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By Bill Altreuter

Online legal research is a peculiar proposition. Westlaw and Lexis are expensive, but reliable. Nothing I've seen that's free has impressed me as being reliable enough to depend on, but that may be changing. Via Matthew S. Lerner's always useful New York Civil Law I've learned that Google Scholar includes a legal research tool. I'm going to want to play with it a little more before I start working with it, but Google's presence in this area is a serious game-changer. Both West and LexisNexis are in the business of taking material that is in the public domain and selling it by supplying indexing and cross-referencing as a value-added component. When I was learning legal research we didn't believe that a mere Boolean search was sufficient-- cross-checking with the Shepard's' citation listings was an automatic part of any research task. That's changed, of course. I don't imagine that there are too many lawyers younger than I am who ever use the Shepard's books. If Google gets serious about this then the only thing West and LexisNexis will have to sell are treatises,forms and annotations. Those things have a real value, and there's plenty of money to be made there, so I'm not worried about West. What's really interesting is that this would be the best example yet of information wanting to be free.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on January 05, 2010 (boomark / email).