Daily Archives: August 14, 2009

CALR – Is the Future Now?

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday was B-Day for us, the launch of Bloomberglaw.com.   Peter Schwartz’s article “The Reinvention of Legal Research: The Future Is Now” for The Huffington Post makes this observation:

The large legal publishers are in trouble. If law firms can no longer pass through online research costs to clients, multi-billion dollar legal publishers such as West and Lexis can no longer support pricing models premised on law firm cost recovery. Because West and Lexis cost structures depend on this pricing model, they are beginning to experience painful margin squeezes, compounded by the entry into the legal research marketplace of both nimble, low-cost competitors and new rivals with deep pockets such as Bloomberg.

RECAP: Turning PACER Around

Posted on by
2

Meet  RECAP (http://recapthelaw.org) – Be impressed.  Very impressed.

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) documents sit behind a pay-wall; however, these are public record documents, so once a document has been retrieved from PACER, it may be freely shared.

RECAP  enables us to easily share federal court documents. The goal of this project is to publish an extensive archive of these documents to the public for free (our favorite word).

RECAP is an extension to the Firefox browser. There is a a video on the site that demonstrates the extension in action.

RECAP works with Firefox to upload case dockets and documents that you have paid for to the public archive, and notifying you when free versions of documents are already available.

RECAP is a project of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.  It is one of several projects that harness the power of the web to increase government transparency.