Google is entering the world of case law search.

To search case law, go to the Advanced Search Page of Google Scholar.  It allows searching of legal opinions and journals.  The search capabilities are fairly rudimentary at the moment.  One can search "all," "only US Federal Court Opinions," or by specific state.  Search terms are limited to searches for "all terms," "exact phrase," "at least one term," "excluded terms."  The search can be limited to the title or be the whole article.  If one is familiar with other Google advanced search options, this will look familiar.

A much bigger question is how extensive the database is.  It is difficult to tell.  According to Internet for Lawyers, it appears to be fairly extensive:

• 1 US 1 (pre 1776)
• 1 F 2d 1 (1924 +)
• F Supp Cases
• US State Cases (1950+)

Assuming that what Google is indexing are publicly available databases of cases.  If that is the case, it is likely that not every case in those time-frames is available.  This is, however, an impressive initial roll out of the service.

I am not sure that Lexis/Nexis or WestLaw are shaking in their boots.  There have faced other challenges based on publicly available databases like FastCase.  Google's effort is likely to be susceptible to the perception that it is not as complete as the Big-2 commercial databases.  I do not think we have gotten to the point that lawyers are going to trust that they have exhausted the research field with a Google Scholar search.

The first inroads are likely to be use of Google Scholar to do initial research and indeed this may be an excellent strategy for holding down on-line research costs. If Google Scholar proves to be comprehensive, it is not difficult to see a scenario where lawyers begin trusting it.  If that happens, the price of on-line legal research could drop precipitously.  It is going to be interesting to see what happens as Google unfolds and, presumably, improves Google Scholar's on-line legal research tools.

An interesting sidelight, it appears that the initial announcement was made in a non-traditional means, by lawyer turned Google product manager Rick Klau on Twitter.

- Peter H. Berge

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