b-screeds

Somewhere in the snowdrift of paper on my desk is a program from an opera performance I attended a few months ago.  Among other things, it’s a document that tells you what the opera company is doing and who, specifically, is doing it.  It  also tells you — less directly — who’s paying, and how.  Among other things in it, I found:

• a roster of individual donors arranged by the level of support they’ve provided
• a roster of corporate sponsors
• a featured list of corporate sponsors who are underwriting particular activities or programs
• advertisements for various businesses, small and large, often with music-related slogans that are pretty dumb (”our pastries hit a high note”)
• a notice of a business-networking event — a kind of meetup — jointly sponsored by the opera company and the local chamber of commerce

You’ll find similar things in the programs of every large and small opera company, symphony, and theater organization — any arts non-profit, really — in the country.  That’s not new; all of those things have been around for as long as I can remember.

What’s that got to do with the LII?  Well, in some form or other, all of these things are coming to the LII web site.  Some already have.  Other things that opera companies have — like admission fees — never will.  Here’s why.

The LII’s core staff consists of six people, augmented by a  pool of student editors, programming interns, and others who help us run a web site with over a quarter-million documents and 100,000 unique visitors every day. At any given moment, those same core staffers are responsible for one or two funded research projects, a series of consulting jobs, a guest blog, and occasional writing on policy and other matters of academic and public interest.  As continually as we are able, we improve our services and our technology.  We are spread very thin.  About a year ago, we realized that the LII had no prospect of either expansion or field-leading innovation so long as our core staff remains the same size.  We had more than fully committed ourselves to the maintenance and continued development of those collections we currently offer.  And to some of us it looked very much as though we might end up spending our careers watching others — people with more resources that we can command –  doing work that we knew how to do five years ago but could not fund.   At a time when there is more need than ever for our expertise and for innovation in the field, this seemed like a pretty bleak prospect.  By nature, most of us here are better pioneers than settlers.  And we have a lot of unrealized ideas that we would like to bring to you.

So for us the question was not really one of how to stay afloat; we could, we think, tread water indefinitely, although the Internet is usually unkind to those who lose momentum.  The problem was, and is, how to move forward, to continue our longstanding traditions of leadership in the field of legal informatics and service to the public.  As a practical matter, this amounts to asking, “How will we get more money?”  Real leadership demands not only that we support ourselves as we are now, but that we grow.  We need more people to carry on our existing programs even as we innovate in new areas.  The answer, it seems to us, lies in making use of our considerable traffic and other assets to support our activities, as well as relying on the continued generosity and commitment of our supporters.  So we began thinking about what our opportunities might be.

There are, of course, a lot of answers to those questions.  We got very interested in what might motivate people to help us.  We have always had a loyal core of supporters (thank you, and thank you again!) who believe in the idea of open access to law, and give us money out of pure belief and generosity.  We think that some among our donors are partly reimbursing us for a service we offer to their law practice (yes, all you law-firm librarians and small-firm practitioners — we know you’re out there and we very much appreciate your help).  And we think that many, many more might take advantage of an opportunity to do well by doing good.

Right now, such folks can help us — and themselves — by listing themselves in our lawyer directory and buying a badge showing their support for the LII; this (not coincidentally) causes them to be shown more prominently in the directory.  Very soon, we will begin recruiting sponsors for specific pages in WEX, everybody’s legal encyclopedia, for the LII’s Supreme Court Bulletin, and for our larger collections (if any of these interest you, contact us).  And right along we have been making use of a modest Google AdSense presence to bring in some revenue — right now, those little ads are paying for about half a staff person.  When we put the AdSense blocks in place, we half-expected to get some negative reaction from our audience.  That has not happened. Indeed, a few people have privately told me that they think that our pursuit of more commercial opportunities is just good stewardship of our donated income.  I think so too; that’s because I come from the “pray to God but row toward shore” school of assistance-asking.

No doubt this raises some questions.  For instance, what about grants?  We seem to fall somewhere in between the agendas of those organizations that support basic science (our work tends to involve applications rather than basic research) and those which have social or policy objectives (which tend to have more urgent priorities than legal information).  Almost none provide operating support.  So it is a small population indeed. We continue to look for good fits (as we have for many years), but we think that these are very infrequent opportunities that will not provide a reliable base.  A second, logical question is whether we are contemplating any kind of user fee.  The answer to that is a simple “no”.  We are building a business model by which we can find reliable ongoing support for open access to legal information, for practical work in legal informatics, and for the promotion of public understanding of law — at no cost to the consumer. Finally, no, this was not a decision prompted by the recession, or by any drying-up of support from other sources.  In hindsight, it looks prescient — but we were driven entirely by our collective need for professional fulfillment and our desire to offer more and better services.

So, finally –  my thanks to those of you who have been loyal supporters all along.  We can’t do this without you, and we don’t think it’s fair to ask you to do it all for us.  To those who would like to work with us in other ways, I look forward to hearing from you.  And if any of you have questions or suggestions, I’m always eager to hear from you at tom {{dot}} bruce [[at]] cornell {{dot}} edu.

