Free Legal Research
[posted by Justin Levine]
I have been experimenting with the free legal search site Altlaw.org and have found it to be most excellent. [hat-tip: Boing-boing] I find the search results to be much faster and more useful than other free legal search sites.
Biggest drawback: So far, it seems limited to U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Appeals Court cases. If it manages to add Legislative codes and state court cases, this will likely become THE site for attorneys (and anyone else interested in law). There is really no reason to pay Lexis or Westlaw anything if you don’t have to.
Lexisone is substantially better. With Lexisone you have more caselaw available (all appellate courts in every state in addition to the Circuits), a better selection of dates, a Lexis cite you can actually cite to in court, and of course, their coverage is dramatically more up to date than Altlaw.
karl (d11ab7) — 8/23/2007 @ 12:38 pmMy first experience with computerized legal research was with WestLaw and now we use Lexis. I welcome this but I bet WestLaw and Lexis aren’t that happy.
DRJ (bfe07e) — 8/23/2007 @ 2:57 pmKarl –
Lexisone may have more caselaw available so far, but I don’t find their search algorythms to be nearly as good. You still have to wade through much more dreck to find what you are looking for compared to my experience with Altlaw thus far. But I’m keeping an open mind. There is plenty of room for more than one search site.
Justin Levine (20f2b5) — 8/23/2007 @ 4:21 pmJustin:
I agree that there needs to be more than just the duopoly of Lexis & WestLaw. For what I do I need to run searches for caselaw usually no more than 10 days old. For low costs searches on newer data– which is what I focus on — unfortunately Altlaw can’t yet deliver.
With that said, Altlaw is handsdown better than findlaw or any of the West products out there, as well as better than any other source out there (other than lexisone).
karl (c638bc) — 8/23/2007 @ 4:51 pmHas anyone had any experience with FastCase?
https://www.fastcase.com/Corporate/Home.aspx
Personally, I am not awfully eager to pay the attorney fee for a lawyer that will not pay for legal research.
“There is really no reason to pay Lexis or Westlaw anything if you don’t have to.” Malpractice or ineffective assistance of counsel are not good enough reason for you, are they?
oldfox (a9d374) — 8/24/2007 @ 10:50 amI don’t see how you can compete with the Lexis / WestLaw duopoly without the capacity to do the functional equivalent of Shepardizing, i.e., finding out which courts followed, contradicted, distinguished, overruled, commented on, etc. the holdings of other courts, with the click of a button. Else you just get a wealth of information, in the form of decisions, that can’t be used to understand the current state of the law in a given jurisdiction (at least not in a reasonable amount of time.)
Brian (c87237) — 8/25/2007 @ 9:34 am