Part 1 of what looks like it’ll be a useful little history for those juniors joining your library so they can see how and where it all started and how the publishers operate.
Here’s the introduction
To gain an understanding of how we got here, and why this time around, we’re finally seeing real innovation in legal research, you think back to the early ‘90s when the first websites came online. Not only were websites hideously ugly and clumsy, but they were flat and one-dimensional — digital versions of their analog counterparts like the billboard or the magazine ad. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that the technology emerged to make websites interactive platforms for self-publishing, social interaction and sharing.
Legal research followed a similar pattern. For forty years, lawyers relied on LEXIS and Westlaw for computerized research needs. Yet all these systems did was automate the manual search tools – like hard-copy Shepards’ and Decennial Digests and Case Law Reporters – that lawyers of my generation were trained on back in law school. Even now in 2015, one of the metrics for evaluating a legal research tool’s utility is whether it provides pagination from case law reporters — hard copy volumes that have been published the same way for two centuries and that no one reads anymore!
In the late ’90s, the web opened the door to a new generation of legal research – with products like Fastcase, Versuslaw and more recently, Google Scholar . These new products made legal research more affordable and accessible (fun fact: when I started my firm, LEXIS costs $600/month. I couldn’t afford it so used the law library) and finally breached the chokehold that the WEXIS duopoly had maintained for a century. But through early versions of Fastcase and Scholar were significantly cheaper than their predecessors, they were still one-dimensional in that they automated legal research rather than innovated it.
Full article – http://myshingle.com/2017/05/articles/web-tech/part-brief-history-legal-research-tools-according-someone-actually-uses/