Lately, I’ve been tempted toward complicated prose that urges rethinking of legal-information fundamentals.  Why? Because the idea of public access to law in a global digital society makes some fundamental rethinking necessary.   It would be swell to explore those notions in some longwinded way, but I’m both lazy and out of time.  So instead I am going to offer two really simple propositions:

1) Simple fairness demands that the public have free access to legal-information systems that embed the same functionality and quality as the most advanced systems commonly available within the public body that creates or issues that legal information.

2) Authority in legal text ought to be judged simply (and exclusively) on the basis of accuracy, currency, and other objective quality measures.  The barter in “official status”  is unnecessary.

Please discuss in the comments.  The fun, of course, lies in cataloging all the ways in which our current situation does not match those ideals, and why.  Assuming, of course, that you think they are ideals.

Over in VoxPopuLII this week, Dan Dabney makes a number of good points about the proper role of LIIs and other public legal information providers. In his view, our useful purpose is to drive innovation up a ladder of value-added legal information providers.  West Group, unsurprisingly, occupies the top rung of his ladder.  I agree with him.  Duopolies are, in many ways, a terrible environment for innovation, because innovation is too often seen as a weapon to be used against the competitor rather than as a way of answering customer needs (I adhere to Guy Kawasaki’s view that your customers don’t care about eradicating your competition).   I am proud that the LII has contributed substantially to breaking the intellectual and engineering stranglehold that West and Lexis had on legal information twenty years ago.  And I think that we and our colleagues in the public sector have driven a great deal of innovation since.  You ain’t seen nothin’, yet.

Dan successfully makes the case — if I can equally reasonably shape his views into a different metaphor — that an average public-transit bus will never win a race against a Porsche Carrera GT.  And indeed it is true that LIIs have neither the holdings nor the editorial depth of Thomson Global.  Nor, I think, would we outpace them in any particular slice of American legal information. Though I might be willing to take him on in a street race with the US Code, for which I think we have better Web architecture, even though our edition is less speculatively up-to-the-minute than West’s.  But that is not my point. West is unquestionably winning the Grand Prix. The LIIs are just trying to help a lot of people get to work.

A couple of weeks ago, I started a draft article for this space with a self-conscious echo of Fred Rodell:

There are two things wrong with how we think about legal information. One is that we are not thinking about how it is produced, and the other is that we are not thinking about how it is consumed.  That about covers the ground. 

I want to concentrate on that second idea, because it would be fair to say that West and the LIIs are thinking about very different kinds of research consumers.

Dan Dabney imagines — as most law-school instruction in legal research seems to — that the aim of research is to support argument in high-stakes litigation, or in some other setting where potential hazard justifies the expense of a high-end service.  This echoes the position that John West himself took over a hundred years ago: the idea that legal information provides the lawyer with insurance against the loss of his case.  West was arguing for the superiority of comprehensiveness over selectivity in the publication of cases.  This is unquestionably true, and as West said the general policy of insurance is the best one.  It is equally true, however, that most people insure only to the value of the goods.  Few will throw $5000 worth of research at a $500 case.

Ken Svengalis has made himself endlessly popular with commercial publishers by making that point in the form of a buyer’s guide that stresses practicality over comprehensive acquisition.  And of course services like Findlaw and LexisOne are tacit nods to that principle, as are well-established, lower-cost commercial services like LoisLaw and FastCase. When we talk about those services, we are talking about services primarily intended for lawyers.  The aim of an LII — or at least this LII, for my colleagues elsewhere do very different things — is to provide legal information for everyone, something that they do by using technology in innovative ways.

And that means that we serve a type of legal research that is very different — not naive, necessarily, but different.  We primarily serve people whose aim is to manage risk using information, and to take bearings on the advice offered them by professionals.  In that respect, use of the LIIs closely resembles responsible use of something like WebMD.  And it continues a belief in responsible self-help that we have seen from diverse sources in the past — citizens advice bureaux, publishers like Nolo Press, trade- or interest-specific guides to the law, and so on.  This is not pro se representation, and it is not intended to take bread from the mouths of lawyers (my own belief, and Richard Susskind’s, is that it will increase the demand for legal services by lowering entry barriers).  It is simply a different activity (indeed, it was Dan who first clued me in to how different it really can be). It is aimed at those whose use of primary legal material is less rigorous because their aim is, perhaps, to get general orientation, or to make sense of the competing advice of professionals and pundits, or to fortify themselves for an initial encounter with a professional who, in their minds, represents a legal system that is scary and incomprehensible.

