An interview with Stacy Stern, on new legal tracking services offered at Justia:
Minow: Hi Stacy! I see you have two new services of interest to librarians. Tell us about them, and how libraries can use them.
Stern: The first is the Justia Regulation Tracker. Librarians can help users find and track proposed rules, new rules, and notices from federal agencies, like the Copyright Office and the Federal Communications Commission. They can even track by keyword (like "library") so they don't get overwhelmed by too much information. By subscribing to daily updated RSS feeds, they need only set up their search once.
Minow: How much does it cost?
Stern: We make this information available free of charge. Our for-fee service is geared towards lawyers who wish to market their practices via the Web.
Minow: What's the second service?
Stern: We are making the federal civil district filings online available for free for the first time. Filings are categorized by state, federal district court and legal practice area, and include the presiding judge and cause of action information for each case. Visitors can subscribe for free to RSS feeds of new cases that meet specific criteria, or to RSS feeds for customized searches. For example, with an RSS feed, visitors can track new Federal Court patent cases, cases that are filed in a specific court or cases filed against a particular company.
Minow: Where do you get the documents?
Stern: From the courts directly. Right now we have all the federal civil District courts. We are also adding a featured case section on our news.justia.com sub-site (currently live, but underdevelopment) where we have all of the electronically filed documents for some selected cases. Right now we are featuring Faith Center Church Evangelist Ministries et al v. Glover et al (about whether a public library policy: "Library meeting rooms shall not be used for religious services" is constitutional), Author's Guild v. Google (about whether the Google Book Search Library Project violates copyright), Viacom v. YouTube & Google (about whether third parties -like libraries- can be liable for copyright infringement in user generated content), the Menu Foods pet food cases (extremely important for library cats) and a few others. We will be working with legal researchers to add more cases of note in the near future.
Minow: Any way to search the full text of court documents?
Stern: Not right now. The filing documents and attachments are usually page images. We are looking at OCRing them, and making keyword searching available in the future.
Minow: Tell us about your transition from FindLaw to Justia. Will Justia offer free legal information for library users?
Stern: I am very excited about our work at Justia. We are committed to making legal information and resources easy to find online. We've already started putting up free legal resources such as BlawgSearch.com and the US Supreme Court cases in addition to the docket and regulation projects. We are planning to add more and more free legal information in the future.
This is fantastic, very excited to read about this.
Posted by: Claire Stewart | April 30, 2007 at 05:43 AM