Earlier this week Google announced a slew of new products (check out the official Google Blog for a full list). Of particular interest to lawyers was the addition to Google Scholar that allows searches for federal and state court decisions. This in itself is nothing new, as many websites currently offer access to federal court decisions for free, such as openjurist.org or justia.com. Like these other free offerings, Google hosts the case itself.  While such sites are not new, Google’s implementation has the potential to transform legal research.

A more user-friendly search is one of the many ways Google beats out alternative free and pay legal research options. While the search engine is far from perfect, queries can be focused by either state or federal court, and searches can be further refined by “author” and date constraints. This can be a great help when starting a new research project on an unfamiliar topic. For example, if staring research on an ADA question regarding “reasonable accommodation,” a simple query of “ reasonable accommodation” and “Posner” (if you wanted a 7th Circuit decision) in the author field yields useful results. The results are organized by which decisions have been cited most, rather than which decisions are most recent. In contrast to Google, both West and Lexis give search results by the date of the decision, and require further investigation in order to differentiate which cases have significance. Because Google doesn’t make money on content directly, Google has no incentive to locate this information behind an additional pay walls whereas pay sites make money by obfuscating information behind additional clicks—the more one clicks the more they make.

In addition to search functionality, Google also improves online case research by improving readability. Rather than try and reproduce the experience of reading a physical page like Justia, Google makes good use of the online medium. Gone are the bold “***” that denote pagination that clutter Lexis and West cases. Rather than impeded readability with an asterisk, Google puts the pagination on the left margin. Google also improves readability by placing footnotes at the bottom of the decision and denotes the footnote with a hyperlink. By clicking on the hyperlinked footnote, the reader has easy access to the text of the footnote. Once at the note text, the reader can return to reading the decision by clicking the hyperlinked number again. The experience is similar to the behavior of footnotes in MS Word.

Not only is the case more readable in Google than in other formats, but Google also organizes how other courts have cited the decision in the “how cited” tab. This feature functions as a very rudimentary Headnotes or Keycite that addresses the holding of the case.

I suspect that this is just the beginning for legal research and Google. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in the future, the offerings will improve. Not only will quality improve, but so will the scope of information offered. Take the administration’s announcement that the Federal Register will be published in XML as a sign of what’s to come.