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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

I just read that this morning. I'm interested enough in the outcome that I put a calendar reminder 6 months out to check what happened. Doing so made me wonder if there's a service that would email me updates about legal cases like this that I would like to follow.

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It's possible that a Google Alert[1] might be enough for your use case, depending on how well the legal cases are covered by Google.

[1] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/4815696?hl=en

Any non Google alternatives out there?

This social listening company does one: https://alerts.talkwalker.com/alerts/

They might try to call and email you though.

Unless Google Alert gets shut down by then.

Or bought to silence any alarms with the terms "Facebook"

Who would pay for this?

Random people like you and me wouldn't pay for something they're gonna use twice in their lifetime, and lawyers surely have something like this, possibly integrate with all the other tools they use.

> lawyers surely have something like this

Not a lawyer and not familiar with their systems but based on my knowledge of other industries I’d say it’s not guaranteed they have a solution.

Could be good ol sticky notes and manual calendar events.

This is really really naive.

I do love it when people say "I am not familiar with this situation at all but" and then proceed to speculate about it having made clear they have no basis for their speculation.

> they have no basis for their speculation

> based on my knowledge of other industries

Yeah, check out docketbird. Also, noticed attorneys already automatically get all ECF filings.

Why does it need to be paid?

I would pay for a comprehensive AI-driven service that delivers alerting on any topic. Google alerts SUCKS for so many reasons.

I might not be aware of other services though so if anyone is – please enlighten me!

Hadn't considered the role that AI could play in such a service. But now think that it could be a great application.

Speaking to my AI: "computer, please create me a Google Doc that gets updated with new results related to the legal case of Joan Donovan vs Harvard, and notify me via email with updates."

I'd probably do something like that a few times a week. It's really a missing link to my news experience.

How silly of me to not consider that lawyers might have something - considering that my GF is an attorney.

There are services that monitors changes on webpages so you could plug the "official" page where legal/official information about that case lives and wait for a change, maybe it would even work with a search engine results page.

Might be a good addition to archive.org, since they will index and re-index pages from time to time anyway and detect changes.

I set up cron to run urlwatch[1] once a day on a vps, and it emails me updates to pages. It supports CSS selectors, various filters (like html2text) and so on. Combined with a little elisp to diff highlight emails in Emacs, this has one of the highest usefulness/maintenance ratio of things I self-host.

[1] https://urlwatch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

"Follow up on stories we reported six months ago"

Sounds like something that anyone claiming to practice Journalism should be doing already.

They are and they do. But with the firehose of news, it's not likely that I'd catch every relevant update.

You might be interested in https://www.courtlistener.com/

> if there's a service

There are plenty of mailing list services that associates of large law firms sign up for. I haven't been around people in that world for a while so I don't know the names, but I'm sure you can find them if you spend time looking.

Anything that provides a calendar and/or timed TODO/list items. Just set calendar item or the TODO item's due date 6 months out. Any OS you're using whether mobile or desktop probably has an app for this shipped with it.

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