ABA Journal - February 2010

RICK KLAU
Project manager
Google

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it useful. This was a collection of content that was not accessible and well-organized.” He says Google Scholar was designed to make the information accessible for ordinary citizens. The company has no current plans to do more with the information than what is already available.

Google’s database allows users to search its content against any words, concepts or citations and will pull up opinions related to the searcher’s query. The results are ranked by relevance. Citations in the opinions are hy-perlinked to other opinions. The results also provide links to other Google databases, such as books and law reviews, to help searchers get context.

But Google Scholar does not provide any sort of system to check the validity of the case, nor does it offer any type of taxonomy of the case.

Klau goes so far as to question the value of Google

PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMAS BROENING

Scholar to practicing lawyers: “The two
primary for-pay services provide tremen-
dous value to their users and help you
better understand and consume infor-
mation, like whether an
opinion is
still valid. Those
are things that practitioners rely on
and will continue to rely on.”
Despite Klau’s protestations, others in
the legal information sector are watching
Google. “You are always very conscious of
what Google is doing because the company
has immense resources available,” says
Warwick of Thomson Reuters.

TESTING THE LIMITS

PRICE—PARTICULARLY DURING A RECES- sion—may be the ultimate competitive advantage. For the time being, the companies are mum on what the new platforms will cost lawyers. As of late December, West had not priced its new platform, but the company said when the platform is launched it will only be available as an upgrade. LexisNexis had not determined its pricing, but company representatives said many of the features on the new platform might be made available on an a la carte basis. Bloomberg declined to comment.

Walters of Fastcase says the others should pay attention to his company because it is proof of the power of the bottom line. Fastcase offers subscriptions for as little as $95 per month.

Then, of course, there is Google’s unbeatable price of free.

Assuming neither the new West nor LexisNexis platform delivers a knockout blow to the other, the most interesting competition may be where price matters least—at the top of the market with newcomer Bloomberg, some observers say.

At the biggest law firms, the companies may be testing the limits of how much information beyond pure legal research content is too much.

Fried Frank’s Rine may have already reached her limit. “It’s a challenge. You have to make such an investment in these products. And they keep adding more and more content, often duplicating what’s included in other services we already subscribe to. But we don’t necessarily need all that content, and we can’t continue paying different vendors for the same information,” she says. ■