 I've been actually very impressed at the number of elected officials that have been participating in this process, both at the state level and at the federal level. And that's actually very gratifying. It means that maybe these issues have some import. So this next session is a 30-minute session, and I thought it might be useful since we've had law librarians and we've had Timor Ali, you know, the geek-in-chief, and we've had law professors. I thought we might have some folks that have, you know, been working in the law. Alexander is at Twitter as their general counsel. Formerly he was at Google, and among his other accomplishments, he wrote the Google book settlement documents, or was one of the lawyers involved in that. And whether you agree with that or not, as Larry Bestick said, it's an amazing piece of lawyer, really well done. And then Professor Barry, as I said before, is a past president of the American Association of Law Libraries. One of the noted experts on legal research and how to do at East Top Generations of Students at Bull Hall. And I asked him to speak today about lawyers and access to the law. What is it the lawyers want? Are there impediments? What do they think of these general concepts? And so I will turn it over to you folks, and you can decide who goes first. Yeah, I'll go first because I'm going to be short. I think that the, so how many of you are in-house legal practitioners? I think I might be the only one, lawyers who are in-house. Yeah, I think I'm the only one. So, and I think that's part of what Carl wanted me to talk, which is just, I think we talk a lot about the cost as being prohibited for something like Westlaw or Alexis for nonprofits. Certainly people know a lot about that. We talk about it in the government space. It's often prohibited. Of course, the academic space, you all have got great deals, so you don't have to worry about that. Yeah, that's expensive. No one has any concern for people at law firms, so we sort of leave them out of it. But one of the realities of in-house, particularly small in-house practice, and you look at a lot of the companies that are in the legal headlines today other than some of the bigger ones like Facebook, but you look at like a script or any of the little user-generated content sites that actually a lot of their businesses, the law is quite important to them, a lot of influences in a big way. And those legal departments are likely either zero people or one person, and the budgets are very, very small. So, to give you an example, when I started Twitter, I was the only lawyer there, and we were looking at subscribing to Westlaw. The first quotation we got from them was $5,000 a month. We said, come on, please, please, please. And they said, okay, you know, magic word gets you, I think, to like $3,000 or $1,000 a month. We did get it down and we did try to get the like, come on, you don't want to say Twitter's using you type of discount. It works sometimes. Yeah, I keep telling people that when they ask about Twitter, we've engaged with a bunch of nonprofits that sort of our first job with respect to nonprofits is making it so that we are not one, because currently we are and we would like to not be. But the choice at the end of the day for me, it was not cost effective to have access to CASEL, which is kind of crazy when you think about an attorney at a company that's not dirt poor but there just was no way for me to justify it to the other expenses that I had a subscription to one of those services. And the biggest thing that I would be using it for, because obviously if you're in house, you do rely a lot on outside counsel for a lot of stuff, but you look at keeping up to date on cases in your area of either expertise or your forced knowledge is very, very hard to do on a small budget. Understanding some of the essays and scholarship on it is actually easier, because so much of that is now published in terms of blogs or even on Twitter, but actually getting access to the underlying primary materials remains difficult, especially some of the state or other types of materials, and getting access to them in a timely way, in a way that you can rely on the content, in a way that you can discuss with your attorney, your outside attorney in terms of the particular paragraph or whatever that you want to talk about in terms of the case. All of that stuff is hard, so it's one of the many reasons why I've been very happy to see, you know, Carl leading the charge here. One of the things I want to talk about from the Twitter perspective is the focus on the timeliness of some of this information and the incredible opportunity for even a short amount, a short lag of time to be destructive in terms of the value of the information. And the easiest example that came to mind, to my mind at least, was a case that would have an impact on the stock value of a company. And of course those cases, there is a tremendous premium on getting those cases quickly and understanding them, and even a three or four hour liable would be a very big deal there. So the more we can do to actually get the case law into the hands of people who can dissect it, analyze it, parse it, spread it, the better. And that's certainly something that we've clearly learned in terms of the value of really, really timely information, even if it's short. The last thing I would say is that even if it's short category, is that certainly Twitter isn't in the legal case business. You couldn't fit most legal decisions in between. It's a dangerous, dangerous thing, but I have been talking to some folks about the way in which both governments and lawyers and courts have been using Twitter to spread information about their cases. If you think about this from a code perspective, you could even imagine that a statute would actually have a Twitter account so that it could tweet out when an interesting revision happened. And again, this is not that different from an RSS feed except for the benefit of being able to be quickly retweeted and asked the people that are, for which the update will be important. And with that, I'll leave the questions. In a way, I feel as if I'm a visitor from another time. When we started teaching advanced