Justia Law Review

Hi Friends,

Here is a great new free case law project that came out (or at least I was made aware of :) a few weeks ago. AltLaw.

Right now AltLaw is focused on getting up the Federal appellate opinions online (US Supreme Court and Federal Circuit Courts). They have aggregated opinions for the last 15 years or so (depending on the court), and have done good job presenting the cases in formated text, in addition to providing the original pdf and in a text only format. It looks like these are the slip opinions, but they can be later fixed up to match the text of the official published opinions.

AltLaw is a joint project of Columbia Law School's Program on Law and Technology, and the Colorado Law School's Silicon Flatirons Program. From the about page.... AltLaw's code was/is written by Stuart Sierra and Professor Paul Ohm, with help from Luis Villa, and produced by Professor Tim Wu. And of course the Federal Judges who wrote the original opinions :)

My take is that one of the keys for free case law will be working with the courts to get them to publish their official final opinions online in their final form. 99.99% of the work has been done (trial, briefs, drafts, slip opinion), we just need to ask (beg?) the judiciary to make the last few text changes to the slip opinion, declare it official and put it online. Ideally this would include a form that can be cited at the time of online publication. Professor Wu clerked for Judge Richard Posner, so maybe he can help influence this influential judge from his previous positions regarding a public domain paragraph citation system (see HyperLaw - Judge Richard Posner's letter (pro West citation system, anti-paragraph citation system), Judge Stephen Williams' letter (pro West/slip opinion page citation system, anti-paragraph citation system) and then contrast to HyperLaw's Alan Sugarman's response/letter to Judge Posner). If the final official published decisions are always being made and published first by Thomson-West, then all other publishers will be at a serious disadvantage.

I will repeat one more time for emphasis... It is KEY that NEW official final versions of opinions are placed online for free in a format that can be cited. That is as important as getting the older previous decisions online in their official form, because it takes us forward.

AltLaw is definitely a worthwhile project. You can read more on AltLAw from on Tim's blog. Onward and onward as they say...

Peace,

Tim

:: Free Bird, Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Hi Friends,

Sabrina Pacifici's new LLRX.com site is.... finally here!

Sabrina had us work on the redesign of the site, with a lot of work on the user interface and search functionality. We also did a lot of data clean up, going through years and years of articles. We are still making some fixes, and adding some features. But the design is nice and much cleaner.

The key to the LLRX site though is the editorial content. The site has thousands of articles written by respected lawyers, technologist and librarians. The topics covered range from law office software to legal research to running a library. LLRX has been up for over 10 years, and has consistently been named one of the top legal Websites on the Internet. We are glad we were able to work on the site for Sabrina. LLRX is a great place to do some research... so check it out and subscribe to updates by RSS or email.

Peace,

Tim

:: Stockton Gala Days, Our Time in Eden by the 10,000 Maniacs

Hi Friends,

I had a great meeting yesterday with my friends at vLex.com. vLex has relaunched their Website, which has laws from many different countries (vLex is based in the EU, and have offices in South America and the USA ). I was given a full tour of the vLex system. They have nicely cleaned up the user interface. The only thing I would add is having the country flags on their home page glide back and forth like album covers on iTunes :)


vLex also has great plans for their future, which I am sure they will announce when they are ready :) vLex truly listens to their users, as the product development shows. I am very excited about the new vLex features that will be coming online, and have full faith that what they are doing will be a huge win for practitioners throughout the world. Check them out at vLex.com. And best of all the USA information is free :)

Now I am going up to Bellingham and Seattle to see Kevin O'Keefe of LexBlog, interview students and drink beer (with Kevin, not the students :). And I have to find out what Avvo is doing, beyond the rumors (maybe a Zillow of lawyer owned homes :)

Peace,

Tim

:: Now More Than Ever, Whenever We Wanted by John Mellencamp