Updates on Free Case Law

I've had several posts in recent months about various efforts to move caselaw into the public domain and, once there, to make it more accessible. I also had a recent article about this in Law Technology News, Online Legal Research Revolution. Now, some updates:

• IT Conversations interviews Carl Malamud, the man behind Public.Resource.Org and a long-time crusader to bring public information out of the darkness.

• David Hobbie at his blog Caselines puts public-domain search engine PreCYdent to the test and "was stunned" by the results. "I have never seen such a highly relevant set of search results on any electronic case search engine. Not in Westlaw. Not in Lexis. Not anywhere."

• Meanwhile, PreCYdent has moved from alpha to beta with a release it describes as more stable. Its recent newsletter (sent to everyone who registers) says it is working hard to extend its database to all state jurisdictions. It has also added a Government Printing Office archive of 1.3 million documents and a database of legal forms.

• Public.Resource.Org has been adding a collection of state cases and codes.

• Public.Resource.Org has added most of the cases from the first Federal Reporter series, which supplements the F.2d and F.3d series posted in February.

Update on Case Law Libre!

My post yesterday, Case Law Libre!, pointed to the registration-required Law Technology News version of the article. Today, Law.com posted it on the Legal Technology page, where no registration is required.

Also, I heard today from Thomas Smith, the University of San Diego School of Law professor who serves as CEO of the experiment legal search engine PreCYdent, which I discuss in the article. I wrote that PreCYdent "came about through the work" of Smith. He corrects me:

"I should note that my work on PreCYdent has been but a small fraction of the work done by Antonio and his team in Italy. I had a notion that something like the technology they created could be created, but they are the ones who built it. I'm a lawyer with undergraduate degrees in philosophy and economics, not a computer scientist. So my team really deserves the credit for our search technology, which is our unique contribution. So saying that PreCYdent came about through my work, overstates my role."

Antonio is Antonio Tomarchio, CTO of PreCYdent. I recently posted Tomarchio's video showing how to use PreCYdent.

Case Law Libre!

My latest Web Watch column for Law Technology News magazine, Case Law Libre (free reg. required), looks at several recent projects to move case law into the public domain, from Public.Resource.Org to Alt-Law to PreCYdent. Here are the opening grafs:

"Feb. 11, 2008 was a day that may forever change the course of online legal research. On that day, the non-profit Public.Resource. Org published 1.8 million pages of federal case law online, free of copyright or other restrictions. The release included all U.S. Supreme Court cases and all federal circuit decisions since 1950.

"Ever since 1872, when John West hit upon the idea of building a business around publishing court decisions, commercial publishers have maintained a firm hold on the dissemination of judicial opinions. Not to knock them — legal publishers filled an essential niche and continue to provide valuable and necessary products.

"But in this information age, private control over the distribution of public case law seems anachronistic. For nearly two decades, gradual progress has been made towards greater public access. But the Public.Resource.Org release is just one of several developments whose convergence suggests that this trend is accelerating."

Video: How to Use PreCYdent

I recently wrote here about PreCYdent, a sophisticated search engine for public-domain law. Now, the project's CTO, Antonio Tomarchio, has posted this video showing how to use it and comparing it against commercial legal research tools.

Fastcase Unveils 'Largest Free Law Library'

There's something happening here. Just two days after Public.Research.Org published 1.8 million pages of copyright-free federal case law online (see my post), the company that provided it with those cases, Fastcase, unveiled an even larger free library of cases, statutes, regulations, court rules and legal forms. Called The Public Library of Law, it claims in an announcement to be "the most comprehensive free resource for legal research online." This is all part of the company's commitment "to democratize the law," says CEO Ed Walters:

"American law used to be controlled by foreign-owned publishers. Over the past eight years, Fastcase has smashed through those bottlenecks with our premium service for lawyers. Now, by launching the Fastcase Public Library of Law as a free service, we are also empowering non-lawyers to learn about and use the law themselves."

PLOL includes all the federal cases Fastcase provided to Public.Research.Org, plus appellate cases from all 50 states from 1997 forward. In addition, it has statutes from all states, court rules from all states, regulations from selected states, the U.S. Code, the Code of Federal Regulations and federal court rules.

What's the catch? None. Users do have to register and agree to the terms of service, but registration is free and the TOS is standard fare. PLOL lacks the bells, whistles and red flags of Fastcase and other commercial research services. But for simple, bare-bones research, you can't beat the price.

D-Day: 1.8M Pages of Case Law Released

The day we previewed here last week has arrived: The non-profit organization Public.Resource.Org today released 1.8 million pages of federal case law free of copyright or other restrictions, in a joint venture with Creative Commons. The release includes all Supreme Court cases and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on. According to the press announcement, the data is available for download by developers for use on the Internet.

