Laura Bergus

I’ve been following the American Association of Law Libraries tweets from the annual conference at #aall2010. I’m filtering the discussion by checking in only when I see something of interest from someone in my “not to miss” list (a high proportion of whom are at AALL, incidentally).

What caught my attention earlier today was the discussion from the Economics of Interface: Vendors Respond session. You can get a feel for it through Greg Lambert’s tweets, starting here and Meg Kribble’s starting here. The gist that interested me was that Westlaw (here, in the form of WestlawNext) and LexisNexis representatives were recycling content and information about product upgrades that everyone has heard before. But Fastcase was unveiling new research features and talking researching scholarship. Telling was Sarah Glassmeyer’s characterization of Ed Walters as a third-party candidate in a political debate. (Ed is founder and CEO of Fastcase, which I’ve written about before.) Westlaw and Lexis came off like the big-party candidates with canned non-responses, while Fastcase was there to actually discuss the issues.

My interest has always been piqued by horror stories of legal research pricing. I appreciate that every company must make money to survive, but, as a long-time public servant, I’m put off by anyone who’s willing to capitalize so much on information that’s created with public money (statutes, case law, and much legal scholarship).

So what makes Fastcase different? First, it is very open about pricing, and about what’s included in a given price. Compare that to WestlawNext’s gymnastics to keep pricing out of new product discussions. Second, Fastcase is a small company, with leadership that’s extremely approachable (Ed responds to tweets and phone calls promptly and personally). It also doesn’t hurt that Fastcase had positioned itself well in the eyes of some AALL attendees before the vendor session. Finally, Fastcase is willing to innovate for the sake of better research — and not just by creating a Google-esque interface, which WestlawNext’s primary improvement, from my perspective as a novice researcher. Fastcase’s four dimensional search visualization really is useful, and it’s brand-new Forecite feature will bring together the purposefulness Fastcase’s interface design with the common-sense usability of a Google keyword search. (Though Ed Walters might have overstated Foresite’s gravity just a bit; pretty sure Google beat ‘em to this with “did you mean.” But still awesome.)

Thanks to the AALL tweeters for delivering insightful perspectives on the rapidly-changing landscape of legal research.

LLRX.com recently posted “Basic Legal Research on the Internet.” How handy to have an up-to-date list of sites for primary and secondary sources, all free or, at most, requiring a library card at a library with access to some of the noted databases. Bookmarking this article has saved me a lot of room in my poorly-organized bookmarks folders. Thanks to @Cornell_LII for the tip!

I also had the chance to get a personlized tour of Spindle Law today. The site organizes the law into an easily-browseable tree of topics that drill down to specific legal rules, displaying supporting authority for the rules. David Gold, one of the site’s creators, turned me on to the site after I’d tweeted about the need for a crowdsourced, legal-rule-based research system. Voila! The site is very cool, and I especially like how it displays links to authorities on free databases (Google Scholar and Public Library of Law). But they need contributors to make the site better. Currently anyone can contribute topics, rules, authorities, and can comment on others’ contributions. If this site takes off, it will be a boon to law students and a good jumping-off point for legal research of all kinds.