Law 2.0

The Wired GC wonders when the law will migrate to Web 2.0: Web 2.0, Heading West to Law 2.0: “What is needed to make Law 2.0 applicable to legal research is for standards to emerge: how courts and agencies will preserve their work (html or pdf?), how they will announce it (RSS?), how they will categorize it (tags?), and how we will search it (guess who?).”
Let’s take a look back, all the way to the year 2002 [music cue “In the year 2000 (and 2)”], where the geeky legal blogosphere was looking forward to courts publishing decisions in a standard, open XML format. This would allow greater public access to the law and make it possible for law firms and information specialists to create their own value-added databases: Free your data and the rest will follow. That post isn’t particularly well-written, but it does hit on the tip of the iceberg of the potential for using the RSS, XML and the web to distribute court decisions.
“Alice” (nka BK) noted some of the advantages to having a central authority for caselaw: More Geek: “I predict there won’t be any critical mass happening on that front in the courts anytime soon (and probably not within our lifetimes). People may have grown up using computers, but there are still many many people who don’t understand anything but basic application use (and can’t even take advantage of the advanced features of those applications). Computer knowledge needs to be driven to comparatively astronomically high levels before judges — even those that grew up on computers — will see the need for such a system, especially considering the time, expense, and potential problems with switching over, even if the implementation of the system is transparent.”
As lawyers and judges become more web-savvy and enjoy using Google, they may wonder why they can’t access caselaw using a search engine that is as fast and friendly.
Denise Howell looked at Trackback and imagined a scenario where “legal citators improve accuracy and stay in business because their editorial judgment continues to have value. Legal research nevertheless becomes more accessible and less costly. This probably won’t happen any time soon, but it’s not difficult to see how techniques being tested in the weblog arena now may shape the way research is done and laws are made down the road.” Back Linking, Forward Looking
Are courts any closer to publishing decisions in an open format and using RSS/Atom (or a similar technology) to make it possible for more aggregators to create value-added services? Probably not.
The good news is, at least, that Westlaw added RSS feeds to its Intraclip service, which allows subscribers to create search watchlists. LexisNexis only offers feeds for some press releases and legal news, but not caselaw.
A different type of Law 2.0 is WikiLaw, which aims to be an open-content resource. I’m not entirely sold on the concept– can such a resource every be considered an authority? Will it be gamed for litigation advantage by counsel?