"The cases made available to developers today will be used throughout the Internet. For example, the AltLaw service from Columbia and Colorado Law Schools has announced they will incorporate the information in their free service. Creative Commons and Public.Resource.Org are donating a copy of the data to the U.S. Courts and the Government Printing Office for their archives. A number of commercial legal research providers have announced they will also incorporate this data in their services."

The announcement said that the purchase of the data was made possible by contributions from a group that includes the Omidyar Network, the Elbaz Family Foundation, entrepreneur and civil libertarian John Gilmore and lawyer David Boies.

Although the cases can be browsed through the Public.Resource.org site, there is no direct mechanism for searching them. As Google begins to index them over the next few days, you should be able to search using its "search this site" function.

Links:

• Cases main page.
• Press announcement.
• F2d series.
• F3d series.
• Supreme Court series.

Federal Cases to Go Public Next Week

I reported here in November that 1.8 million pages of federal case law would go public early in 2008 through an agreement between Carl Malamud's nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org and the legal research company Fastcase. Today, Malamud said the release of those cases is scheduled for next week. The release will include all cases included with the U.S. Reports, all federal appellate cases in the F.3d series of the Federal Reporter and most of F.2d. All cases will be formatted in XML with digital signatures and public domain labels. Malamud also said that two other companies have made substantial donations of case law to be added to the public domain database, Justia and William S. Hein & Co.

Search Company Acquires Casemaker

My Web Watch column this month, Search on Steroids, profiles Collexis, a powerful new search tool making its way into the legal market. The review notes, "The company also is preparing to launch other legal products based on the same search platform, including databases of federal and state case law and U.S. patents. Both are due out in the first half of 2008."

Well, no sooner did that column go to press than Collexis on Monday announced its acquistion of legal publishing company Lawriter LLC, operator of the legal research service Casemaker, which contracts with 28 state bar associations to provide the research service to their members. Then today, Collexis announced its acquisition of an additional legal library consisting of 3.5 million documents to add to Casemaker's existing library of cases, statutes and other materials. Allan Crawford, Collexis's senior account executive for the legal market, told me that the company will continue to offer Casemaker while also adding a premium service with enhanced features.

As my column explains, I was impressed with the company's search technology. I look forward to seeing what it has in store for Casemaker.

Sophisticated Search for Public Domain Law

I wrote here in November about plans by Public.Resource.Org to publish 1.8 million pages of public-domain federal case law sometime this year and its goal of eventually creating a public-domain repository of all federal and state case law. More recently, in an article of mine published on Law.com, I singled out Public.Resource.Org and a similar project, AltLaw, as among the five most notable legal sites of 2007.

Now, a parallel project aims to bring to this growing body of public-domain law a sophisticated search engine comparable to those of commercial legal databases. In fact, the developers of this experimental legal search engine, called PreCYdent, say their tests outperform "by a wide margin" Westlaw natural language search, not to mention Lexis and other commercial databases.

The site is up and running in an alpha version containing about 340,000 cases, with a beta launch planned for the end of February. It came about through the work of University of San Diego School of Law Professor Thomas A. Smith, who serves as its CEO. Smith and the other members of the PreCYdent team say they base their work on two fundamental beliefs: that judicial opinions and statutes must be in the public domain, and that everyone -- lawyers, students and the public -- should have access to state-of-the-art legal research technology. "The site is free and will stay that way," Smith wrote me in an e-mail. The service will rely on ads to generate revenue.

The power of PreCYdent's search engine comes from its ranking of results by "authority," using a propriety algorithm to analyze connections within networks of data similar in concept to Google and its PageRank technology. Here is how the Web site explains it:

"PreCYdent search technology ranks results by 'authority', using mathematical techniques, such as eigenvector centrality, similar to those used by advanced Web search engines, as well as proprietary techniques we have developed that are specialized to the legal domain. PreCYdent search technology is able to mine the information latent in the 'Web of Law', the network of citations among legal authorities. This means it is also able to retrieve legally relevant authorities, even if the search terms do not actually occur or occur frequently in the retrieved document."

Smith describes the development and mechanics of PreCYdent in greater detail in an interview with Joe Hodnicki published yesterday at Law Librarian Blog. Smith's initial research that formed the genesis of the project is described in his 2005 article, The Web of Law.

PreCYdent's developers are incorporating a number of Web 2.0 features. The site already allows users to add commentary, recommendations and ratings to cases. Smith writes:

"Coming soon is a social network platform that will interface seamlessly (or pretty seamlessly) with the law library and search. This will enable people to find lawyers and lawyers and laypeople to share knowledge and experience. An upload feature will allow users to upload all kinds of documents, such as briefs, memos, videos, audio, and so on. All of this will be parsed by us, put into our network, and be searchable and ranked by our engine."