Of course, there are those with more sophisticated needs who cannot afford more highly priced services than ours.  In fact, most of our users are people making use of legal information in a professional context, not people having traumatic, episodic encounters with the legal system. An example I often use is that of a hospital administrator with a day-to-day need to know about public benefits law.  Many of our most supportive users are government lawyers, and I understand that in some agencies at least access to commercial services is at least limited by seniority if not altogether barred by the budget.  And quite recently the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Convention on Private International Law has become concerned with the high cost of legal question-answering across borders.  That is the problem with the Porsche:  it is fast as hell, well-made, and pretty, but far too expensive for a lot of people who need more ordinary transportation.

In a very recent paper , legal anthropologist Annelise Riles points out the existence of something she calls “the polycentric model of legal expertise”.  The idea, so far as I understand it,  is that there are benefits to be had from the distribution of a species of legal literacy throughout a population. She attributes some important aspects of Japanese legal culture to this phenomenon.  This, I think, is what LIIs are about in the long run: the promotion of polycentric legal knowledge.

That, and building shinkansen , which go almost as fast as Porsches, and carry a lot more people.  We’re starting to lay the track.

Our LIIBULLETIN publication is really two publications in one, delivered through the same e-mail channel.  It rapidly notifies subscribers of Supreme Court decisions, usually minutes after they are handed down.  More, it delivers sophisticated but accessible analysis of upcoming Supreme Court cases about two weeks before they are argued.  The analyses are student-written and student-edited, and so it’s tempting to think of them (and of the LIIBULLETIN) as a kind of law review.  That’s a little misleading, but not because the BULLETIN analyses demand any less of our students. I think it’s a different kind of experience, with unique strengths.

The LIIBULLETIN is written by 30 students. 24 are associate editors working in teams of two.  Each of four student “managing editors” supervises three or four of these teams.  An executive editor and editor-in-chief supervise them in turn, assigning cases to teams and performing a second review of the product. They are also responsible for a “print edition” that appears in the Federal Lawyer, the magazine of the Federal Bar Association, which reaches all members of the Federal Bar Association, all Article 3 judges, and all members of Congress.  Everything is aimed at producing high-quality writing and insightful analysis that remains accessible to non-lawyers.

The editor-in-chief and executive editor are chosen by the LII, usually with strong input from the current editor-in-chief.  The incoming editor-in-chief and executive editor participate in the choice of supervising (historically “managing”) editors.  All six then run a selection process for the associate editors, which consists of a written sample and an interview process. All involved are paid a very small stipend.

We ask the editors to do something hard:  to write for the person they would be if they weren’t law students. My slogan for that approach used to be  “write as though you were writing for your mother”.  I quickly discovered that an amazing number of law students have mothers who are lawyers. Now I just say “write for the person you were a year ago, and for the clients you’ll have two years from now”.  We stress that “non-lawyer” does not mean “unsophisticated”.  Where popular writing about the Supreme Court often consists in large part of human-interest stories about the parties, we ask students to produce thoughtful discussions of cases and their implications from a legal perspective, and to try to draw out the larger, non-technical implications of what the Court may decide.

This is different from law reviews in a number of ways:

• The writing is by students, for attribution
• The writing is pitched for people who will one day be their clients.
• Deadlines are absolute, and frequent.
• Teamwork and a mentoring process (particularly on writing) are built in.
• Substantive consultation with faculty is frequent and rewarding.

You can, of course, judge the product for yourself.  We know that the BULLETIN is widely read — and that we often hear from those representing the parties and from academic observers of the Court.  Their feedback is usually positive and always valuable for the editors, though there are always partisans who want to relitigate the case with us.  District of Columbia v. Heller provided a great example of how different an experience this can be. It was rewarding to watch the students patiently and persuasively defend the objectivity of their analysis  in the face of attacks from advocates on both sides of the issue. Via e-mail and blog posts, they made their case.

Last month we decided to find out more about the LIIBULLETIN’s audience, via review of the subscriber list, by reviewing the inbound-link census we get from Google Webmaster Services, and by means of survey. What did we learn?

First, we learned that we need to be careful with survey results.  It is sometimes hard to know whether respondents are talking about the LIIBULLETIN that is a notification service for decisions, or the LIIBULLETIN that provides pre-analysis of upcoming cases.  This is particularly the case because the analyses are a relatively recent addition — they were started in 2005, while the notification service has existed since 1993.  Still, we know that about two-thirds of the subscribers read the analyses in their condensed form, and roughly half of those read the full version on the Web.

Second, we learned that we are at least 15% more popular than we thought.  According to its subscriber list, the LII reaches about 18,500 people and has grown at the rate of 1,000 subscribers per year for the last 3 years.  In reality, we reach at least 3,000 more people than that via “rebroadcasting” from our subscribers.  Often they relay it to whole firms (the largest of which has 450 lawyers), or to professional-interest listservs (as with criminal-defense attorneys in Alabama); sometimes it’s just to five or ten other lawyers in a practice group or small firm.  But, like everything else on the Internet, it adds up.

