Legal Research

"Google Mobile App: What Might It Mean for Legal Research? Part 2"

Posted by Robert C. Richards: "In part one of this post, I described Google Mobile Application ("GMA"), its effectiveness for certain kinds of legal research, the history of voice recognition for legal research in the U.S., and some factors suggesting that GMA may become a popular legal research tool in the not-too-distant future.

In this second part of my post, I'll discuss how the leading U.S. CALR vendors are coping with the potential challenge posed by GMA.

As I discussed in part one, commercial CALR vendors might respond to GMA by pursuing either, or both, of two paths. First, CALR vendors could choose to expose to Google the metadata describing the content of their databases, so that those vendors' content would appear in Google results lists stemming from GMA legal research searches. (Given that Microsoft might eventually develop a voice search feature to compete with GMA, CALR vendors might also choose to expose their metadata to Yahoo! and Bing.) Alternatively (or additionally), CALR vendors might decide to compete with GMA head on, by offering a voice search tool customized to work with the vendors' CALR services, as Westlaw and LexisNexis did at the end of the last century.

To sound out CALR vendors on these issues, in August 2009 I sent to the leading U.S. commercial general CALR providers (namely Bloomberg Law, Casemaker, Fastcase, Lexis.com, Loislaw, VersusLaw, and Westlaw) an informal survey asking about the providers' exposure of their descriptive metadata to Internet search engines, and their current offerings and future plans respecting voice search. (The latter six are mentioned by name in the ABA Survey. I included Bloomberg Law because it is offering access to a number of U.S. law schools.) Neither Bloomberg Law nor Casemaker responded to the survey. Here are the survey results:

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

Source: Law Librarian Blog, 2 September 2009

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on September 02, 2009 (boomark / email).