Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Law Students Blogs -> Objective Justice

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

Law Students

: Objective Justice

PreCYdent legal search engine

By Sean Sirrine

ADVERTISEMENTS

Check out this new legal search engine. It supposedly ranks cases by authority if you look up a particular term. The idea is great but there are some serious bugs still. The creators are looking for feedback, so here is your chance to help create a search engine that could be useful to lawyers:

From The Right Coast:

Right now our library consists of all US Supreme Court cases and US Court of Appeals cases going back to the 1950s (i.e. F.3d and F.2d). Automatic updaters are in place, so new cases are uploaded in slip opinion form as soon as they are released by these courts. We are working on having the last ten years of cases from all 50 states available soon. Everything is in XML.
...

We are especially proud of our search technology. It is based on the legal citation network in a way somewhat analogous to how Google's PageRank is based on the link network of the Web. However, the legal citation network is its own animal, so a lot of work was required to create an algorithm that would exploit the unique characteristics of the Web of Law. PreCYdent ranks results by "authority" -- something only we do. It is much, much more sophisticated than mere citation count, and it appears to work really well.

...

There's a feedback button on the upper right of results pages. This feedback goes directly to the team in Italy and they will take your comments very seriously. This is a true alpha; we are still very much in development. There are plenty of rough spots, but we think early users will help us fix those.

Full post as published by Objective Justice on January 30, 2008 (boomark / email).