Third, we learned that we have a very diverse audience.  We have subscribers in:

• all 25 of the AmLaw top 25 law firms;
• 12 US Circuit Courts and 65 District Courts
• a slew of Federal agencies
• many corporations, including media outlets
• 589 colleges and universities
• 63 foreign countries

They’re a diverse group, including many, many extraordinary citizens, lawyers and judges, a Senate staffer, an RV transporter, an advisor to the president of an African nation, a forensic psychologist, a prison warden, the president of a Christian women’s college in Japan, an American Shari’ah law judge, and any number of people who want to hear a clear and objective report of what the Court has done or is about to do.

It is, if I modestly say so, an impressive list of accomplishments for any law school publication.  But if you were to ask me what I’m proudest of, it would be a toss-up between the high value we’ve created for our audience and the management model that we’ve perfected over the last few years.  I think we’ve found a scalable, stone-soup-based way of making high-quality law content.

We are going to do a lot more with what students have taught us as we worked together to perfect  that model.  We have a plan that may surprise you…. and we’ll be revealing it soon (yes, this is a blatant attempt to heighten suspense).

If, after this,  you’re moved to subscribe to the LIIBULLETIN, you can do so here.

Over the last several months, I have spent an awful lot of time travelling. I met with a lot of people who work in legal information, both here in the US and abroad.  And I had every intention of filling this blog with posts about interesting things I’d seen and heard — a kind of travelogue of legal informatics.  It’s been slow in coming.  Actually, I’m not convinced that a travelogue per se is what’s needed.  Event-by-event reporting is easy.  Drawing a map of everything that’s going on out there in the world of legal information is not.

It’s a big world now.  People are doing legal informatics in a lot of places.  And that phrase — “doing legal informatics” — now includes a breathtaking number of disciplines and perspectives.  It used to be that we thought of ourselves as situated at the corner of law publishing and computer science.  Now we need to add big chunks of information science (itself a composite field), legal bibliography, digital librarianship, e-government studies, political science, and sociology of the professions.  At various times during the last six months I’ve had fascinating discussions with representatives from each of those academic disciplines, and from the practical side of librarianship, government, and publishing.  Each was working in a distinct context leading to different kinds of insights and solutions. Each worked within a different legal regime.  Each had mapped a different part of the world.

We badly need communication across borders — national, disciplinary, institutional. It’s important that we do that now.  We have opportunities — and challenges — of unprecedented scale and scope.  We can act on those most effectively if we can stitch together all the little maps, overlay them, get a more complex and mutually-informed view of the world. And stop reinventing the wheel in each of its out-of-the-way corners.

It has taken well over a decade to reach this point.  Legal and government information showed up on the Web in the early 90’s — our own efforts here at the LII and Carl Malamud’s liberation of the EDGAR database were leading examples.  Those were quickly followed by open-access projects in Canada and Australia.  Digital-government projects began in the US around 1995 or 1996, including many self-publication projects in courts and legislatures.   These efforts created significant pools of data based on open standards, and the availability of that data made it possible for information-science researchers to pay far more attention to legal data than they could when it was behind proprietary barriers.  Now we’re seeing lot more work  on legal data by computer scientists working with language technologies, database specialists, semantic-Web engineers, and others. In Europe, work on integration of government information was propelled (and, ultimately, funded) by the requirements of unification.   Everywhere, more and more courts, legislatures, and agencies are putting information on the Internet in more and better ways using improved technologies.

A condensed narrative like the preceding demands oversimplification, and I apologize if I’ve slighted anyone out of sheer middle-aged forgetfulness.  And this tale no doubt has its beginnings much earlier — you could, for example, point at the long cooperation between the statistical arms of various government agencies and academia and industry as part of the story.  But as with so many other things the rise of the Web was the start of a new wave.  That long, slow groundswell — the product of many individual efforts over a decade and a half — is now peaking.

The American press first saw fit to remark on it about a year ago, with the release of extensive caselaw datasets by public.resource.org — Carl Malamud’s latest effort.  A community has started to form.  Just within the last year or so, we’ve seen:

• a variety of open-government initiatives continuing important work already underway at the Sunlight Foundation
• a critical study of the e-rulemaking system by a special committee of the American Bar Association
• public clamor for greater Congressional transparency
• a highly influential paper by a group at Princeton advocating the creation of a robust market in valued-added government data, premised on wide release in bulk form
• the creation of a public commons of legal-education information
• an effort to identify and standardize “Rosetta Stone” datasets that link together other datasets in ways that promote aggregation, integration, and interoperability
• advocacy for new models for cooperation between volunteers wanting to “hack government” and the government itself
• more and more attempts to bring open standards to legislation and judicial opinions, including MetaLex, OAI4Courts, and the nascent (and as yet unpublished) urn:lex standard

It’s time.

But … we need to be talking to each other much, much more.  We need the kind of efficiency that we can only get by learning from one another.  We need to make informed choices between inexpensive automated approaches that work by brute force and the hand-crafted, highly-accurate approaches of legal bibliography that are not always scalable or affordable.  We need to recalibrate what we mean by “authority”, and begin to think about measures of quality and reliability for legal text that avoid the creation of  unnatural monopolies in legal information.

