Google’s Attempt to Takeover the World Reaches New Levels
Wow. This morning Google announced that it has launched a new feature on Google Scholar that makes it possible for anyone, anywhere, to do a comprehensive search of every published court decision in the country. This is huge news. It won’t be the complete death knell for Lexis and Westlaw – presumably, Google isn’t going to be providing access to unpublished opinions contained in the Lexis and Westlaw databases (the selection of which is proprietary to Lexis and Westlaw), and won’t be able to provide access to a lot of secondary sources such as restatements and the like. But this will make it much, much easier for solo practitioners to do an adequate job without bankrupting themselves. As importantly, it provides the average person with the kind of access to the law of the land that was previously exclusive to lawyers. Even more impressive, the service also contains a feature (albeit a somewhat confusing feature) that allows the reader to cite check any case.
So far, through an advanced search, Google Scholar lets you search case law by state, but not by court level or by federal circuit. It relies upon Google’s search algorithm which, although very good, offers a fraction of the power of what you can do through the practiced use of boolean searches on Westlaw or Lexis. Westlaw has added some innovative ‘extras’, supplementing searches with links to secondary sources that you can read even if you don’t subscribe to the database from which they’re drawn, to try to keep people (like me) paying them lots of money each month for access to their databases; I’m not sure what Lexis presently offers in that regard. Both also offer access to case history.
It will be interesting to see what Lexis does with LexisOne, or Westlaw does with FindLaw, in response to this development. It will also be interesting to see if Google Scholar links start displacing the sites that presently offer free case law, whether substantive (like Cornell’s Legal Information Institute or Findlaw) or the sites that have reproduced case law as a cheap way to pad out their content.
And when are statutes coming? 😉Report