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Legal Research and Personal Injury Attorneys

By Benjamin J. Sansone, Esq.

For most attorneys, legal research is a labrynth of databases and special queries. Two behemoth companies have dominated the market for about the past 20 years or so: Westlaw and Lexis. Some have argued they are a duopoloy. It wasn't until a couple years ago with the advent of public.resource.org that there was a glimmer of hope that the corpus of legal decisions would be more readily available to attorneys that sis not want to spend money on Westlaw or Lexis. The difficulty is that Westlaw and Lexis has years years of content from whic both have built overwhelmingly powerful and knowledgable search engines. Users can search issues, find news, and search periodicals and law journals. Usually these are arranged in databases which are not intuitive to search. Which as much as they offer, its like using a backhoe when a hand shovel will do. This kind of tool, with fancy queries and millions and millions of documents just doesn't fit within the typical practice of a personal injury attorney. Recently, however, two newcomers - Bloomberg and Google - are making this promised opening of the legal research market more of a reality. Bloomberg Law is a new competitor that promises more than just legal research. Bloomberg, a news service, will soon be going right after Lexis and Westlaw by offering legal search, a legal citator to rank relevant law, a legal digest and news stories relevant to your legal search. Then there is Google scholar. Google is the king of search and it shows in their search engine. Results are accurate and the interface is easy to use. Google Scholar also offers a nice citator service here but lacks the ability to search more than just primary law. These two newcomers offer nice packages. Bloomberg will be a fee service and is not yet available. Google Scholar is free and already available. Bloonberg is going after the pay services and google is trying to open the market. Regardless of the promise both lack legal search features which are valuable to plaintiff attorneys. Both lack a direct jury verdict search feature and both lack any way to search expert witness reports. To plaintiff's attorneys these are valuable features. One helps determine the value of a case, and one helps make the case. The legal world is always a few years behind in technology. Legal research is no different. Attorneys acan only benefit from new players in the market. Here's hoping we will see some provider offer expanisive search with features that are valuable to planitiff attorneys.

Full post as published by Missouri Injury Law Blog on December 20, 2009 (boomark / email).