Searchable case law free on Google

Google continues to amaze me. Their latest project:  searchable case law. Lawyers are familiar and comfortable with searching for case law, courtesy of the two giants in the field, Westlaw and Lexis, which each provide extensive data bases of case law, statutes, rules and regulations from jurisdictions around the world. For a price, of course. This week, Google has come out with what seems to be a similar product: a searchable data base of "full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar." See their blog entry which describes the product in more detail. Or go directly to Google Scholar to check it out. Note below the search box that the default search is for their data base of "Articles". You need to instead check "Legal opinions and journals" to search for case law.

The simple search will bring you more results than you need or want or could use in a lifetime. Pick a broad topic like "abortion" and you get 106,000 hits. That type of result is useless for lawyers or laymen, and so that is why you need to read the instructions, and learn to do a more focused search. You can select "advanced scholar search" and that will begin to bring some order out of chaos. Put "abortion" and "hawaii" in as your search terms, and search the jurisdiction of Hawaii only, and you get 21 hits. That's a much more manageable search result. Try using "dog" and "bite" for the jurisdiction of Pennsylvania, and you get 213 hits. Use the date options to narrow the focus to cases from 1980 to present and you now have 156 cases. Use the phrase "dog bite" instead, and that will leave out the cases that mention a dog and a bite but not a "dog bite" and now you have 47 cases. Add the word "death" to the search and you now have 12 cases. That does not mean that those cases involve a death from a dog bite, or that this is the whole universe of dog bite cases. It simply means that those cases contain the phrase "dog bite" and "death". What your search turns up depends upon how carefully you phrase your search request. And that in turn depends on how well you use the tools that Google gives you. Go to the "advanced search tips" page to get more tips on searching in Google. You can use the more advanced Boolean operators that Google permits - such as the very useful "minus" sign followed by a word or phrase that you do not want to appear in the search: -poodle [will leave out any results that otherwise meet all of your criteria but have the word "poodle" in the opinion] or -"german shepherd" [will leave out any results that otherwise meet all of your criteria but have the phrase "german shepherd" in the opinion]. The Scholars help page only shows the tip of the search iceberg. Go to the regular Google search basics page to find the full tool set of Google search basics.

So will this latest Google feature put Westlaw or Lexis or lawyers out of business?   I am guessing no, at least in the near term.  As lawyers, we have a very persuasive reason to use the tried and true data bases that we are familiar with:  malpractice claims.  We don't yet have faith in how extensive the Google data base is - how far back it goes,  how up to date it is, how thorough it is.  We need more certainty that this new product provides right now.  We will likely continue to use the law libraries, and the legal search data bases that we are accustomed to.  If we rely solely on Google right now, without knowing its parameters, then we are  opening ourselves up to possible malpractice claims if the Google data base is not as thorough as what we have come to trust, and as a result, we miss a citation that perhaps is decisive of a particular case.  So for now, I think Westlaw and Lexis are safe, though there should be alarm bells ringing at each of their headquarters.  The Google camel has stuck its nose in their tent.

Will this take business away from lawyers?  I think at this point that is unlikely too.  Are neighbors going to resolve their issues by sitting down in front of a computer screen and looking over the cases and agreeing that the dog owner is going to pay his neighbor for the dog bite?  In a perfect world, perhaps that would occur, but I don't think we are there yet, at least not in this part of Bryn Mawr.  Most intractable disputes will still be decided by an arbiter, a judge or a jury, with the use of an advocate, the lawyers.  In certain instances, the Google data base may actually grow the legal business.  I am reminded of the time that I attempted to make a repair on a toilet in my home.  I was new to home repairs, and just finding out what I could do.  I had my Readers Digest Handyman's Book, and that told me exactly how to do the job I was taking on.  And yet it can't provide all of the nuance and experience necessary for the actual task, it can't tell me what torque to apply and when to back off rather than using a bigger wrench and brute force to try to loosen a nut.  And as a result, I cracked the whole toilet unit and the whole thing had to be replaced.  By a plumber.  I looked over his shoulder as he performed the job, and at the end asked him if he minded me kibitzing while he worked.  And he smiled and said, "Nope.  I love guys like you.  You make more work for guys like me!"

And so it may go with the new ability to do your own legal search.  It will be wonderful for educating the client, but as before, the client who acts as his own lawyer may well have a fool for a lawyer.  And that makes more work for guys like me.