Program on Law and Technology at Columbia Law School

Law Librarian Blog: Should LexisNexis and Thomson West Be Worried About the Economy’s Turbulence?

“Faced with substantial budget cuts to library collections and legal research policy changes, we think it timely to ask if law librarians are seeing a shift to free and low cost legal research services at the expense of Lexis and Westlaw use.”

Mentions our own AltLaw.org.

An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy - NYTimes.com.

quote: “Pacer takes information that [public.resource.org founder Carl Malamud] believes should be free — government-produced documents are not covered by copyright — and charges 8 cents a page. Most of the private services that make searching easier, like Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis, charge far more, while relative newcomers like AltLaw.org, Fastcase.com and Justia.com, offer some records cheaply or even free. But even the seemingly cheap cost of Pacer adds up, when court records can run to thousands of pages. Fees get plowed back to the courts to finance technology, but the system runs a budget surplus of some $150 million, according to recent court reports.”

From UsefulArts.us, Rebel Efforts to Liberate the Law describes Carl Malamud of public.resource.org, Tim Stanley of Justia.com, and our very own AltLaw.org as “tenacious, creative and on a mission.”

The news site Information Today reports that free legal research sources, such as our own AltLaw.org, were one of their most popular stories in 2008.