The Young Texas Lawyer

Google announced today that they will begin providing full text case law free of charge using their Google Scholar search engine. It is still way too early to determine if this begins to take a bite out of the profits of the sites that charge for legal research, but if anyone were to pose a threat to the big boys then who bigger than Google. According to the Official 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. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

The blog article goes on to say that Google’s goal is to “empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all.” Surely lawyers will feel empowered by the potential cost savings to their legal research budgets.

No other topic is more dear to a recently admitted attorney’s heart than student loans. They are both the key to getting one’s license, but also an albatross for those forced to borrow. For those that took the initial taste from the government and went back to private lenders for more, the pain is even greater. In what appeared to be a surprise to most, the National Law Journal is reporting that the American Bar Association has started lobbying the government to let unemployed graduates convert private loans into federal ones. The change could allow them to defer repaying those loans for as long as three years.

It’s a good start, but does not go far enough. The program should extend to employed graduates as well. Essentially, allowing all law graduates to borrow from the federal government to immediately pay off any private debt, since most private loans carry no prepayment penalty, would make much more sense. Borrowers could then enjoy the deferral benefits of federal loans and only have one lender to worry about.

It makes perfect sense, would ease the burden on lenders, and would generate revenue for the federal government. The only problem with the plan is that it makes too much sense, and like most things mired bureaucracy, that might be enough to kill it.