Okay, so I admit I was having a kind of Tom-Friedman-sings-kumbaya moment there, and I’m over it now.  Really.

We do all need to be talking more, and this week the LII starts a modest effort in that direction. Our new guest blog, VoxPopuLII,  is designed to help the conversation along with biweekly posts from folks you may not have heard from before.  They’re from all different tribes in all different places on the intellectual and global map. We’ve asked for their big ideas — and if you’ve got big ideas of your own, I’d invite you to get in touch with me about writing something for us. And of course we invite your comments and suggestions about what you find there.

Technorati Profile

A recent tweet reminded me that, almost 15 years ago, Peter Martin and I spent the day with members of the Bar Association of the City of New York.  As I recall, the best moment of the day was an extended peroration from Chris Locke (a/k/a rageboy) on the subject of lawyers and the Internet which, in his mind at least, had something to do with dinosaurs calling to one another in a swamp (yeah, I know, and for the life of me I can’t remember what it had to do with the subject at hand, either — but one of Chris’ great virtues is that he can suspend that kind of disbelief, apparently by holding his mouth right).

Second best (sorry, Peter) was Peter Martin’s presentation on why lawyers belong on the Internet.  Perhaps it might have better been titled “What the Internet offers lawyers”.  Peter mentioned five things:

1. clients and potential clients are there
2. other law firms are establishing themselves on the Net (there were only two, at the time)
3. conversation among lawyers and maybe clients is taking place there
4. cost-effective access to (legal) information
5. cost-effective global communication of data of all sorts

These may seem obvious now.  At the time, they weren’t.  And maybe they’re not so obvious even today, or maybe each new technology that comes along makes us revisit these same arguments:

1. clients and potential clients? Kevin O’Keefe gets rhapsodic about LinkedIn (6/2008)
2. other law firms? Muzeview’s law firm Internet presence rankings for December are here.
3. conversation among lawyers and maybe clients?  See Justia’s LegalBirds, LexTweet, and maybe just plain old Twitter itself.
4. cost effective access to legal information? o hai, westlawz [1, 2, 3….].  And there are over a million inbound links to the LII alone.
   
5. cost effective global communication of data? heh.

So… these things just keep coming around again and again, getting stronger in each cycle.  Fifteen years from now?  (kthxbye, westlawz….)

Somewhere between 13 and 22 seconds after the first offering of free content on the Web, the publisher asked herself, “How am I going to pay for this?”.  And web publishers have been asking that question ever since.  The current economic meltdown makes it a more urgent question, but it’s always been there.  We sum it up in a slogan:  this service is free, but it is not costless.  We spend a lot of time and effort trying to resolve that conflict between our aspirations and the need to buy groceries.

The open-access-to-law community (particularly in the US) has had trouble with this.  There are a variety of solutions, few if any complete in themselves.  Most open-access providers originally depended — as we have — on grant funding, and on extensive support from a parent institution or a consortium.  Most have added consulting income to the mix.  And many get income from commercial partnerships, often based on the sale of back-end bulk data services.  The most stable model is CanLII’s, which is financed by a head tax on Canadian lawyers.  An excellent paper by Graham Greenleaf (abstract here, slides here), offered at the recent Law via the Internet conference in Florence, describes one prominent free-access provider’s experience in keeping the doors open.

In any case, open access to law presents some unusual sustainability problems.  And those problems vary a lot from place to place. Institutional and political settings are very different, particularly in transition countries ( no doubt some of our problems here at the LII would no doubt be seen as high-quality problems by others).   Here’s a brief catalog — full treatment would need a very long article indeed:

First, open-access providers don’t really do research, in the sense of either basic science, or quantitative social science, or any of the things funded by research-oriented outfits like the NSF.  We can sometimes make a plausible case for ourselves as testbeds or helpers on grants that go to others (as the LII has with its participation in the CeRI project).

Second, we are continually faced with rising costs of innovation. The new legal information products and services we imagine, and hope to build, are significantly more expensive to produce than the things we imagined when we began 16 years ago. This is partly the result of the Web’s technical evolution and partly the result of more sophisticated needs and wants — a slow but steady revolution of rising expectations that we share with our users.  In 1993, we could significantly raise the sights of everyone in the legal information world by spending a snowy afternoon putting Two Pesos v. Taco Cabana into HTML — a one-person task that created the first web-published judicial opinion.  These days, it takes many more people a lot longer to come up with something that interesting and useful.

Like other not-for-profit projects, we have more trouble finding operating money than we do finding startup funds.  A lot of people would like to see their law (or someone else’s) put online. Very few are willing to pay to maintain it.  This is a particular problem with legislation, which requires frequent updating.  It also distinguishes legislation and regulations from scholarly publishing, and from many open-access repositories, which (like judicial opinions) gather material that is relatively static once mounted.

