Everybody is all aTwitter (can I say that now? I mean is it copyrighted or patented or something?) about Google Scholar having case law on it. Wahoo! After all, how can you resist a title that says: “Will Google soon own law?” I swear, in one day, the number of posts on the Tubes, Twitter, and FriendFeed were enough to make you wonder if someone had discovered the Blessed Mother gave birth to twins or something.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s terrific that The Goog is offering case law research now, but please try not to get ahead of yourselves. As best as I can tell, it doesn’t have any new case law on it, which means it is of limited value as a research platform. You know, if you’re a lawyer trying to find recent pronouncements from your Supreme Court or Court of Appeals on a relevant point that you’re briefing, like now. It’s terrific if the law has been assigned a cite … by Westlaw. Wait, I thought we were trying to get away from those bastards. Ooops, I guess not … yet, anyway. And Rick Klau or Ed Walters aren’t coughing up any info either. I’m waiting fellas. And a big shout out to Richard Leiter for his minor expose on the similarities of The Goog’s database to Westlaw.
Honestly, I love me some Google Scholar case law though. I’ve been using it all day today, and for cases that have been assigned to a reporter, it’s great. It gives me what I want, quickly and simply. I’m a power user of online research sites, but I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles to find what’s relevant. Having it delivered fast (and FREE!) is huge. And Scholawer will do that.
But guess what? I still need something that is going to give me the most recent cases. And that means the Big 2.5 (Welexislaw <– totally made that shit up) still have nothing to worry about. At least until The Goog gets current opinions online, but knowing what I know about that system, I don’t see it happening anytime soon. [I'd seriously make it the Big 3, but Bloomberg still isn't giving me access to their content yet, so fuck them.] I would also like batch printing, which took Loislaw years (and I mean years) to implement, and dual-column support. Citators, like Shepards or KeyCite are a different issue. Loislaw’s Global Cite has worked fine as long as you can read and digest cases quickly to know what is and is not relevant, and I suspect that The Goog’s How Cited feature will operate similarly. Honestly, there’s lots of ways to knock the offering, but hey it’s FREE! And given The Goog’s history, you have to figure it will only get better once they determine how advertising revenue will be generated from all of our searches. All the sidebar stuff is noise anyway, amiright?
If somehow you’ve been stuck in a hole since Monday, there’s only one post you should read and that is Don Cruse’s here. The guy is legend now with his post, and one of the best on The Goog’s efforts in this space.
As an aside, we had a great Wave going on about The Goog here. If you don’t know what a Wave is, well, I’m sorry, you’re practice is doomed and you should rededicate your life to social media. If you do, but don’t have an invite, drop me a comment and I’ll send you one.
[Image by C. Pedersen.]
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On a slightly divergent track, I'm pleased to say this is not Google's only journey into the Law. Have a look at http://www.lawdonut.co.uk, an oustanding set of practical legal resources for small and medium sized enterprises in the UK, from specialist business publishing house BHP Information Solutions, with Google as the project's founding partner. There's a great syndication model behind this and get ahead lawyers and law firms are fast climbing on board.
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