March 1 marked the culmination of an formidable and audacious venture to digitize and supply free and open entry to all official court docket choices ever revealed in america. Known as the Caselaw Access Project, it took place, beginning in 2015, via an uncommon partnership between Harvard Regulation Faculty and a Silicon Valley-based authorized analysis startup known as Ravel Regulation.
The huge endeavor concerned scanning almost 40 million pages from some 40,000 regulation books and changing all of it into machine-readable textual content recordsdata, creating a set that included 6.4 million revealed instances, some relationship way back to 1658. Whereas Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab did all of the work, Ravel — and later LexisNexis after it acquired Ravel in 2017 — footed the invoice.
Harvard completed that digitization in 2018, making these instances out there free of charge to most of the people, however till March 1, 2024, any industrial use of the instances was restricted by the settlement between Harvard and Ravel (and later LexisNexis). The March 1 milestone marked the complete launch of the instances, freed from any restrictions.
On right this moment’s LawNext, we’ll get the within story of the historical past of the Caselaw Entry Challenge and speak concerning the significance of this closing lifting of all restrictions on the information. How did the partnership ever come about within the first place? What was the scanning course of like? What does this knowledge imply for the way forward for entry to regulation, notably within the face of generative AI?
To do all of that, I’m joined this week by three company who performed instrumental roles within the venture:
Nik Reed, the cofounder and COO of Ravel Regulation, and now senior vice chairman of product, R&D and design at Knowable, was additionally scheduled to be on the present, however needed to cancel as of the recording time.
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