Bob Ambrogi has a nice preview of the new Fastcase iPhone App that will be available soon.

He focuses on the functionality of the app, but not to be overlooked is the price plan: free.  As in, search the full Fastcase database and access its content for free.  And the app itself is free, too.  On the heels of the availability of Google Scholar’s collection of free US case law, it looks like we have entered an era in which nobody will be able to charge money simply for access to primary legal documents. Fastcase, as a provider of case law whose price point was, shall we say, closer to free than other legal research providers, is arguably more threatened than either Westlaw or Lexis by Google’s push into the field. With this move, Fastcase is showing that it’s not out to play defense in the mobile space. (On Google’s move, see Winners, Losers, and Other Implications of Case Law on Google Scholar).

The full Web version of Fastcase, with its additional tools and bells and whistles, will continue to be a fee-based service.  In effect, Fastcase is content to use the iPhone app as a marketing tool for to the full-featured and full-priced Web version.  West’s and Lexis’ mobile apps to date include Black’s Law Dictionary at $49.99, and Lexis’ Get Cases and Sheparize app requires a paid subscription to use. Fastcase is attempting to seize some high ground on the mobile space by offering more for less.

This move could cause the activity around mobile content apps for lawyers to heat up a bit.

There was widespread celebration in the legal community yesterday as word of Google Scholar’s launch of a substantial collection of US case law spread across the internets.  Now what?

Only time will tell how the availability of this critical body of public content will shake things up in the legal world and in the legal information industry.  But the winners, losers, and implications might not be what everybody thinks:

• The availability of free primary law sources is not going to have its biggest impact on products and services that the legal profession itself uses. That market needs a lot of value-add beyond just access to the law (including advanced finding tools, secondary legal content, and workflow tools), and the existing players are well positioned to continue providing it. Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) and Reed Elsevier (Lexis) are likely more concerned about Bloomberg than Google in their primary legal marketplace. However, open access to legal sources will spur the creation of new markets for legal information among consumers, but even more so among non-lawyer professionals who need to understand a narrow field of that they work with all the time. Expect to see new products and services built on top of the free legal information that will make the law more accessible to those new markets.
• The people who should worry about this news are lawyers. They are about to be “Web-MD’d.” Clients will begin coming to them with reams of print-outs, thinking they know the law, the same way doctors are always hearing from self-diagnosing patients who think they can spot their disease by reading stuff on the Web. New-found access to formerly hidden legal information will do for potential legal clients what WebMD and the Web has done for patients – arm them with information, and build a thirst for more information that’s targeted to them, rather than to the lawyers.  Lawyers, like doctors, will have to redefine their role and authority in a world where everyone thinks they’re an expert.
• Still to come will be the question of how Google will develop the “how cited” and “cited by” features. Already you can see some cases where legal journals and non-legal sources from elsewhere in Google Scholar are linked in. It’s fairly crude right now, but Google or others could develop some really interesting cross-linking between the cases and other published material in and outside of the legal industry. Think of what Google has done with maps, and how many different kinds of information could be linked into court opinions: geographic information; the identities of parties, lawyers, and judges; and external links about the subject matter of a given case. What Google is showing us today is only a sliver of what’s possible.
• While much of a lawyer’s work requires the bells and whistles embedded in the full research offerings by the major research players, there is no doubt that many searches in case law are preliminary “fishing expeditions;” first stabs at identifying a case or a legal principle that applies to a legal issue.  It is pretty clear that many lawyers will begin to conduct that first-stage, low-risk research in free services including Google Scholar.  This has two implications: that there will be continued price pressure on the big providers for search offerings ; but also that there will be increased pressure on the newer, inexpensive players such as Fastcase and Casemaker.  Those players will have to continue to innovate in functionality, user experience, and service in order to maintain their hard-won positions as legitimate alternatives to the big two players.

Jeff Jarvis has a thoughtful post about the future of journalism and the news industry:  The future of news is entrepreneurial.

In it, he argues that the news industry isn’t going away – but that the old media companies and their approach is.

The news industry of the future will consist of smaller and more fragmented players.  Journalists will be more like free agents, and money will be made – but on a smaller scale.  There will also be significant opportunities for companies to to take part in the industry by providing networks and business services to journalist-entrepreneurs.

