https://www.ravellaw.com/From NYT:
Though the primary (Legal) documents are formally in the public domain, many are not put online in a convenient format, if at all. Many states even rely on commercial services to post court briefs and decisions, which then provide them to paying subscribers.
Legal groups spend millions using commercial services like Westlaw and LexisNexis to find cases and trace doctrinal strands.
While Harvard’s “Free the Law” project guarantee a floor of essential information. The project will also offer some sophisticated techniques for visualizing relations among cases and searching for themes.
Complete state results will become publicly available this fall for California and New York, and the entire library will be online in 2017, said Daniel Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of Ravel Law, a commercial start-up in California that has teamed up with Harvard Law for the project. The cases will be available at www.ravellaw.com. Ravel is paying millions of dollars to support the scanning. The cases will be accessible in a searchable format and, along with the texts, they will be presented with visual maps developed by the company, which graphically show the evolution through cases of a judicial concept and how each key decision is cited in others.
The company hopes to make money by offering, for a fee, more advanced analytical tools it is developing, like allowing a lawyer to see how a particular judge has responded to certain kinds of motions in the past.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/harvard-law-library-sac...
Overview of Ravel's Data Visualization
https://vimeo.com/127559698