It seems every publication on the planet is reporting Google's mnove into legal information.. so for those of you following the development here are some quick extracts and links
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The Political Cartel Foundation
Google Scholar ? RIP Lexis Nexis and Westlaw
2009 NOVEMBER 19
tags: Google, Law, legal, legal opinions
by Michael Kraemer
The legal profession is stuck using two legal indexing services, Lexis Nexis and Westlaw. Both are prohibitively expensive and practically required for lawyers. David Manes and I had a recent conversation about the absurdity that court information had no free central indexing service ? like a universal public interface. In other words, provide people with the case law that they are expected to follow as citizens. We believe that a single free portal, combining legal content from the courts and legislatures, is in the public interest. Deferring to a prohibitively expensive content management system drives up the cost of legal representation while also making it unavailable to non-attorneys. With this in mind, it is also relevant that the private companies do provide case briefs and hierarchical structure of ?good law? or Shepardizing. But then again, is it not intuitive that governments convey laws of society to the public by providing this service?
http://politicalcartel.org/2009/11/19/google-scholar-rip-lexis-nexis-and-westlaw/
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Brooklyn Law School Library Blog
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Case Law on Google Scholar
Google Scholar has garnered a great deal of attention for its new Case Law service, some flattering and others critical. See the WSJ Law Blog post News You Can Use: On Google?s Adding Caselaw to ?Scholar? and the Resource Shelf?s post Legal Info Now Part of Google Scholar Database; Federal and State Legal Opinions and Patents, Law Journals Also Part of the Mix both of which raise questions about the new service. While it permits free access to full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts, it also contains citation features. In its blog entry about the new service, Google Scholar states that the ?Cited by? and ?Related articles? links will help the average citizen understand the impact of a given opinion. For example, a search for Roe v. Wade will yield not only the text of the decision but all 22,841 citing documents including cases and articles that cite to it. It is questionable whether an experienced legal researcher, let alone the average citizen, will be able to process that much information.
http://blslibraryblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/case-law-now-on-google-scholar.html
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Info Today
Judicial Opinions Now Available in Google Scholar
by Carol Ebbinghouse
Posted On November 19, 2009
Google is now including full-text legal opinions from U.S. Federal and State District, Appellate, and Supreme courts in Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com). And I really like it. For the lay public, it is fun to search opinions because you not only get judges explaining how a particular law is applied to certain facts in the case, but you also get links to law journals and treatises citing the case and "related scholarly works" (whether it cites your case or not).
What Google Scholar's Legal Opinions Are Not
This product is not going to put Lexis or Westlaw out of business. These files do not cover the time dating from the beginning of our country, nor to the beginnings of the individual states. There are no hyperlinks to statutes, codes, regulations, administrative opinions, or anything else quoted or referred to in the text of the opinions. Finally, there is no citator service to verify that a particular opinion has not been overruled or vacated, distinguished, or otherwise declared of dubious value.
Google has a disclaimer on the "about scholar" page: "Disclaimer: Legal opinions in Google Scholar are provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied on as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed lawyer. Google does not warrant that the information is complete or accurate."
No free site on the internet-including the official state and federal sites-has authoritative, comprehensive, or guaranteed current or preserved archival legal information. (See the American Association of Law Libraries report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources at www.aallnet.org/products/pub_authen_report.asp.) The report found "that a significant number of state online resources are official, but none are authenticated or afford ready authentication by standard methods. State online primary legal resource are, therefore, not sufficiently trustworthy." No other free site can claim it is more authoritative.
So Much for What Google Legal Opinions Are Not-What Are They?
What Google offers is the thoughtful scholarship of appellate justices, crafting an explanation of the law, and how this particular law will be applied to a particular set of facts. There are about 80 years of U.S. federal case law (including tax and bankruptcy courts) and more than 50 years of state case law.
If you want to limit the results to opinions within your state, or just Federal Appellate or U.S. Supreme Court opinions, you can do that. Want to limit by date-you can do that, too.
Searching: I was delighted that the interface is as friendly as other Google products. The Advanced Scholar search button allows you to create relationships among your search terms (phrase, all words, at least one of these words, dates, selected jurisdictions, and "not" certain words, etc.). You can be as specific as you want with author, title, and/or date; or as general in your search, then narrow down your query later.
Results: The highest court opinions come up first, and that is the best way to list them-even Lexis and Westlaw use that rule. The relevance to the search terms and any date restriction is visible-there is a blurb under each returned case with your search terms in context. You can determine at a glance the number of cases citing each opinion in the search results (and you can decide how many case results to display on any one screen). In one of my test searches, a California Supreme Court opinion dating from 1984 was on top, and another California Supreme Court opinion dating from 2004 was second-obviously, I believed, because the top opinion had been cited 520 times, while the more recent opinion had only been cited 87 times. However, just to show that there is a Google algorithm involved, the third listed case dated from 2003 and had been cited 316 times.
When I asked Google's "distinguished engineer," Anurag Acharya, how the results were determined, he said it was "magic." He also noted that while in law there is definitely a hierarchical relationship among courts in a jurisdiction, the goal is to bring back what is "most important to present to a user." In other words, Google begins with the "most common use patterns then see[s] how they get used, then decide[s] how to evolve the process"-fascinating. They're never done improving the search. Here is a link to Acharya's post about adding opinions in the Official Google Blog, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html.
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Live Mint
Legal search ? Google Scholar
Posted by Sandeep Parekh on Thursday, November 19, 2009
I tried the newly created google scholar law cases and articles search and would highly recommend it to anyone, particularly outside the legal community who wants to do search for cases and legal articles, to use the service. Lawyers have usually flocked towards paid services like LexisNexis and Westlaw, which continue to provide useful though expensive services. Lawyers not willing to pay typically go to findlaw.com.? I would however, strongly recommend Google Scholar for its simplicity and quality of their search results ? more for cases than for articles though.