How well do his arguments apply to the legal information industry?  Will legal publishing become similarly entrepreneurial?  Consider:

• The open access movement is making it cheap and easy to slice and dice public legal content into new products.  Big legacy publishers won’t have an advantage here.
• Where Jarvis talks about journalists, substitute the word lawyer.  Will legacy publishers be challenged by individual entrepreneurial lawyers, each of whom has his or her own printing press with a global reach? Why turn to a publisher for information when the expert is directly accessible?
• Think about the integration of practice and marketing that Web-savvy practitioners are demonstrating.  The same platforms are used for service delivery, reputation enhancement, and business development – just as Jarvis’ vision calls for small information providers integrating new business models with content and technology.
• As technology is injected into the lawyer’s workflow, the value of big one-size-fits-all services diminishes as well.  Just as a fragmented core of entrepreneurial journalists can specialize and provide increasing focus and expertise on their subject matter, so will the packaging of legal information be focused and targeted to specific kinds of litigation and transactions.  Building big technology platforms for a wide range of legal practice areas takes critical mass; building efficient practice tools that do one thing well requires considerably less resources – so here again the technology advantage of the big legal information players may be smaller than it was a decade ago.

Lawyers (like journalists) are building an entrepreneurial information environment that is a threat to the structure of the legal services industry.  Is this entrepreneurship it also a threat to the legal publishing industry?

The work of making legislation and other legal materials more accessible is going on all over the world.

The latest version of the Swedish service lagen.nu now includes commentaries written by law students and practicing lawyers, all with the intent of making the text of the law more comprehensible to laypeople.  If by any chance you can can read Swedish, see the announcement by the man behind the service, Staffan Malmgren, at his blog: Lansering av nya lagen.nu plz RT! I’m looking for a good English-language description of the project.

The service reminds me of OregonLaws.org, which also was put together by a law student/programmer in his spare time; both are attempts to use new technology and Web 2.0 techniques to make legislation more accessible than existing commercial products – on the cheap.

You’ve probably seen the announcement of Federal Register availability in XML.  I think this will be a tipping point in open access for regulatory information, and it will lead to a lot of new applications for gummint data.  Carl Malamud provides some Questions and Answers! About the Federal Register at O’Reilly Radar.

Poor PACER, everyone’s conspiring on a new workaround.  Here’s the latest.

Turning PACER Around, One Document at a Time

The US federal government’s source for machine-readable datasets is now up and available at data.gov.

To encourage use of the datasets for interesting applications, The Sunlight Foundation has launched Apps for America 2, a contest designed to encourage creative use of open public data.

To start things off, an early entrant allows you to play a lively game of concentration by matching the mugs of folks on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.  Try it yourself.  Okay, maybe not so useful, but expect some clever people to find a lot of interesting applications for the data in coming weeks.

I’m watching for interesting apps that make use of legal and regulatory information.

That old saying that you don’t want to know how sausage or legislation is made? Here’s a quick overview of the latter process from the Sunlight Foundation’s Open House Project, with some hope for innovations.

In defense of sausage: found this nice item that calls for a new metaphor.

Robb Shecter, a second-year law student at Lewis & Clark Law School, needed a decent online version of the Oregon Revised Statutes.  So he built one.

The availability of the Oregon statutes for this venture was secured after Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org and Tim Stanley of Justia lobbied the Oregon legislature to stop asserting a copyright in the Oregon Revised Statues, which had prevented third party publishers from creating their own versions of the statues without steep licensing fees.  They presented a number of legal and policy arguments for the change.  Last June, the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee agreed to no longer assert its copyright interest in the statutes.

This is a model of what’s happening in open access to legal and regulatory information online. it’s no longer enough that information be freely available at a government web site; the really interesting innovations come when public bodies release their information in low-level formats that allow third parties to manipulate it into innovative new products.  That a second-year law student can whip together a better version of the state laws than the state itself – in his spare time – says volumes about the possibilities and level of change that open access will bring to primary law publishing.

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) conducted an economic outlook survey of library directors to see how they were adjusting to the economic climate. More than 60% report they’ve already encountered budget cuts.  Notable actions taken include:

• Print subscriptions: all types of libraries (private, academic, state/court/county) are watching subs and canceling where possible.
• Renegotiating with big publishers, pushing back on long-term agreements.
• Public library cuts lean more heavily on service hours and even climate (”lowered temperature in building”); private library cuts are more about personnel cuts and cutbacks on databases and subscriptions.

These challenges come come a time when viable alternatives such as low-cost online legal research services and better and more sophisticated peer- and collaboratively-created content become available.  Look for more law libraries to get creative as they serve clients on a lower budget, and shift from simply being more economical with existing resources to finding new resources and new ways of providing service altogether.