Some deep-rooted reluctance surrounds the funding of legal information, perhaps based on the idea that free legal information is just lawyer subsidy, or only answers the information problems of the rich (as Dan Dabney once put it).  Who wants to feed the sharks?

Open-access providers could do more than they have to dispel this distrust.  For the most part, we’ve made the case for open access in highfalutin’ normative terms:  support the rule of law, level the playing field for human rights, force the state to meet the transparency/publishing obligations implied by the idea that ignorance of the law is no excuse.  That’s a regime where success is hard to measure, if only because assessment is often self-referential. We declare our results to be good because our intentions are noble. We are Doing the Right Thing, and who would question that?  We are now starting to see some work on evaluation of open access in much more hardheaded terms — how does it contribute to lawyer competence, support economic development, level the playing field between one-shot litigants and repeat players?  These are important questions that will, if we are able to answer them rigorously, provide us with a strong case for support.

And then there is the “Tweed Ring” challenge — illustrated handsomely by this Thomas Nast cartoon.  Everybody thinks that free legal information is the next guy’s problem. Private foundations think government should do it. Government thinks that it is doing it (via weak services like PACER), and that anything it isn’t doing must be some kind of value-added service that the legal profession should pay for, or a matter of interest only to academic researchers.  The legal profession would like to pass research costs on to the clients, and increasingly can’t (small and solo law offices probably never could).  And so on.

Nobody thinks that free legal information is a bad thing, or unworthy.  It’s just not at the top of anyone’s list.  The US is a particularly severe case because (unlike the countries of the European Union, where partnerships like ITTIG are fairly common) we have never thought that work in legal information was a matter for cooperation between government and academia. Partnerships have been almost exclusively with private industry, though private industry sometimes relied on basic research produced by information scientists.

This circle may break soon.  Government transparency-by-web will no doubt get a lot of attention from the new administration; expectations among the “hack-the-gov” crowd are already very high, and there is good reason for this optimism.  We are seeing what amount to open-access legal information projects of this kind demanded by assessments like the recent ABA committee report on e-rulemaking and realized in the efforts of people like the Sunlight Foundation (GovTrack.us is a good example).  And certainly the economic crisis is pushing us toward greater awareness of global interdependency and with it the need for global transparency of regulatory and other legal regimes.

At the LII, we are moving toward sustainable self-support; we’re not there yet. We get about 20% of our current budget from the generous contributions of private individuals who think we’re worthwhile (and if you’re one of them, let me thank you again on behalf of all six of us here).   We recently added Google ads to many of our pages; we’re seeking sponsors for others.  And this week marks the launch of a new service offered in partnership with our friends at Justia.com : a lawyer directory service that offers great value, and an opportunity for us to give reciprocal benefits to those who help us out either financially or with donations of their expertise in the form of wiki content and other things that benefit our audience.

We have great hopes for it.  Talk it up.

[ Guilt-inspired author note:  apologies for the long absence.  It’s been an unusually busy six or seven months, even by LII standards.  With luck, this will be the first in a series of posts reporting on what I’ve seen and learned in that time.]

I have a couple of hobbies. Actually (as those close to me would tell you) I have an endless series of momentary obsessions. But a few have met the chronological challenge and persisted, so they’re hobbies. For one, I deal in antique woodworking tools. I also ride around on a bike. It’s a nice thing to do in Ithaca during the lighter months. Saturday, I was intent on both — a fellow up near Syracuse wanted to buy some planes and a set of auger bits, and I wanted to take a bike ride around Cazenovia, which is a pretty area, and fairly flat for this neck of the woods.

My tool customer was a guy named Sean Murphy, who works for (probably owns) a company called CWR Manufacturing in Syracuse. They make cold-formed parts for, well, pretty much anything. He mentioned automobiles, small electric appliances, casement windows, and electric motors among many other things. He is just getting into woodworking — and built his own dust collection system, whose cyclone chamber he welded up with a MIG welder, from plans he found on the Web. I am guessing he is a very good craftsman.

More to the point, he’s a happy, and habitual, LII user.

Sean uses us for information about employment law, intellectual property law, and as he said “the sort of thing that a guy in manufacturing needs to know to run a business”. I noticed that he didn’t blanch when I referred to the “CFR”. And he told me about how he had heard a lecture on intellectual property in a course he was taking (working toward an MBA), and started to wonder how he could use that to protect his company’s work product — none of which is patentable. As a result, he’s introduced the use of the non-disclosure agreement to his industry.

The large companies he deals with often do a kind of technology transfer — Sean’s crew is hired to produce a new part using cold-forming technology, and the company that hires them tries to learn as much as possible about what goes into the design and manufacture of the part. CWR does that for a couple of years, and then the client figures out how to use his own equipment and engineers to replicate the know-how that Sean’s crew has provided in designing and making the new part. Or the client passes the design and the knowledge on to another supplier who will make the part more cheaply, maybe offshore, leaving CWR behind. Not so good, that. After hearing the lecture, Sean consulted with the lawyer who had been brought in to give it — and as a result, now makes signing of an NDA a standard part of his arrangement with new customers. Big deal, sez you — everyone in the software industry signs five NDAs before lunch. That’s right — and now everyone in manufacturing will too, and the situation for small shops like Sean’s will improve as a result, because the client will no longer be able to walk away with CWR’s real work product: the know-how involved in re-engineering the part for cold-forming manufacture.

