September 28th, 2010 by Avvo Admin

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Two years ago Google launched its 10 to the 100th project, a contest to come up with ideas to change the world, where the winners receive a portion of 10 million dollars.  Recently Google announced the winners, and as it turns out, one of them is an idea that’s bad for Lexis Nexis and Westlaw’s (Wexis’) bottom lines.

Law.gov will receive 2 million dollars from Google to help “make all primary legal materials in the United States available for all.”  Free, open access to legal documents? That’s good news for lawyers, educators and every American, but presumably bad news for Wexis.

As you may recall, Google’s first foray into giving Wexis a headache was Google Scholar, which makes a large amount of case law available for free.  And while part of Law.gov’s mission is to make cases available, it strives to do much more, including authenticate legal documents so that readers can trust them.  So it seems Law.gov aspires to be the more sophisticated, game-changing version of Google Scholar.

How will Westlaw and Lexis Nexis respond?

I’m not aware of any official reaction from Wexis yet, but I would imagine they’d take the same stance as when Google Scholar came out with free access to legal documents:

Westlaw

“We provide the breadth of information and technology tools to help quickly zero in on specific cases and the facts embedded within them. We provide the context, expert analysis from our attorney-editors and links to supporting materials to help users find the right answers, faster. And, Westlaw includes workflow tools so that our customers can use this information as part of their client workstream.”

LexisNexis

“They [LN Legal Customers] look to LexisNexis to find needles in the ever-growing information haystack, not the haystack itself. Not only do we provide the most complete portfolio of public and proprietary legal content, but LexisNexis enables legal professionals to conduct their research more efficiently, effectively, and with the assurance of accuracy.”

So it seems that Wexis will continue to argue they’re more than just document providers, which is true.  However, I’m hoping (perhaps delusionally) that one day free, easy, comprehensive and accurate access to case law will eventually give rise to a Wikipedia-style repository, where lawyers and law students share the burden of shepardizing and categorizing the law.

If that sounds lofty, it is, but then again, so was the idea that Wikipedia could virtually replace Encyclopedia Britannica just 10 years ago.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 at 4:03 pm by Avvo Admin and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.