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.