Google announced today that its Google Scholar now features full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts. Users can search by case name, citation or topic.
“We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all,” Google said in an announcement.
The addition of legal opinions and journals to Google Scholar is a positive development for the general public, but it raises an important question: how will this impact lawyers, and could it make LexisNexis and Westlaw virtually obsolete?
For one thing, Google Scholar is free, whereas LexisNexis and Westlaw charge law firms per transaction (i.e., for each search performed or case link opened), or time spent searching. Often, these charges are passed on to the clients for whom research is being performed. Many lawyers already start their research with Google to keep costs down and because of the perceived user-friendliness and familiarity of Google. Now Google Scholar makes it even easier to perform legal research for free.
Google Scholar is similar to LexisNexis and Westlaw in that articles and cases contain clickable links to cited sources that bring you directly to those sources. Terms that are specifically searched for appear highlighted in search results, as they do on LexisNexis and Westlaw. With Advanced Scholar Search, users can restrict their search results by date, author, title, and publication.
Nonetheless, Google Scholar has some limitations that may force lawyers to continue using paid legal search services.
Google Scholar includes a “How cited” feature that lists citing references, including excerpts from those citing references. However, the citing references are not classified; they are not displayed as positive or negative and it is not stated whether the citing references followed or declined to follow the original case. Lawyers need to be able to verify whether a researched case is still good law and will have to go beyond Google Scholar for this purpose.
What do these citing references tell us about the researched case? It's unknown without following the links to read each citing case.
Google Scholar also contains a limitation on jurisdictional searches. While it is possible to search for only U.S. federal court opinions, or for cases by state, the search results cannot be narrowed to a specific court, such as a federal district or a state appellate court.
How could we filter this list to search for only Supreme Court cases in New York?
Google Scholar is sufficient for searching by case name, citation, and possibly topic, but it is necessary to utilize another research tool to limit search results to a specific court.
In addition, there is no summary at the beginning of each case or journal article, thus requiring one to review an entire document before coming to a conclusion about its implications. This could be a huge deterrent for lawyers, for whom efficiency is key.
Perhaps the biggest drawback to Google Scholar is the “related articles” feature, which display “related” documents in a list that does not classify the documents or explain why and how they are related to the original search results.
Despite these shortcomings, Google Scholar can be a useful service for lawyers looking to perform simple searches, particularly if they already know the case name or citation for which they are searching.
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