Legal Research

"Google Mobile App: What Might It Mean for Legal Research?"

Posted by Robert C. Richards: "Voice search may soon become a popular tool for legal research in the U.S. The reason? The Google search engine's smartphone application, called Google Mobile Application or Google Mobile App ("GMA," currently available for BlackBerry, iPhone, and Android phones), includes a "search by voice" feature that executes voice searches with surprising accuracy, at least for known legal resources. (Try it on a search for: Mapp v. Ohio; or for: 42 USC section 2000e.) Not only is GMA's voice search feature quite good already; it is likely to improve over time, because, as Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle noteGMA, which is cloud-based, utilizes machine-learning on a very large scale. The legal materials that GMA searches consist of a large (and growing) share of U.S. primary legal resources that are freely available on the Web and are indexed by Google. These include much U.S. federal case, statutory, and administrative law, as well as some recent state primary law, and certain well-known older U.S. state cases. Google also indexes a great deal of metadata describing primary and secondary legal resources, not freely available on the Web, from the U.S. and other jurisdictions. The result: GMA makes a substantial body of legal information accessible via voice search on smartphones.

How might GMA affect legal research in law firms and law schools? To explore answers to this question, this post discusses several types of information. First, this post examines the history of voice recognition in connection with commercial computer-assisted legal research (CALR) services. The post next considers factors suggesting the willingness of practicing lawyers, law professors, and law students to use GMA for legal research, including data from the 2009 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report  (the "ABA Survey"). Finally, this post discusses how U.S. commercial CALR services might deal with a potential challenge from GMA. The post presents results from an informal survey of major CALR providers respecting whether they expose their metadata to Internet search engines, and whether those providers offer, or plan to offer, voice search.

Some History...

Factors Suggesting the Potential of GMA for Legal Research Use...

Implications...

Full text and active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Law Librarian Blog, 1 September 2009

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on September 01, 2009 (boomark / email).