Technology as a Force Multiplier

A year ago at this time, ChatGPT had just launched. As the timing worked out, this was not long after we’d cleaned up the crumbs from our 30th birthday cake, and at that point we couldn’t help but think that if we’d needed any reminder to keep focusing on the future, it would have been hard to find a better one. In the year since, we’ve put a dizzying array of new technologies through their paces and been reminded of both the learning curve for new tools and the magic of gaining leverage on a problem by finding the right fit between a new tool and our central task: helping people find and understand the law.  

As we’ve been talking about in several recent posts, this year has brought us an occasion to look anew at how people from all walks of life use the LII website – including (as we noted in our previous post) whether or not they ever experience our website directly at all.  In part because we have that luxury, we choose to see consumption of our website for purposes of re-use as a force multiplier – quantitatively an existential game-changer, but not all that different qualitatively from what happens when individuals use content from our website to develop training manuals for public servants, or include it in source packets for law school classes, or screenshot it for social media. 

And so far we’re finding that this particular juncture in the history of artificial intelligence increases the need for stable, reliable information whose provenance is clear. We have seen already that the combination of text generation at negligible cost and hallucination by large language models has created a misinformation force multiplier. Although qualitatively a familiar problem (most starkly for those of us who remember that one time when a false citation to a non-existent provision of LII’s U.S. Code played a role in a national news story), the asymmetry of effort required to verify information makes the proliferation of unreliable text an existential problem not just for us but for the web itself.  

Our aim is to keep the legal information we publish free, accessible, stable, and reliable – available to everyone, fact checkers included, from a reputable source at the click of a button. As we navigate this rapidly evolving information environment and find the niches where we can make unique contributions for the benefit of the public, we hope to seize opportunities to evolve while continuing to offer services the public has come to rely on.

What does the Winter Solstice have to do with Free Legal Information?

Today is the winter solstice.  We know that because we asked Google. 

As you can see, Google didn’t return a list of web pages from which we could extract an answer, but the actual answer itself: December 21, 2023. It was then and there that I knew what I wanted to say in this blog post.

We’re all accustomed to these Featured Snippets (as Google now calls them), but when they started almost a decade ago, they were a really big deal. On one hand, it was neat to see Google use our website to, for example, answer a holiday-themed legal question:

On the other hand, getting the answer straight from Google wasn’t obviously a good thing for projects like ours. If searchers didn’t click through on that link, then we wouldn’t have an ever-growing amount of traffic to demonstrate our usefulness. We also couldn’t expect the same level of advertising revenues and user donations that made our work possible if folks stopped needing to visit our website to find the answer they were looking for. It was, quite literally, an existential crisis in the making. Despite these concerns, our traffic continued to grow steadily over the last decade to a point where continuing to use it as a leading indicator of our impacts now seems futile (a topic we touched on in another recent post).  

We’ve also written recently about the fascinating rift that’s developing in the global online Free Law world all these years later between those who welcome the bots/scrapers/crawlers that harvest content like ours to power AI systems and other future technologies and those who are fighting to keep their websites, in essence, read only. In short, what’s coming down the road makes Google’s Featured Snippets seem utterly quaint, and existential crises abound for all sorts of knowledge workers.

Both that Featured Snippets example and this recital of the issues they implicate are admittedly facile; but, we  wanted to reiterate LII’s commitment that we will continue to develop, test, refine, implement, and share innovative techniques for making legal information more findable and comprehensible for the public–whether you ultimately end up on our website or not. 

Free (as in Law)

We’d like to share a bit about how we approach the heavy traffic that’s been keeping us on our toes. We’ve been talking a lot recently about the ways in which changes to Google’s traffic reports have been an occasion for us to revisit our thinking about who uses the site and how they do so. Here we’re relying not just on the data from people whose use of the website shows up in Google Analytics, but also from the ever-growing assemblage of automated user agents ranging from long-standing search engine crawlers to newer corporate large language model crawlers to custom crawlers that seem to represent some very curious researchers on home internet connections. 

A little over a month ago, LII’s leadership attended the Law Via the Internet Conference, meeting with other members of the worldwide Free Access to Law Movement. As you might guess, everyone was talking about the use and refinement of artificial intelligence tools, particularly large language models. The atmosphere encompassed a mix of excitement, caution, curiosity, and realism. But one element of the discussion stood out as a point of strong divergence: what are the limits of the “free” and “access” in “free access to law”? Does free mean “free as in beer” or “free as in speech”?

It turns out that we have a different intuition from some of our sibling LIIs who run services designed to be used primarily by members of the legal profession. Although (like us) they would never stand in the way of others gaining free access to information published by their respective governments, (also like us) they have invested significant amounts of resources over many years to standardize and enrich the documents they work with. But because (unlike us) many of them focus primarily on publishing case law, privacy concerns alone have given them plenty of reasons not to allow crawlers access to their websites. A policy not to now open their data for free AI-related consumption is not far from their long-standing practice.  Use of their services is free as in beer. 