legal research, it was 1982. And one of the things that concerned me was that people were not interested in the legitimacy of the information that they used and that they didn't have a global understanding of how it was assembled and what a judicial opinion really was, or a statute was, or a code compilation, or a Ministry of Rural Regulation. Obviously, the world has entirely changed, but I think one of the things to directly answer the question that it was posed. The law students that I see, and we teach advanced legal research in Berkeley, Michael Levy who's here, and Kathleen Van and Hale and I do, and this year between the two semesters, we have about 160 students. So we're seeing half of the Berkeley law students as they go through. And what they look for right now is they want something they can rely on, something that they can trust. And back in the ancient days when I started out, that was not a question. A question of legitimacy of information was not something that anyone posed. You did not ask if the book of reports was legit or durable or the code that you were using or the administrative report that you were reading, the loosely service. The idea that it wasn't legitimate, authenticated, durable, didn't occur. They were actually legitimate questions, and I challenged some publishers at the time. By the way, I should say, I don't have to stumble across this, I'm not working for any publisher. I've worked for them all at some point, but no more. So I think that unthinking legitimacy, and that's something I've tried to play with in my work and in my teaching and in my thinking, what is it that creates that feeling of trust that you can use a product and that you believe that it is giving you a definitive answer, that it's really holding the bag. In the end, if something goes wrong, that you did the right stuff to take yourself to that source and employ that source. Dan Dabney calls it research psychosis. He says that what Alexis and Westlaw have done to a lot of law students is they've made them psychotic when it comes to research because there isn't a single place to go and look for something. Now there's two. When I said that out, you could shepherd eyes and you were safe. If a shepherd's was wrong, you used shepherds. It was like an amulet to a vampire. I used shepherds. What else could you do? Well, not as to the key side. But it's spreading further and further out. So I think that the reality base, it used to be these sets of books in the library. For the typical student now is Alexis and Westlaw because they've got the boots on the ground and they do the first year research training in most law schools. I pose a question. I use the same template every semester for probably 10 years or more and more recent years where I give the students a recent judicial decision and I say go look this up and read it on Alexis. Go read it on Westlaw and then find me three free websites where you found the case and what's different about it. Write a book with you. Why would you trust one? Why would you not trust one? And so I discredit a whole bunch of these and I got to see the back. I can drive people to use LII. People use fine law. People use justicia. People use, I mean, you name it. But they all, although some of them like the other products, they carry with them this feeling of paranoia that some of the leaks don't work. I mean, I read on the papers these folks are doing their best. But, you know, they can't have the bells and whistles. They don't have the 801 number to call. They don't have the feet on the ground. I actually, it's funny, two thoughts occurred to me today. One of them is that there's another side to this entire issue. That is, those of us who teach legal research I think are all aware of Bloomberg. Bloomberg is definitely wants to be a player now. And given that Michael Bloomberg apparently is the Prince of New York City now, he gets to roll as long as he wants and he has all the money in the world and they're actually starting to put boots on the ground and they wanted to come into our LR class and they gave out free numbers. So, in fact, there might be more competition at the high end on this reality base. And I know we're talking about law students and I know we're talking about expensive services that maybe they could cut you a deal and give you three thousand instead of five thousand. But there's high end competition here too. The other question that occurred to me on this legitimacy factor though is I often try to pose questions to myself as my, when my sons were like eight or ten years old because they would have posed to me. Because at heart what Carl is working on is a ten-year-old's question. That is, the government has law and we're all supposed to obey the law so the government should make the law available to us. I mean really, it's a ten-year-old's proposition. It's so simple that it's kind of stunning when you think about it in that sense. Why don't they do it? And I think, I really love the article that you gave me that was mentioned this morning about the early reports, the decisions and the reporting. The government, in my view, I'm very cynical about this, has never sued responsibility for the production of information about the law. It didn't do it early on. The lower federal courts have never done it. Some states took it up. They left it up. That's in a way created a platform, as Tim would have said, by Wheaton versus Peters and saying that there's no copyright but they invited it into the private sector and the private sector just did a better job and made this stuff available and pervasive and beat each other out of the market. I came out through the world when Ben Proff Whitney was the official reporter in California. You know, it got gobbled up and eaten up by the competition within the market. And as the government tries to provide information available, it just reaches this incredible nest of problems. Coming up with, we're solved in paper, universal citation system that everybody understood when you could use it in every place. A template for the way a judicial opinion appeared. Standardization of codes and even administrative rules and regulations. Even these municipal codes, which