4/13/12

As LexisOne Goes Dark, Fastcase's PLoL Comes Back To Life

Many of you may have heard the news that LexisOne, Lexis' minimalist effort at providing a limited selection of free case law, was officially shut down earlier this month. Apparently, Lexis did a two-step program to first place LexisOne behind a "community site" (which required registration), and then two months later shut it down completely. Many of us were not surprised by Lexis' move, but we were still disappointed that once again, an access point to legal information was first placed behind a registration wall, and then eventually placed behind a pay-wall. Now in order to get to the cases that were once available to anyone with an Internet connection, Lexis now requires that you subscribe to its pricey subscription-based product.

It reminds me of when Thomson West (now Thomson Reuters) bought up Findlaw and turned it from a free legal information site into the abomination that it is today as a quasi-marketing, blogging, lawyer website creating resource. 

As many of us took to Twitter last week to discuss what options were out there, we quickly came to the realization that Google Scholar was still an option for cases, and there was Fastcase's Public Library of Law which apparently had not been updated in many months and was assumed dead. 

However, occasionally Twitter can cause good things to happen. Yesterday, Fastcases CEO, Ed Walters, sent me a Direct Message on Twitter telling me he saw the discussion that Jason Wilson and I were discussing on Twitter and that PLoL would be brought back to life:


See, Twitter can be more than just a way to let people know what you are reading, or where you are at the moment. 

With both Google Scholar and PLoL, there are at least a few options remaining for finding cases.

Note: Remember there are limits to both Google Scholar and PLoL's coverage. You can look at the scope of coverage for each:



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Posted by Greg Lambert at 10:41 AM
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1 comments:

Lilly Lorren said...

What Lexis did is not unusual. The good news is that probably soon someone will do the same, even better. So who will be the bravest one to do it?

April 13, 2012 at 7:18 PM

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