy answer for is how to incentivise the people behind these things without locking their work behind paywalls? Compliance marks, homologation regimes, copyright, and other strategies all have their own downsides.

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#36

Post by pyuser583 »

And this doesn't include the messiness in the decisions themselves. Judges often edit the decisions for some time after they are published.

For example, Souter was editing his published opinion in Lee v. Weisman nine years after the case was decided.

https://balkin.blogspot.com/2025/05/a-justice-souter-anecdot...

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#37

Post by rockskon »

esbranson wrote: post #29

If you're trying to fix anything relating to public policy, politics, &c., without fixing this you are wasting your time. You will make a bigger difference adopting a local stretch of highway and picking up litter. It is maddening to see generation after generation learn this the hard way. FLP's CourtListener RECAP hits hard, but it has no counterparts either worldwide or within the US. If it goes offline, democracy…

There is little worse action you can take than discouraging others from doing anything.

Far worse problems than PACER have been solved. Just because you've been unsuccessful doesn't necessarily mean others will be.

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#38

Post by toomuchtodo »

showerst wrote: post #28
toomuchtodo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who will maintain the git repo per state [1] [2]? There is value in a pipeline that continually ingests this data from various sources and pushes it into the Internet Archive, but if you wish to treat it as authoritative, it must have a human minding it, because of entropy and decay. Even the Python Software Foundation has a budget of ~$5M/year. Hence my openlaws.us example. If it was as easy as writing a scraper and…

I know a thing or two about that, 2,400 commits to the scrapers powering openstates over the past 9 years. Even with openstates, we have an API but don't "just" dump the bills to git for legacy nerd reasons. The nice thing about laws is that the host websites (or PDFs) don't change templates _that_ often, so generally you can rescrape quarterly (or in some states, annually) without a ton of maintenance. With administ…

Fair, I stand corrected. Thanks for your work. All Openness efforts are welcome.

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#39

Post by rockskon »

shicholas wrote: post #5
showerst wrote: post #2

Lexis especially makes even scraping public state laws and admin codes difficult, which is extra frustrating because they are the legal publisher of record in a number of states. I've been considering trying to launch an OpenStates style scraper project for US laws and admin codes, but haven't had the time to attack 100 more scrapers. Even with AI help, the volume is significant.

Also the states themselves can’t update their own laws. In Nevada the code (NRS) from Nevada’s website is out of date. Very embarrassing imo and hard to get it to work bc AI can’t have a trusted source of data.

Why can't Nevada update its own laws on its own website?

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#40

Post by doctorpangloss »

akudha wrote: post #23
atlanta90210 wrote: post #15

The state of Georgia tried to copyright its public written laws. They lost. https://www.bfvlaw.com/supreme-court-rules-georgia-cannot-cl...

How does one decide what should be in the public domain for the good of society and what should be commercialized? These are a couple of examples that I learned recently 1. In the UK, Royal Mail owns the postal addresses data. I was looking at UK's open datasets - apparently lot of datasets that have addresses can't be used without paying Royal Mail. There are some exceptions - but I am no lawyer. It is depressing to…

Do you think it’s good for UpToDate that OpenEvidence scrapes and paraphrases UpToDate and sells the same information in a GPT wrapper to make big investor bucks? I don’t know what the answer is. Go for it, tell me.
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