Here is an update to a case commented upon earlier here and here.
Law Professors Clear Hurdle in Suit Against West Publishing
Shannon P. Duffy
The Legal Intelligencer
June 10, 2009
A federal judge has refused to dismiss a defamation suit brought by two law professors who claim that West Publishing harmed their reputations when it falsely identified them as the authors of a poorly researched treatise update.
The June 4, 2009 Memorandum can be found here.
From the Minneapolis City Pages: “Westlaw rises to legal publishing fame by selling free information,” by Erin Carlyle.
West makes its money by selling free, public information — specifically, court documents — to lawyers. On this simple model, the company raked in $3.5 billion in revenue last year, placing it on a par, sales-wise, with retail giant Abercrombie and Fitch. But its operating profit margin really impresses: At a whopping 32.1 percent, West outpaces that of tech giants like Google (19.4 percent), Amazon (3.4 percent), and eBay (20.8 percent). Westlaw excels at one simple task: saving lawyers time by making legal information more readily accessible. The company charges a firm of six to ten lawyers as much as $30,000 a year to access its state and federal databases. But since attorneys’ time is worth a lot of money, the service pays for itself. After all, the more work they can do, the more money they can make.
How did it do this? According to the story, by following these eight rules:
Rule 1: Find a niche with growth potential
Rule 2: Organize information to make it useful
Rule 3: The internet is a distribution channel — not a product
Rule 4: Turn words into math
Rule 5: Separate the signal from the noise
Rule 6: Computers can’t do everything
Rule 7: Treat content like patented material
Rule 8: Print’s not dead, it just needs online help
Green Bag 2d, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 187-217, Winter 2009
George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 09-15
ROSS E. DAVIES, George Mason University – School of Law, The Green Bag
Commercially speaking, law journalism was a risky business in the early Republic. According to Frederick Hicks, of the 30 legal periodicals that went into business before 1850, 24 also went out of business before 1850. And of the six that survived into the second half of the century, five expired by 1866, leaving just one to carry on over the long term. (That one is the Legal Intelligencer of Philadelphia, which is still in operation today.) A simple recitation of Hicks’s body count does not, however, reveal the full intensity of the semi-Hobbesian existence of those early journals. A few features of their experience merit a bit more attention. First, the very short lifespans. Second, the total number of failures. Third, the persistence of failure despite enthusiastic support from pillars of the bar. And fourth, the depths of obscurity into which those failed journals have tended to fall.
Source: LSN Law & Rhetoric Vol. 2 No. 33, 04/28/2009
THE HISTORY OF COMPUTER-ASSISTED LEGAL RESEARCH (CALR)
______________________________________________________
First in an occasional series
More on Thomson West Merger and FLITE Takes Flight
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This is the first in an occasional and somewhat random look back at the early days of computer-assisted legal research (CALR). It stems from a post here earlier in the week about a terrific new book by noted antitrust lawyer (and Stanford Law School alumnus) Gary L. Reback, Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (catalog record copied below). The very readable book gives an insider look at the merger (Mr. Reback represented LexisNexis) and as Jonathan Zittrain notes on the jacket, “Gary Reback offers a powerful defense for government’s role in protecting market competition. He draws from rich historical examples and his own extraordinary personal vantage point: his victories and defeats at the front lines of the most high-profile antitrust cases of the past two decades.”
Thomson West Merger
In 1997, Mr. Reback took a vacation to Hawaii after he had “spent a year of futility . . . trying to convince the Justice Department to block an anticompetitive merger that would raise the price of hiring a lawyer for just about every consumer of legal services anywhere in America.”
Storytelling for Lawyers and Monopolizing the Law
Chapters 14 (“Storytelling for Lawyers”) and 15 (“Monopolizing the Law”) tell the story of the 1996 merger of Thomson and West, “. . . the largest publishers of court opinions, treatises, and other materials used to do legal research. No other company was even close in terms of market share or customer usage.” And, as an earlier post here suggests, the end result of this merger created a wrecking ball for academic law library budgets. In my opinion absurd and obscene annual price increases was indeed an effect of this merger.
