Free Legal Search Engine
Posted By Rob Millard - 5 Comments -
I'm blogging from a Starbucks near Embankment station in cold, windy and somewhat rainy London today.
What do you do when knowledge that you have been selling becomes publicly available .... for free? Another milestone along this trend line surfaces today with the launch of a free legal search service engine from Google. From the Google blog:
"Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar."
More evidence that in the future ... the near future ... law firms that are relying on simply selling knowledge are going to be in for a tough time. Clients will buy deep, thoughtful judgment and business advice from their lawyers, but not simple repackaged knowledge.
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This is an incredible opportunity to level the playing field for all participants of the legal system.
I think web 2.0 community sites offer an even richer way to get valuable information for free.
Consulting work in any field (be it legal, technological, management, etc) will have to compete with free information online. And the free information will get better and better.
I am thinking for example of:
-> answers.onstartups.com for advice for entrepreneurs;
-> stackoverflow.com for software programmers
On our side we started askaboutprojects.com for project managers.
This sort of communities exchanging information will, I believe, become bigger and bigger because people benefit from it and ... it's free.
YES! Google Scholar is the next great thing.
It is very helpfull.
Google Scholar should prove a wonderful tool for court reporters. We spend hours looking for the correct citations that many times are not provided to us during the proceedings.
As far as creating a problem as the blog refers to it being free, as with everything else in society, the information is only as good as the person utilizing it and actually could create more business for attorneys in the end.
