Hacker News Reader

LN and Westlaw's real service is their ubiquity. Every law student has access to it and every firm expects proficiency. While they generally suck, the last time I used it (looong time ago), their boolean search was quite nice. That kind of text search has mostly been replaced by non-deterministic black boxes which aren't great for legal research.

View on HN

They've also got the Microsoft effect going on. Usually at least one of their products like their personal information aggregator used for locating people (like when serving lawsuits) is mandatory for a firm so it's just easier for them bundle everything else in.

You forgot to mention their claim of copyright over the bulk of, e.g. obscure state case law.

So, you have to pay to access the law that you are subject to?

If you want it digitized, yes, odd as that seems. You can go find individual prints of it or perhaps digital copies of opinions elsewhere, but those are also technically copyrighted in a lot of cases too.

In some jurisdictions, like Ontario, there are secret agreements that only allow 3 organizations to have digital access to Case Law (https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/). This says a lot about our society, and how much we still have to improve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com