Legal Commentary

Thanks to Dan for letting me overstay my visit a little. To continue my series on legal research, I wanted to focus next not on the giants--Westlaw and Lexis--nor the giant new entrants--Google and Bloomberg--but rather on the other end of the long tail, on the small companies, start-ups, and solitary programmers who are developing new tools for legal research. I'm thinking of companies like Justia and Fastcase, nonprofits like public.resource.org, LII, and computationallegalstudies.com, small entrepreneurs like my former student Mike Boucher, and solo hackers like Robb Schecter.

The tools and techniques we use today to do legal research are so outmoded, mired in old, creaky technology, and desperately needing innovation, that it won't take much to do much better. Walk around the orchard of "things we can't yet do" and you'll find lots of low-hanging fruit, so much in fact, that a small start-up or even a hacker in a garage can create a great new advance on a shoestring. We don't need to rely on two or four giants, because we should be able to harness the collective innovation of a thousand different companies, each competing with one another for the legal research killer app.

The incentives are there. Your potential customers are lawyers with big IT budgets, high billable rates, and astronomical subscription fees to Lexis and Westlaw. Build a tool that will make law firm associates 5% more efficient, and you should make millions. (VC's: Are you listening?)

But there are many barriers to entry, and none more significant than access to data. Unless and until the garage hacker can easily and cheaply (read: for free) download caselaw, statutes, and regulations, she won't be able to test, much less launch, her new tool, so she's probably off building a new Facebook or Twitter app instead.

It's an embarrassment that so much supposedly "public" law is so hard to access, but the times are changing. Thanks to the Law.gov movement, and others like it, and thanks to the work of people like Carl Malamud, free, bulk access to the law is coming. If you want to learn more about this, and if you happen to be near Boulder, Colorado, today, come join me and Carl, as we continue the Law.gov conversation.