we work through at ALR, and you see them, you know, and as Eric said, a lot of them have the same templates so that they become much easier to use. I think that that's coming from the outside and I just don't see the energy or the will within the government and given the changing waves of politics how this is going to happen. And you also have the problem with judges. I've spoke, you know, I assume you're lobbying the judicial council and various state judiciaries but judges are godlike figures and they take their roles very seriously and they don't like to do what they're told. And so each district court is going to have its own view and the state courts have their own view and they can live in the universe and they're mostly in my generation's, you know. Sad to say. And so they tend to have come from a world where they understand the information system and so why should they switch? I've spoken to the national courts, state courts of court, and court reporters, state court reporters. Incredibly conservative. I mean they were hostile to me because they thought that I was one of these people who wanted to take away their ability to do everything just the way they wanted to and put some template, this is over, in the Great Citation Battles. I think it has to change. I very much agree with Secretary St Bowman. Eventually time and energy will catch up here but right now at the law students is someone who's holding the bag and when I had them look at LiI or if they use fine law or anything like that they didn't feel that that was a place where they could plunk down their nipple and say, I bet my career on this or I totally rely on this and is it maybe that they should look past some of the blitz and ease of use? Maybe. But it is their perception and I've seen Westlaw next. What's that called again? I haven't seen Alexis but as everybody probably has here I mean it looks a lot like Google. I mean everybody is moving towards that because they want to be familiar and they want it to be a familiar reliable cognitive authority and base. So I remain worried. I'd cheer you on. Truly I'm not putting sarcastic. I think Carl is fighting a fight for the just here. I mean I look at a place like Australia where Graham Green leaf one of my heroes. You know, Australia really did fix this and the Canadians have done a great job fixing this and I wonder is it just because of the size of the jurisdiction that somebody got everybody organized? Is it because of the different structure of the court systems? Different historical traditions but in the United States there's been so much investment in an ownership of the way you do things and the way that your information is sometimes courted or guarded or reported or just comfortably produced. Again, Secretary of State Cohen's examples of people just afraid of what might happen and they want to stay with what they know and are accustomed to using and they don't want to change. So they answer the question what do law students want and I think most read Google research is done by the younger lawyers. If you're solo practice or if you're a solo in-house counsel then it's going to be a different world but a lot of the people we teach even if they go to state agencies or non-governmental organizations research is very heavy in the early years and the people that are passing through the halls are people who do want to use systems that are easy seamless but that in their heart they feel they can lean on and that in the end the reality base might be they check both Lexis and Westlaw but I think that they have not and I don't understand the magic formula that creates a cognitive authority would make everybody in this room believe if I went to SCOTUS I would have a case on fire and the last thing I'll say is I was at one of my aha moments was last summer I spoke at the Bob Oakley Memorial symposium in DC on authentication of information and Tom Goldstein showed up who I'd be reading about from SCOTUS all my students and their assignments at SCOTUS and one of the themes of the program was authentication of the information so the person who has your view how do you go about authenticating your information and he said oh we don't have that again that's up I think a lot of agronomers might be doing that I'm not sure but that's not what we do we get information out there fast and we get up to some little totally and that's for all of the great reputation that it has and the great information we provide which is not in that business because it's a change of generations or you're going to have to sell a lot of state legislatures or you're going to have to take out ads in the Super Bowl but you got to make people believe that some new tool that's gathered together is something that they can rely on in fact they're for questions or comments? I'll open that I think that there's a lot of free information right now on the internet which might not be case law which is certainly worthwhile the SEC documents which came out but there's a lot of good contract language in there I know that we're a fine law that we used to use the SEC contracts to negotiate our own deals and now one CLA the other society that can trade in our office runs lots of contracts all broken down there's a lease agreement part of Roshai is in the gross data store and I'll just be a fine law founder used that for doing sort of university licensing found actual deal terms written by really top lawyers in case law but certainly down so I think that if you look at the internet from a lawyer's practitioner level there's a lot of things you still can find out there so you're always going to sort of use it the case law part in the codes I think the codes can sort of be solved by states or the federal government at some point it's not as big a deal but it certainly needs to be done in the United States in multiple years for some states it's not all the states but on the case law part it would be nice to at least see the federal the state supreme courts put up the final official version at a minimum and I think they could do that through the licensing agreements that they're making with these other folks they didn't have to go through some user license and I think if they did