It seems like everyone is talking about open source these days.  We read many predictions at the end of 2008 that a technology theme for 2009 would be the continued growth of the open source movement.  Even President Obama’s new administration is asking experts about the benefits of open source within the federal government (451 CAOS Theory writes about that here.) According to that article, it appears that some are even pushing for open source funding as part of the upcoming stimulus package — local Portland techies might want to keep that in mind.

Now it appears that even the legal field is getting into the open source movement in the form of precydent.com, a site that bills itself as a free public database of laws and legal authority.  It’s based on two principles:

1. all lawyers, law librarians, law students, and the general public should have access to state-of-the-art search technology to help them navigate through the large and complex body of legal authority; &

2. judicial opinions and statutes must be in the public domain, in practice as well as in theory.

Sounds good to us, and it should sound good to the general public as well.  Add precydent.com to other free on-line legal resources for consumers, like jdsupra.com.  Precydent.com has been around since at least early 2008 — it was featured in this NY Times article in April 2008 — but is still in the beta stage.  At the moment, it only contains US Supreme Court and US Court of Appeals cases.  It’s working on extending service to cover all U.S. federal and state cases and statutory materials, and is encouraging outside contributors to add those materials.

Despite having a long way to go, this looks to be a great public resource.  From our experience, many consumers and small businesses, including startups, first look on the Web for legal answers before talking with a lawyer.  If this site is successful, it will expand the Web database, and make the legal information easier to find.  We’ll be monitoring the site to see how it progresses and would be interested if anyone knows of other similar, or open source legal sites out there.  Let us know…

Tags: legal research, open source

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Intellectual Property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.