I get two very warm and fuzzy things from this: first, another anecdote to add to the many that tell us that the audience for legal information goes way, way beyond lawyers, and second, an indication that maybe what Richard Susskind said about a more transparent legal information regime increasing, rather than decreasing, the need for legal services is proving itself. If — as we’ve long thought here — more accessible legal information means that people are less apprehensive about approaching the legal system (or feel better prepared when they do), then more people like Sean will do so. And the result will be an increase in the use of legal services in a preventive way. Nothing new about that, of course — but I’d like to think the numbers are going up as legal information gets more and more available.

These days, if you say something is “like a legal version of WebMD” , people are inclined to think in terms of consumer law, bankruptcy, divorce. But it’s also about small business, entrepreneurship, and a healthy economy. That is, if you’re like Sean.

And he’s a good businessman — I know because he wouldn’t pay my ridiculous prices for a #8 jointer plane and a set of auger bits.

Along with LII Editorial Boss Sara Frug, I spent yesterday morning with the folks at the Sunlight Foundation — an organization with a compelling mission and a growing set of activities that reflect it. Founded with the idea of using Web 2.0 techniques to bring transparency to Congress, Sunlight is now becoming a rallying point for a diverse community of folks who share the idea of making government better by making the information it generates and consumes more accessible.

That’s an idea we find really attractive. We’ve been amazed — shocked, really — at how little access government has to its own work product (never mind the public). We recently learned that some branches of the Federal courts limit access to the commercial legal information services based on seniority; we understand that the same is true of Federal agencies, where junior people don’t have access to Lexis and Westlaw [note to legal research teachers: “junior” would pretty much describe our recent graduates, wouldn’t it? Think we should be teaching them more about free online sources? ] Our e-mail is chock-full of questions and testimonials from government attorneys who rely on our edition of the US Code and our Federal rules collections. Our most successful projects over the last fifteen years have involved improving or re-mixing the presentation of Federal data to make it more easily used and understood by a broad audience.

So our question for John Wonderlich at Sunlight was “how can we help?”.

Turns out there are a number of ways. We have a lot of expertise in the arcana of Federal data online, experience with data standards, software tools that have remained in-house because we didn’t think anyone else had any use for them, and so on. There are a lot of ways that the LII can and will participate in the growing community of technologists who want to “hack government”. One of the best ways we thought of involves some help from you… particularly if you are a law librarian, legal scholar, or anyone else with experience working with government documents.

We know from experience that some online documents are especially useful to people building new services on top of government information. Here are some examples of these “linchpin” documents:

• The US Code classification tables, which describe pending codification of public laws
• The Table of Popular Names, which ties the names used by journalists, the public, and politicians to refer to legislation to the sections of the US Code where it ends up
• The Parallel Table of Authorities, which relates sections of the Code of Federal Regulations to the statutes that enable them
  
• The Unified Regulatory Agenda, which tells the public what agencies will be regulating in the near future
• The US Government Manual, which describes the organization of the government.

These are documents that provide important information about the context and structure of government, or that link isolated pools of legal information together. For example, the classification tables form the basis of our US Code updating features; we parse them into a database that is then used to power both clickable update links and RSS feeds. As published by the government, they are difficult to use; they would be near the top of our list of documents the government should be publishing in easily processed XML form. Put another way, they are the documents that are most useful in building online services that make legal information more transparent. They would be a good focus for our efforts here at the LII, for the growing community of government-transparency hackers, and for lobbying of (and cooperation with) the GPO’s FDSys effort.

We think that it should be possible to build a list of (let’s say) 100 such documents — the Big Docs that those who develop these kinds of services would most like to see placed online in a form that is both easily processed by machines (ie. XML) and continuously updated by the official body that creates them. What would your suggestions be? Put ‘em in the comments, please.

[editorial note: this week’s post is a bit later than usual because of my stay at the 2008 CALI conference, about which more next time. The posting schedule will no doubt continue to be spotty throughout the summer — I’m travelling and talking more than usual — Tb.]

This is probably not the time for it, but honesty compels me: very few people can turn off a car radio as fast as I can when an NPR fundraiser is in progress. I’ve sent them money, and two cars. But my local NPR outlet manages to combine self-righteous patronizing with mind-numbing repetition in a way that causes me to tune out very, very quickly. I hasten to say that they’re far, far below average in this respect. I know of no other NPR station that would call the Triple Cities the “Treble Cities”, or thank its donors on-air in a tone usually used to give positive reinforcement to a slightly retarded Labrador retriever who has just managed “roll over” for the first time. These shenanigans are a strong deterrent for somebody who has to make the case — to a broad swath of the public — that our work at the LII deserves support.

