The House of Butter notes that Qudoc, a new Australian legal search resource, has run into problems accessing AustLII content. Like many of the legal information institutes or LIIs, CanLII and BAILII included, AustLII blocks external organizations from using search spiders to index its case law. These blocks include Google and other common Web search engines.
I had a short post last week about some of the strange content discrepancies you can find on the regional sites powered by LexisNexis and Westlaw. In the meantime, the Findlaw UK site has debuted so I decided to take a look and see how it was different from its US and Australian brethren.
I won’t pretend to have spent much time on it but all the content I did look at (particularly in the real estate (conveyancing) area) was either sourced to freely available government content or was unsourced. At least with the other sites, you had identifiable content owners so you could get a sense of the reliability of the information. Compare this Advice for First Time Buyers with its original at Direct.gov.uk. The former is really just a cut and paste of text, while the latter, original, has additional cross-linking so that a reader who gets there might be able to click through to other Directgov content. Even in the Ask a Question forums, you find that Findlaw staff are asking AND answering the questions. I appreciate that new Web sites, particularly those developed primarily as marketing resources, need content, but this seems to take it a bit far. When you click on contributor names, there is no information about what their qualifications are to answer the questions. Legal researchers interested in UK legal issues would be better off going directly the Direct.gov.uk site, where there appears to be far more content and you are not one step removed from the publisher.
These sorts of sites can make Internet legal research much more difficult, since they are likely to be optimized to appear higher in search engines or else why would they be marketing sites? But if their content is dated, or sourced from reliable sites and then not kept current with the original site, it means that you start to have unnecessary noise in legal research, particularly for non-lawyers researching on their own. Legal research is enough of a bramble without adding confusing, duplicated and potentially dated content.
The UK FreeLegalWeb.org is now in beta and is an interesting looking alternative to BAILII, the current go to source for free UK case law. As their About page states, the problem is that the law just isn’t practically accessible.
FreeLegalWeb works like a library discovery tool. It is not hosting the content. It is aggregating links to the resources, so a single search will retrieve information about content from multiple sources but you will eventually link to the primary document on that source. This means you still need to know something about the sources and what their scope is.
This resource has a lot of nice features in place already – a retrieved result has links to the full text and supplemental tools, like a citator to note up cases – and the development of subject classification through crowd sourcing will make the content aggregated that much richer.
The case law search on FreeLegalWeb relies on BAILII for case law and LawCite for its citator service. This is a huge improvement, since you can now view both the BAILII text and run the link through LawCite, something which is not possible if you start your search directly on BAILII.
It will be interesting to watch this site develop and move from beta to a full online product. It will be a huge time saver for legal researchers looking for UK primary legal information.
[thanks to the Legal Informatics blog ]
I was reading an interesting piece on commoditization (fascinating history of the toaster!) which made me think about the many options for primary law available on the Web. Fee-based publishers take this public domain content and add editorial information to it, but at its heart, a case is a case.
When I think of the legal publishing market and case law, I usually think of it in three tiers, of relatively comprehensive national coverage. First, there is the free tier, with sites like the Legal Information Institutes (Cornell for the US, CanLII, BAILII, AustLII, WorldLII, etc.). Usually accessible with a search and ability to browse, each of these sites has a relatively shallow collection of case law, depending on funding and ability to collect older content.
CanLII is an interesting duck, actually. It is more of a hybrid between the first and free tier and the second or middle tier. The middle tier isn’t free. They are substantially less expensive than Westlaw or LexisNexis or other online legal resources, and they have far less content. They tend to be competitive, though, on case law. These products are primarily in the US, and include Fastcase.com (and its free version at Public Library of Law), Wolters Kluwers Loislaw, Versuslaw. Some other sites include Justis (UK) and Casetrack (UK) and the free Jade (Aus) (here are my thoughts on Jade).
Many lawyers are paying for access to one of these mid-tier services already. Canadian lawyers underwite the cost of CanLII, even though it is available for free to the public. The stable funding source may explain why it has a citator-like tool, called Reflex, and other enhancements. Lawyers in small firms in Saskatchewan and many lawyers in Ontario can get free access to LexisNexis from their desktops as well, supported by their membership dues.
US lawyers are likely to have access to Fastcase, which is a member benefit at 19 bar associations, or Casemaker, available at more than 20 bar associations but without a consumer version. Collexis has rolled out a version for law students and faculty at CasemakerX.
When you are reviewing your case law options, or if you are looking outside your normal jurisdiction, consider that you may already be paying for one or more online services through your member dues to your professional association or could get access to an inexpensive alternative.