While I was in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting the founders of Fastcase, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal. They have impressively built a formidable competitor to Lexis/Nexis on a shoestring budget. I tip my hat to their entrepreneurial spirit.

Consistent with my “Digital, Everywhere, Free” mantra, Fastcase has now launched the Public Library of Law. Ed Walters sent out the following announcement email yesterday:

One of the joys of disruptive technology is that it occasionally allows you to disrupt things. In that spirit, I’m pleased to introduce the Public Library of Law, which debuts today at www.plol.org. PLoL is the world’s largest free law library, with more than 7,100 miles of text in the cases alone.

PLoL works hand in hand with our (much larger) subscription library at Fastcase, which features power research tools as good or better than any in the world. PLoL has its virtues as well — it is ad supported and easy to use, and should be a great starting place to find law on the Web. It’s designed to be an easy way to look up cases or to do basic research, and I hope you’ll take a minute to check it out.

True, Justia has been generously been offering federal case law for free for some time; but PLoL really opens things up by also offering cases from all 50 states (back to 1997), federal statutory law and codes from all 50 states, etc.

It will be interesting to watch PLoL develop . . .

Mark

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 1:38 pm by Mark Britton, CEO and is filed under Mark Britton Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.