{"id":3987,"date":"2017-06-23T08:52:46","date_gmt":"2017-06-23T13:52:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/?p=3987"},"modified":"2025-01-31T09:18:12","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T14:18:12","slug":"25-for-25-law-as-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2017\/06\/23\/25-for-25-law-as-data\/","title":{"rendered":"25 for 25: Law as Data"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/a>by David Curle<\/span><\/p>\n

In order to agree to write about something that is 25 years old, you almost have to admit to being old enough to have something to say about it. So I might as well get my old codger <\/span>bona fides<\/span><\/i> out of the way. \u00a0I came of age at the very cusp of the digital revolution in legal information. \u00a0A month before my college graduation ceremony in June 1981, IBM launched its first PC. \u00a0I thus belong to the last generation of students who produced their term papers on a typewriter. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Former Next Great Thing<\/b><\/p>\n

When I later entered law school the PCs were pretty well established (we used WordPerfect to write our briefs, of course), and the cutting edge of technology shifted to new legal research tools. Between trips to the library stacks to track down digests or to tediously Shepardize cases manually, we learned of Lexis and Westlaw, which in my first year were accessed via an acoustic-coupled modem and an IBM 3101 dumb terminal, squirreled away in a tiny lab-like room next to the reference desk in the library. \u00a0One terminal to serve an entire law school. Sign up to use it via a schedule on the door. Intrigued by this new world of digital information, I took a job in the law library, eventually teaching other students how to search on Lexis and Westlaw between shifts at the reference desk. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By my second or third year, the 3101 was replaced by Lexis\u2019 and Westlaw\u2019s UBIQ and WALT dedicated terminals. My boss Tom Woxland, Reference Librarian and Head of Public Services at the University of Minnesota Law School, wrote an <\/span>amusing article<\/span><\/a> in Legal Reference Services Quarterly about a conflict between WALT and the library staff\u2019s refrigerator that will give you a good sense of the level of technology sophistication we dealt with on a daily basis in those days. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was just a few years after this refrigerator incident that Tom Bruce and Peter Martin started up LII. \u00a0It\u2019s hard to underestimate the imagination and vision that this must have taken, because the digital legal world was still in its infancy. \u00a0But they could see the way the world was headed in 1992, and not only that, they did something about it in starting LII. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

UBIQ and WALT, locked away in that room in the library, awakened an interest that turned into a career in legal information systems. I gradually lost interest in legal practice as a career as my interest in electronic information systems of all kinds grew. \u00a0By the time I first met Tom Bruce, it was in my capacity as a token representative of the commercial side of the legal information world; I was an analyst at the research firm Outsell, Inc., which tracks various information markets, and I covered Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier (RELX), Wolters Kluwer, and all of the smaller players nipping at their heels in the legal information hierarchies of the time. Tom called on me to help explain this commercial world to his community of people working in the more open and non-commercial part of the legal information landscape. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t intend this piece to be a tribute to LII, nor was I asked to provide one. Rather, Tom Bruce asked me to say a few words about the relationship between free and fee-based legal materials and how they relate to each other. In one big sense, that relationship has evolved in the face of new technologies, and that evolution is the focus of this essay. A fundamental shift in the way the legal market approaches legal information is underway: <\/span>We no longer think of legal information simply as sets of <\/b>documents<\/i><\/b>; we are starting to see legal information as <\/b>data<\/i><\/b>. \u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

To go back to the chronicle of my digital awakening, there were several things about the new legal information systems that excited me even way back in the 1980s:<\/span><\/p>\n