As you may have heard, an enormous quantity of federal and state case law is now freely searchable at Google Scholar. It’s a big advance in the quantity and quality of case law available for free on the web, and, unsurprisingly, a great search tool.  Check it out.

Case law on Google Scholar is also a great development for Spindle. At Spindle Law, we provide an organizational tool that allows researchers to find specific propositions of law easily and rapidly, with reference to supporting cases (and other authorities). While we don’t collect cases, we like to give researchers on our site easy access to cases that are relevant to them, whether by pulling cases from a free law site (we’re grateful to another great free case law site, Altlaw, for making cases available to us) or by providing a link to a fee-based or free research service that has the case. Now we will be able to include Google Scholar among the free case law sites we link to.

Stated more broadly, Westlaw and Lexis (and soon Bloomberg Law) sell two main services for case law researchers: A) access to a large, searchable collection of cases, and B) organizational tools that professional researchers need, in addition to search, to find the precise information they need in a reasonable time. Spindle is all about doing B in a new and better way. We don’t do A at all. Google (like several other already-existing services) now does A, not B. Thus, without making our service any less valuable, Google Scholar brings us closer to the day when fewer of the lawyers who use Spindle will also need to subscribe to one of the major high-end fee-based services.

We have been expecting Google to take this step, and we’re delighted that they finally have.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 11:47 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.