A lot of virtual ink has been spilled this week about Google’s inclusion of judicial decisions in Google Scholar. Here are some highlights of the discussion:
Rob Richards at Legal Informatics Blog argues that Google has just moved “up market” in the legal information world (from an indexer of case law that happened to be online to integrating a repository of case law into Google Scholar) and sets Google’s entry into legal research in context.
John J. Digilio at LLRX summarizes the new tool, observes that Google’s brand and buzz bring a visibility to this endeavor that other free and low-cost legal content repositories have lacked, and notes what a good place Google Scholar will likely be for quick and easy, time-cost-only, case retrievals and early dips into case law research.
David Hobbie at Caselines includes some speculations about Google’s algorithms, compares the tool to the case law searching of Precydent, and observes that the relatively simple URLs for cases in Google’s database are likely to find wide use among legal bloggers and others who need to refer to cases in online publications.
David Curle has a very well-done initial analysis of “Winners, Losers, and Other Implications” on the Outsell blog Lex Disruptus. Among other points, Curle notes that many lawyers may soon find that they’ve been “Web-MD’s” by self-researching clients. (As a reference librarian, I might note that this is nothing entirely new.) Curle also notes, and I whole-heartedly agree (I noted something similar in an earlier post about free online legal information, that Google (like other emerging free tools) will and should see wide adoption within legal practice in “first-stage, low-risk” research contexts. The top-end players will remain Lexis and Westlaw customers – but they have no need to use Lexis or Westlaw all the time.
Scott Greenfield doubts that case law on Google will actually make the law intelligible to the lay public, but sees a foot in the door toward ending the duopoly.
Eugene Volokh finds some of the search results from Google Scholar to be flawed and “mysterious” but anticipates improvements to come.
Of course, there have also been many blog posts and tweets to the effect that “Lexis and Westlaw are dead.” That conclusion is, at the very least, extremely premature. (And to the degree that those services do face new competitive threat, hardly the result of Google alone.) While Google (in company with LII, etc.) is hardly direct competition at this point (though Bloomberg intends to be), I’d think “Wexis” should be alert to the ‘disruptive technology’ scenario in which newer, cheaper, tools or technologies aimed solely at a lower-value marketplace eventually become ‘good enough’ to outrun the actual needs of even the high-value marketplace, even while the high-value tools continue to improve apace at meeting and exceeding existing, stated, customer needs (as West’s and Lexis’s surely have). In other words, if both ‘Wexis’ and the free-information cluster (Google, LII, Justia, Precydent, GPOAccess, Thomas, etc. along with lower-cost fee-based services) each continue to improve at roughly the same relative rate, at what point will the costly ‘Wexis’ model simply exceed the actual needs/desires of most of a market that can, by then, get by with the cheap/free tools?