I performed various top-of-the-mind searches today -- nothing too sophisticated -- and was impressed by the relevance and ranking of results. The default ranking is by authority, so if there are relevant Supreme Court cases, they tend to appear at the top. Advanced search options allow you to modify the ranking to be chronological or "traditional" and to limit your search by date, court and judge. Cases include citations and page numbers. Once Public.Resource.Org publishes the cases mentioned at the outset of this post, PreCYdent will add them to its database.

Free Access to Older Mass. Cases

Via the Massachusetts Law Updates blog, the Massachusetts Trial Court Libraries announced today the completion of a project to provide free online access to all Supreme Judicial Court and Mass. Appeals Court cases from 1986 to 1996. (Cases starting in 1997 are already available through Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.) The cases are available through the Web site MassCases.com, where they can be found by citation, name or word search. The collection also includes hundreds of frequently cited older Mass. cases.

1.8M Pages of Federal Case Law to Go Public

Carl Malamud's nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org and the legal research company Fastcase today announced an agreement that will allow Public.Resource.Org to publish 1.8 million pages of federal case law in the public domain. The archive, which will become available sometime in 2008, will include all U.S. courts of appeals decisions since 1950 and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. I wrote in August about Malamud's charge to crash the Wexis gate with his plan to create a public-domain repository of all case law, federal and state, and I first wrote about him a decade ago in recognition of his work to bring the SEC's EDGAR database to the public. In today's statement, he said:

"The U.S. judiciary has allowed their entire work product to be locked up behind a cash register. Law is the operating system of our society and today's agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable."

Notably, this public-domain database will come about with the cooperation of a for-profit legal research company. Fastcase has agreed to sell this case law in a one-time transaction that will allow Public.Resource.Org to use it. The cases will be marked with a new Creative Commons mark -- CC-Ø -- that signals that there are no copyrights or other related rights attached to the content.

Once it receives the cases, Public.Resource.Org will format them using open source "star" mapping software, which will allow the insertion of markers that will approximate page breaks based on user-furnished parameters such as page size, margins, and fonts. "Wiki" technology will be used to allow the public to move around these markers, as well as add summaries, classifications, keywords, alternate numbering systems for citation purposes, and ratings or "diggs" on opinions.

Going forward, new cases will be added to the database through organizations that already make cases publicly available, such as AltLaw and the Legal Information Institute.

Today's announcement said that further news "will be forthcoming on the availability of other case law, including Federal District and pre-1949 Appellate decisions."

New blog digests all Maryland cases

A new blog, Maryland Courts Watcher, provides synopses of every publicly available opinion published on the Internet by any court in Maryland. This includes the Court of Appeals, the Court of Special Appeals, the U.S. District Court, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, the Maryland Tax Court, the Circuit Court for Baltimore City and opinions of the Maryland Business and Technology Case Management Program. Synopses are written by lawyers and law students and each includes a link to the full opinion.

Maryland lawyer Stuart Levine, an editor of the new blog, sends a note asking why there is not a similar blog for every state. He writes:

"There are no out of pocket costs involved and, despite the coverage and appearance, the project is not so labor intensive for any one individual that it is difficult to operate. If anyone is interested in starting a similar project in their state, I will freely (and for free) share my experiences."

New Portal Tames Patent Caselaw

Some patent lawyers might consider the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to be a circus, but a new Web site aims to tame the lion of patent caselaw. Called FedCirc.us, the site is the latest and most ambitious project of the folks behind rethink(ip), patent attorneys and bloggers J. Matthew Buchanan, Stephen M. Nipper and Douglas Sorocco. The new site describes itself as a portal of patent caselaw built on a foundation of timely, accurate and considerate reviews of appellate decisions. Its central offering are reviews of all appellate patent decisions. These are summaries that digest and provide perspective on each case. Each review includes a case data box with a link to the full decision, citation and other information. Cases whose precedential value may be in question include "red flags" explaining the concern. Reviews can be searched or browsed by court, date or name. Key words are organized in a tag cloud. A feature called Gimme Ten! provides the most recent 10 reviews in a single page. Users can subscribe to receive FedCirc.us updates by RSS or e-mail.

The site is clear that its goal of timely case reporting does not mean immediate case reporting. In general, it says, case reviews will be published "a couple weeks" behind a decision's release. If the site has a weakness, this is it. But assuming the collection of reviews continues to grow and be comprehensive, the site should prove to be an essential resource for patent practitioners.

Meanwhile, watch for more to come as this trio of patent lawyers continues to develop the site. Coming soon, they say: a patent law podcast.