Ep 242: The Inside Story of the Caselaw Access Project, with Three of the People Who Made It Happen

03/25/24 • 50 min

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March 1 marked the culmination of an ambitious and audacious project to digitize and provide free and open access to all official court decisions ever published in the United States. Called the Caselaw Access Project, it came about, starting in 2015, through an unusual partnership between Harvard Law School and a Silicon Valley-based legal research startup called Ravel Law.

The massive undertaking involved scanning nearly 40 million pages from some 40,000 law books and converting it all into machine-readable text files, creating a collection that included 6.4 million published cases, some dating as far back as 1658. While Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab did all the work, Ravel — and later LexisNexis after it acquired Ravel in 2017 — footed the bill.

Harvard completed that digitization in 2018, making those cases available for free to the general public, but until March 1, 2024, any commercial use of the cases was restricted by the agreement between Harvard and Ravel (and later LexisNexis). The March 1 milestone marked the full release of the cases, free of any restrictions.

On today’s LawNext, we will get the inside story of the history of the Caselaw Access Project and talk about the significance of this final lifting of all restrictions on the data. How did the partnership ever come about in the first place? What was the scanning process like? What does this data mean for the future of access to law, particularly in the face of generative AI?

To do all of that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three guests who played instrumental roles in the project:

Daniel Lewis, the cofounder and CEO of Ravel Law, who is now CEO of the contract review company LegalOn.
Adam Ziegler, the former director of Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and the Caselaw Access Project (who recently wrote a first-person account of the project)..
Jack Cushman, the current director of the Library Innovation Lab.

Nik Reed, the cofounder and COO of Ravel Law, and now senior vice president of product, R&D and design at Knowable, was also scheduled to be on the show, but had to cancel as of the recording time.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

To do all of that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three guests who played instrumental roles in the project:

Daniel Lewis, the cofounder and CEO of Ravel Law, who is now CEO of the contract review company LegalOn.
Adam Ziegler, the former director of Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and the Caselaw Access Project (who recently wrote a first-person account of the project)..
Jack Cushman, the current director of the Library Innovation Lab.

Nik Reed, the cofounder and COO of Ravel Law, and now senior vice president of product, R&D and design at Knowable, was also scheduled to be on the show, but had to cancel as of the recording time.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Previous Episode

Ep 241: InfoTrack’s Mission to Revolutionize Litigation Services Such as E-filing and Process Serving, with CEO Ed Watts

InfoTrack may be one of the fastest growing yet least known legal technology companies in the United States. You may know it more through its brands, including ServeNow for finding process servers, One Legal for California court filing, LawToolBox for court calendaring, and the Legal Talk Network group of legal podcasts.

Our guest today, Ed Watts, CEO of InfoTrack in the U.S., says the company is on a mission to innovate and even revolutionize litigation services and the litigation workflow. Already, its products are used every day by lawyers throughout the United States to file court cases, track court dockets, search court records, and arrange service of process, and it integrates with most major law practice management platforms.

InfoTrack in the U.S. actually grew out of a company founded in Australia in 2012, when it was spun out of the LEAP law practice management platform. InfoTrack expanded first to the U.K. and then in 2016 to the U.S.

Since coming to this country, it has expanded both organically and through acquisitions, including in 2020, when it acquired two legal tech companies, LawToolBox, the court calendaring company, and One Legal, a California provider of litigation support services such as court filing, service of process, and document retrieval, and in 2021, when it acquired Lawgical, the parent company of ServeNow, Serve Manager, and the Legal Talk Network.

Watts has been with the company since before it spun out from LEAP, and says he was employee number one when it expanded to the U.S. He and host Bob Ambrogi talk about the company’s history, where it is today, and its plans for future growth.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Next Episode

Ep 243: How iManage Is ‘Making Knowledge Work’ for Legal Professionals, with CEO Neil Araujo

With the tagline “Making Knowledge Work,” the document management company iManage is enormously successful within the legal industry, with more than 4,000 customers across six continents, including 80% of the Am Law 100 and more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies. Just last year, it recently reported, it added more than 300 new law firms and companies as customers.

But over the 30 years since its founding, it hit some speed bumps, of sorts, after it went through a series of acquisitions that led to its ownership by Autonomy and then by Hewlett Packard after HP acquired Autonomy in 2011. The HP-Autonomy deal famously turned into a fiasco when HP claimed Autonomy had fraudulently inflated its value, causing it to write off nearly $8.8 billion of the $11.1 billion purchase price, and the repercussions of that deal continue to reverberate, with Autonomy’s founder currently on trial in San Francisco for criminal fraud charges.

With iManage, through no fault of its own, caught up in that morass, its original founding management team, led by Neil Araujo, swooped in and bought back the company in 2015. It was, Araujo now says, an opportunity to reboot and apply everything they had learned about what to do and what not to do to build a successful company.

Neil Araujo is our guest in this episode, to share the story of how iManage became the success it is today and to give us a preview of what lies ahead on its product and development roadmap, including its plans for expanding its use of generative artificial intelligence. .

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.