At one point in chapter 15 Mr. Reback states “. . . both Thomson and LexisNexis started charging law schools for online legal research, originally provided free of charge.” I shared this information on the law library directors listserv.
A few directors contested that statement and commented that, to their knowledge, neither Lexis nor Westlaw was ever free; a couple of other directors weren’t so sure and thought that perhaps there were some free installations. But this comment also elicited a small flood of memories and reminiscences from directors about the very early days of CALR.
Stanford Law Library’s First CALR Terminal (Lexis only)
I myself came to stanford in 1982. At the time the library had one Lexis terminal, and no Westlaw terminal. The terminal was the so-called “DeLuxe” terminal, which was a large sit-down consol, reminiscent of the “con” of an early Star Trek starship. It was located in a room shared with our photocopiers and microforms, both of which were used far more than the Lexis terminal. For one thing, there was a daily blackout period and we could not access the database between the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. There was no downloading of documents, and printing was done laboriously, one screen shot at a time. Connection was via an internal modem and a phone line paid for, I think, by Lexis.
And then J. Denny Haythorn, Associate Dean of Library and Information Services & Professor of Law at Whittier College School of Law shared this very interesting story about FLITE (reproduced with permission):
More powerful minicomputers and the internet simplified the search process to ultimately be more like the commercial services thought FLITE kept the research attorneys for assistance with searches. The office also continues to maintain unique databases of information use by military lawyers. FLITE purchased the first PC computers for Air Force legal offices and began a program of law office automation using shareware software (PC Write for example), commercial software, and software specifically written by the office.
FLITE also was an early adopter of CD and DVD technology. The goal was to have Judge Advocate General attorneys in the field with legal resources for a standalone law office.
The office still exists and is now located with the Air Force Judge Advocate School at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama. In the 1980s I was one of the research attorneys as they made the transition from batch, overnight searching to real time searches and then user searching directly on the internet. I also worked on the manuals for some of the software.
Author: Reback, Gary L., Stanford Law School graduate, J.D.(1974)
Title: Free the market! : why only government can keep the marketplace competitive / Gary L. Reback.
Related e-resource: Publisher description
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0906/200804668
Imprint: New York : Portfolio, 2009.
Physical Description: x, 416 p. ; 24 cm.
Note: Signed by the author. CSt-Law9-d.html
Note: Includes bibliographical references (p. [397]-403) and index.
Contents: Protecting competition — Product distribution –Patent and coypright limitations on competition –
Monopolies and market exclusion — Mergers and acquisitions.Subject (LC): Trade regulation–United States.
Subject (LC): Competition–United States.
ISBN: 9781591842460
ISBN: 1591842468
CALL NUMBER
HD3616 .U47 R136 2009
“Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer”
NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08/09-1
JAMES GRIMMELMANN, New York Law School
Recently, the state of Oregon has used copyright law to threaten people who were publishing its laws online. Can they really do that?
More to the point, why would they? This essay will put the Oregon fracas in historical context, and explain the public policies at stake. Ultimately, it’ll try to convince you that Oregon’s demands, while wrong, aren’t unprecedented. People have been claiming copyright in the law for a long time, and at times they’ve been able to make a halfway convincing case for it. While there are good answers to these arguments, they’re not always the first ones that come to hand. It’s really only the arrival of the Internet that genuinely puts the long-standing goal of free and unencumbered access to the law within our grasp.
This essay, written for nonlawyers and people interested in contemporary debates over access to the law, explains what’s at stake in the Oregon dispute, how people have tried such things before, the role of new technologies in improving legal publishing, what the law has to say about it, and where we ought to go from here.
Source: LSN Legal Information & Technology Vol. 1 No. 8, 04/08/2009
