altlaw- legal search that might not suck

Posted on by Luis Villa

Tim Wu, a prof here at Columbia (he’s famous! he’s on youtube!)12, has announced the existence of AltLaw. The core idea is that instead of ranting endlessly about lexis and westlaw3, someone could actually do something about it, taking advantage of the public domain status of most court decisions to collect a database of cases, parse them into something reliable formatting-wise, and slap a search engine with actual brains on top of it.

AltLaw still has a long, long way to go- in particular, it covers only cases from federal courts and the past ten years, and it does very little to act on the copious metadata available in court cases. But it is getting there, and as it will eventually be open in all the significant senses (source code as well as data), the hope is that it will pick up speed as time goes by and more people start to contribute parsers and data.

I’m generously credited as a contributor on the about page, but realistically, I’ve just been cheerleading so far. I’m thrilled to have had the good luck to be even that involved, and hope to find other ways to contribute eventually. Stuart Sierra and Paul Ohm (sorry, no youtube yet) have really done the bulk of the heavy lifting- congrats to both of them for getting it this far, and on the positive reaction it is getting.

  1. the third video in particular is… very special [↩]
  2. there are 700 students at Columbia who can take electives. 300 of them signed up for his copyright class this semester. [↩]
  3. that blog post talked about searching for eBay v. Mercexchange, which I’m pleased to report altlaw does better than either lexis or westlaw [↩]

Published by Luis Villa

7 thoughts on “altlaw- legal search that might not suck”

  1. is done all wrong.” My friends begged me to stop, and the manager threatened to call the police. All that net neutrality stuff is just a smokescreen. Wu’s a single-issue lawyer and he’s on a Christopher Kimball-esque crusade against bad dumplings.Luis Villa, whom I’ve met a total of once but whose blog I’m still reading, reminded me that, oh yeah, Wu’s a law celebrity. And that AltLaw is really tremendously cool. The ordinary layperson probably does not know that private corporations have this weird de

  2. Would be great to see some of the state bar assoc. websites that provide similar services merge/leverage AltLaw. This is indeed a valiant undertaking – not sure many realize just how complex such a service can become. With the right investors and a common goal, this could take off.

    Any advice for how others could get involved?

  5. […] Wu’s a single-issue lawyer and he’s on a Christopher Kimball-esque crusade against bad dumplings. Luis Villa, whom I’ve met a total of once but whose blog I’m still reading, reminded me that, oh yeah, Wu’s a […]

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