It does.

That “broad swath” is one reason. We put law — well organized and well explained — in front of a lot of people. We had close to a million and a half unique visitors last month, from over 200 countries — that’s about 20 million page views, maybe slightly more. Some of those visitors are lawyers, many are private citizens, and the majority of them are making use of law in some professional way. Those that are not lawyers are doing risk management — figuring out whether the advice of a lawyer is good, checking the implications of particular courses of action, trying to figure out what they’re expected to do. Among those who are lawyers, a large number serve the public, either as government officials or as workers for non-profits and public service organizations of all kinds. Our LIIBULLETIN subscription list is fascinatingly democratic — it includes schoolteachers, professors, insurance guys, cops, the members of the Supreme Court practice group at Akin, Gump — and many, many others.

I like to avoid platitudes when I can. In a place where the justice system has no access to the precedents on which it is supposedly built, the argument for open access to law is all too obviously an argument for a fundamental human right. But, even (or perhaps especially) in developing countries, it is also a practical argument about how difficult it is for people to discover the legal framework for starting a business, buying and selling things, hiring and firing, and so on. No matter where or who you are, finding out what you’re expected to do can be expensive and troublesome. One compelling reason for open access to law is that it should be neither of those things. People in all sorts of places, for widely different reasons, have a right to legal information and practical, powerful reasons to use it to make their situation better.

These are things we’ve said before. They’re compelling and true. But they don’t really show the LII as the uniquely valuable activity that it is. That’s a much more difficult case to make. It lacks the overtly emotional grab-points that cause people to give reflexively, and that fundraisers love. Let’s try something a little more thoughtful instead. It goes like this:

Increasing numbers of people and institutions can publish law, many people and institutions already do, and soon many more will. Some of them are late to a party they should have joined long ago — particularly those courts that are only now offering open access to their decisions. But there they are nonetheless. Their efforts at self-publication are being substantially assisted by other open-access providers like AltLaw and public.resource.org. We applaud these guys, and we help them when we can. We’re also different from them in one important respect: we’re looking ahead to what will need to emerge once everyone is publishing what they should. Within cramped resource constraints, we’re working to figure out what a seamless, highly usable, multinational legal information commons would look like and how it might be built from the isolated, individual collections that now exist. We’re constantly thinking about how to integrate caselaw, statutes, regulations, and explanatory material in ways that make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

We like synergy because we’re made of it. The LII is unique in its location: affiliated with a graduate law program, inside a research university where, among many other things, you can find many of the digital librarians who did the fundamental architectural work on the emerging global structure that supports electronic publishing, world-class researchers in language technologies, and — significantly — very smart students who don’t hesitate to jump the boundaries between these disciplines. In the fifteen years that we have reliably provided public access to legal information, we have made great use of the efforts and insights of a wide variety of people in creating pathbreaking, innovative services and techniques now used by many.

As time has gone on, we have found this harder and harder to do. Most of you know that we do this with very few people: just six of us for three quarters of a million web pages. That staff is adequate to maintain and improve what we’re doing now — but we have little time free to do what we do best, which is to conceive and develop next-generation services. That is so for two reasons. Our maintenance responsibilities grow with each new database and service. And, after 15 years of Web development, innovation has become an expensive effort demanding time and talent in increasing amounts. In 1992, my co-founder Peter Martin could spend a snowy afternoon marking up the text of Two Pesos v. Taco Cabana in a new thing called HTML and produce something the world had never seen before — the first Web-published judicial opinion. Projects with comparable impact now take teams of people working for months. We have many more such projects on our list than we can possibly do. We would like to narrow the gap between our reach and our grasp, and with your help, we will. While we’re not (yet) announcing anything as complicated or ponderous as a traditional fundraising “campaign”, we would like to be raising an amount equal to one dollar each year for every repeat visitor we had to the site last month.

If you’ve taken the trouble to read this much of this blog post — cheerfully self-serving as it is — then I’m going to assume that you’re fairly committed to us and our cause. I’d like to impose on you by asking you to do more — not an increased dollar contribution, but something much harder. Please help us persuade others to join you in supporting the LII. Many of our supporters are lone individuals among many in an organization who know and value what we do. We need volunteer “recruiters” to bring others into the fold, and you can help. Just ask somebody you know who uses the service whether they’ve thought about how it’s done, who does it, and whether they think those LII folks drive fancy cars. (I don’t, personally, and you already know what I do with the old ones).

Direct support by our users is, for us, the best kind of support. It is free of partisanship and of imposed research agendas. It is a vote for what we are, and what we might become, and not what somebody else wants us to be. We need more of those who use the service to support us — and we need those of you who already make donations to know how very much all of us here value them.

Thanks again, from all six of us. We look forward to hearing from more people like you.