that and again there's a lot of money to spend on litigation you got to hit first you have to get into conflict then you got to hire lawyers and then you finally get up to an account lots of fees lots and lots of work the actual amount of work I think it takes to per free sort of do the spell checking the grammar checking help and then do the cross sentences and so some of the checking for quotes and things like that it's really minimal compared to all the amount of the expense that litigation is taking place so the question is how can the courts do that and I think the courts basically controlling what isn't the official opinion can say to whoever they want to be sort of the official publisher you're going to give us back an official copy of that opinion they, without the page numbers mean without the parable citations that that seems to be a big issue but at least get the official text of the opinion and put it up on the website and then let folks like us or people of public resource that work download the blog's car files take and do the markup and I think other things like citations that can resolve at least get the official text and that's something which I've not seen I'm not sure what your thoughts are on that but that seems to be a big thing in the case well I think actually I'd take it further I mean it's a 10 year old problem again we have Ed Jessen come and talk to her against the research class and he's the California reporters decision and he talks about how others do different versions and you know we have the kind of Alexis but I think they might scrape off the first one and then there might be a second one you know we're not sure exactly and if you compare it might not be exactly the same now some of these are tiny differences that don't really matter very much but the courts have the whip hand here I mean if you could mobilize somehow the judiciary that they could require citation by a paragraph they could change the entire universe they could demand whatever they want the thing is to get them motivated that's what I see as the basic problem it's very hard to get courts and court structure do you think these companies do that do you think that if they were motivated that the government would be confident that there would be additional things or do you feel like this really needs to be something done by private commercial budget well I mean to this point you've only been able to test commercial budgets I'm just cynical about the ability of government to operate very well again I was really hard on my secretary of state who I'd be happy to vote for to govern I mean given the track record the federal government on this and the various state governments as they come about I just don't see them as reliable partners the other thing you were talking about I mean if you've got the same copy of the same opinion people have this view that Lexis Westlaw are more authoritative so you have, so one of the things that you probably also need is a way for the the various websites that are hosting the opinion to mark that their product is the same as the Westlaw Lexis product yeah I mean it's the same problem that I'm sure Crystal talked about in terms of privacy if you can find it bad to say this is just as good as that other thing or it's the same ingredients as in Pepsi or whatever it is right yeah part of your problem there is that paranoia and you can see that paranoia when you talked about the municipal code or the websites that say well this is an electronic representation of the information but don't take it to the bank it really counts we're not holding the bag on this one it's not a paper version it's just this general paranoia and fear of the bag I always feel hurt when I can tell that someone has cut and pasted out of Westlaw onto the web because I know that at least they got it from that other thing that people pay for I actually was on a mission about this about 15 years ago about getting authentic information from the American law institute and I went to the American law institute and said you know I try to think what's the most prestigious blue ribbon non-partisan organization you get to authenticate stuff sign up a way to authenticate information and of course I'm sure it's different now because I stopped going to meetings but the board for all sub-degenerates and octetarians they all said well that's a wonderful idea I think they're still having that same idea so I couldn't find it so I wanted to say yes this is a version that should be relighted by my brother so let me make two points one that I think is very important is that there's always going to be room for a company that's got boots on the ground it's got hundreds of lawyers scrubbing the cases and adding value and that's why I say this really is an opportunity for the established vendors for authentication I think that's one of those areas where technology has begun to move along and when you look at the current system and say why is it so broken it's so broken because that's just the way the world has been and we now have some opportunities in front of us if you look at the Federal Register for example a lot of people have assisted the Office of the Federal Register in their new XML release and they did two things they made bulk data available for free it used to be $17,000 a year but most importantly they are digitally signing a PDF version of the Federal Register now that doesn't mean that you have a digital signature on the XML and if someone uses those words out of the XML and puts them someplace else maybe it's right, maybe it isn't you might trust West or Lexus much more but if you really care you can go back to the government pull up that PDF and it's been digitally signed and you can verify that that document is the same and what that's done is produce opportunities for small vendors and nonprofits to work with this material and do things but maybe not but at the very least the public interest applications and the nonprofit applications and the legal research applications are possible whereas at $17,000 a year for the Federal Register they weren't possible it was out of our price range so thank you very much we're going to move on to our next panel now