Google Rolls Out Search Tool For Legal Opinions

By Jessica Dye

Law360, New York (November 18, 2009) -- Joining the movement to make online legal documents more accessible, Google Inc. has introduced a new tool that indexes and searches a vast array of federal, appellate and state court decisions by case title, keyword, topics and other criteria.

The search giant announced Tuesday that its Google Scholar tool — a search portal for scholarly literature — now includes a separate search function for legal opinions and journals, which taps into an indexed collection of millions of freely available legal decisions provided by Google and other Web sites.

The database includes virtually every U.S. Supreme Court decision dating back to 1791. Federal appellate, district, tax and bankruptcy court opinions are available from 1923 onward, as are every state court decision since 1950.

According to Anurag Acharya, a distinguished engineer for Google who helped spearhead the project, the tool is intended to make critical legal opinions more accessible and understandable for ordinary people curious about the decisions that shape and clarify the law of the land.

For legal professionals, it also provides a new option for finding legal documents when case titles or citations aren't readily available and drawing connections between cases and how they are employed in subsequent opinions.

While it might not yet trump paid databases like Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis in terms of depth and scope, Thomas Bruce, director of Cornell University's Legal Information Institute, said it could fill a legal search gap for nonlawyers, government officials and even attorneys whose firms don't have access to the subscription-only collections.

From the Google Scholar home page, users can enter the name of a case, its number or a key phrase —like “separate but equal” or “Clean Air Act” — and retrieve a list of results that include the full text of the decision from all available sources.

While Google offers links out to other sites like Justia or LII, it also provides its own copies of decisions. Within those decisions, Google's tools find any mention of other cases and statutes and provides hyperlinks that take users directly to cited decisions.

Advanced search options also allow users to return only results from federal courts or from any selected state courts. Users can also opt to return decisions written within a particular date range.

Each result lists how many times that particular case has been cited in other decisions. By clicking on the “How Cited” button next to the case title, users can view a list of excerpts from other decisions where that case is cited, as well as links to those and similar opinions, as determined by Google search algorithms that connect cases based on topic and related citations.

The tool also taps into a collection of legal journals available through Google Scholar. Depending on access restrictions, users can either view a passage or full article.

How often cases are updated varies from court to court, Acharya said, but he said he hopes the tool will evolve to make new decisions available as quickly as possible.

While the tool is still in its preliminary stages, Acharya said he will be collecting feedback from users to fine-tune the functionality and explore new features to improve the service.

Bruce said it would be interesting to see whether legal professionals familiar with paid tools like Lexis and Westlaw could adapt their habits to Google's search standards.

While Google may not do much to displace high-end providers initially, Bruce said he saw its entry into the legal search space as “an extremely positive development.”

“It's nice to see them doing something in the space, because it nothing else, it will push many of the existing providers to a higher level of quality in terms of technology,” he said.