We take a very different approach. Our content is findable primarily because it has always been crawlable, and (almost all) reusable. That policy enabled our site to reach the top of search rankings for vast numbers of search terms. By extension, it enabled our data to become part of the pool of documents used to train most of the large language models.  In turn, that openness – and the openness of other U.S.-based free access to law operations – means that even if they’re still having some trouble getting their facts straight today, the large language models we interact with have access to the data they need to get it right tomorrow. Even if we don’t ever see the readers who benefit from that data, it means that our work can serve the public in ways we can’t begin to imagine. As best we can, we offer services that are free as in speech.

But it gets tricky. These crawlers all receive free access to the LII website and in turn make LII’s work usable by millions more people than we would ever reach on our own. But their traffic is not free for us to field.  (If you’re wondering why we don’t consider changing our approach, the reality is that we are a very small group, and even if we wished to change our policy to include a paid service for corporate reusers, it would come at the expense of using our technical and administrative resources for direct support of our core mission.) For both principled and practical reasons, everyone – human or crawler alike – receives a standard of access that supports all of our users.

Learning the Law with LII

We recently wrote about how changes in the way Google reports traffic to websites like law.cornell.edu have given us the opportunity to revisit how we think about, and talk about, traffic. When we sat down last week to sift through the 7.4 million website sessions Google Analytics recorded for us in November, one of the first things we did was go to the “heaviest” of traffic days last month–November 29–to look for interesting use cases. What emerged amused us, and we thought you might enjoy hearing about it.  

There weren’t any particularly compelling news headlines like a high-profile indictment, an important Supreme Court decision, or a political event of the type that often drive extra folks to our website. There was also no evidence that all the folks who use our site as part of their work in legal services, or any of the myriad regulated industries, or all levels of government, etc. were particularly active on a random Wednesday six days after Thanksgiving.  

So, what was it? All signs point to law students flocking to the website to study for their final examinations. All that week, but especially that day, traffic in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure was busier than usual, and parts of Title 28 of U S Code like Sections 1332 (diversity jurisdiction), 1367 (supplemental jurisdiction), 1391 (venue), & 1446 (removal) were far busier than usual. Anyone with a law degree will recognize those topics as the fundamental concepts addressed in any good CivPro exam.  

We always get a lot of mileage, especially within our home institution of Cornell Law School, in recounting all the ways we employ law students and expose them to the intersection of law and technology. But we don’t really talk too much about students as a segment of our user population. But they’re very much present, and sometimes we hear from them and those who teach them:

Thank you for providing much needed information for us law students and for the public at large!

A law student in Georgia

I have so much appreciation for what you do! LII is the first resource I turn to when I need to look at statutory text or regulations.

A law student in Washington, DC

I teach business law and find your site to be extremely helpful!

A law professor in Georgia

Most of my students go into solo or small firm practice. Having this resource is a life-saver for many of them because they cannot afford the various paid research services. But they still have clients who deserve justice.

A law professor in Texas

This website has been essential for my law school education!

A law student in Massachusetts

This was an invaluable resource when I was teaching, and I still consult it in retirement.

A retired law professor in Washington

I honestly do not know how I would be able to complete my weekly discussion posts and assignments without [LII].

An undergraduate legal studies major in Oregon

This website saved my [keester] more times than I care to admit in Law School and is an extraordinary research tool in the real world.

A lawyer in New York, NY (of course) 

With any luck, we’ll keep saving the [keesters] of students, lawyers, and millions of others for many years to come.  

Playing in (web) traffic

This year, big changes in how Google records and reports traffic in its analytics platform caused us to reconsider how we think about, and talk about, traffic to our website. Remember when a certain fast food chain switched from counting the billions it had served to just saying “billions and billions” served? We’re basically doing the same thing. If you saw our Fiscal Year 2023 Annual Report from this summer, for example, we simply noted that once again “more than 45 million people visited” the website. We expect to take the same approach at the end of the calendar year, then again next summer when our current fiscal year ends, etc.

It’s not that we’ve stopped cherishing each and every visitor, or that we’re assuming our ubiquity in your search results and browser bookmarks will never change. Far from it. Instead, we want to put more focus on how people use our resources, and less on how many. After all, we’re long past the point where it’s just an incomprehensibly large number that trends ever larger over time. And it’s not like any of the challenges we face in publishing law online for free will change all that much when we hit 50 million annual visitors, or 60 million, or 100 million.

So, we’re paying more attention to what kind of events spark heavy traffic days and just how much traffic those events tend to yield over a “typical” day, and then we’re using those insights to think about what we can do differently and do better to bring as much legal information to the public as possible in the simplest and most connected way we can.