 I thought we might have some folks that have 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 Nesset 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 it. He's taught generations of students at Bolt Hall. And I ask 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, and I'm going to be shorter. 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 I think that's part of why Carl wanted me to talk, which is just, I think we talk a lot about the cost as being prohibitive for something like Westlaw or Alexis for nonprofits. Certainly, people know a lot about that. We talk about it in the government space, that it's often prohibitive. Of course, the academic space, you all have got great deals, so you don't have to worry about that. Feel insensitive. And no one has any concern for people at law firms, so we can 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 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. The law influences them 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, OK, the 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 is using you? Said with discount. Which works sometimes. Yeah, keep telling people that when they ask about Twitter, we've engaged with a bunch of nonprofits that 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 K-Slaw, which is kind of crazy when you think about an attorney at a company that's not sort of poor. But there just was no way for me to justify as 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 case. All of that stuff is hard. So it's one of the many reasons why I've been very happy to see 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 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 line 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 at Twitter have learned in terms of the value of really, really timely information, even if it's short. The last thing I would say is that in the even if it's short category is that, certainly, Twitter isn't in the legal case business. You couldn't sit, most legal decisions, in between the dangerous, dangerous thing. But I have been talking with some folks about the way in which both governments and lawyers and courts have been using Twitter to spread information about their cases. And 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 yeah, this is not that different from an RSSB except for the benefit of being able to be quickly retweeted and passed to the people that are for which the update will be important. That all leads to 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 and what a statute was or code compilation or administrative rule regulation. Obviously, the world has entirely changed, but I think one of the things to directly answer the question that was posed. The law students that I see and we teach advanced legal research at Berkeley, Michael Levy, who's here, and Kathleen Bannon, and April and I do it. This year between the two semesters, we had 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 that they can rely on, something that they can trust. And back in the ancient days when I started out, that was not a question. The 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 or loosely serviced. 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, if I stumpled across this, I'm not working for any publisher. I've worked for them all. That's all right, 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 has given you a definitive answer, that it's really holding the bag in the end. If something goes wrong, then 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 started out, you could shepherd eyes and you were safe and even if shepherd's was wrong, you used shepherd's. It was like an amulet to a vampire and I used shepherd's. What else did you do? Well, I managed to keep sight of it. So, but it's spreading further and further out and so I think that the reality base would, 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've used the same template every semester for probably 10 years with a student. 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 review. 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 them 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 links don't work. I mean I write on the papers, these folks are doing their best. But they can't have the bells and whistles, they don't have the 801 number to call it and they don't have the feet on the ground. I actually, it's funny about two thoughts occurred to me today. One of them is that there's another side to this entire issue and that is those of us who teach people research I think are all over at Bloomberg. Bloomberg is definitely wants to be a player now and given that Michael Bloomberg currently is the prince of New York City now, he gets her role 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 ALR 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 punch a deal, give it to you for 3,000 instead of 5,000. 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 when my sons were like eight or 10 years old as they would have posed to me because at heart what Carl is worth your time is a 10 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 10 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, is never a super 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. And I guess in a way created a platform, as Tim would have said, by we versus Peters and saying that there's no copyright but they invited into private sector and the private sector just did a better job and made this stuff available and pervasive and beat each other out the market. And you know, I came up with the rule and Ben Croft Whitney was the official reporter in California, you know, got gobbled up and eaten up by the competitioners in the market. And as the government tries to provide information and tries to make it available, it just reaches this incredible nest of problems coming up with, we're solved in paper, universal citation system that everybody understood and you could use 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 in ALR, do you see them? You know, and as Eric has said, a lot of them have the same template 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 gonna happen. And you also have the problem of judges. I've spoke, you know, I assume if you're lobbying the Judicial Council and various state judiciary areas but judges are God-like figures and they take their roles very seriously and they don't like to do what they're told. And so that each district court's gonna 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 generations, 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 clerks of court, state clerks of court and state court quarters. 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 the Sector of St. Bohm and eventually time and energy will catch up here but right now what the law students want 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 clunk down their nickel 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 glitz and ease of use? Maybe, but it is their perception and I've seen Westlaw next. Is that what they're calling it? 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. They want it to be a familiar, reliable, cognitive authority and base. So I remain worried. I cheer you on, truly. I'm not sarcastic. I think Carl is fighting a fight of the just here. I mean, I look at a place like Australia where Graham Greenleaf, 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 what they are accustomed to using and that they don't want to change. So they answer the question of what do law students want? And I think most legal research is done by younger lawyers. I get if you're in 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 right now 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. We make everybody in this room believe if I went to SCOTUS and then linked from SCOTUS to a case, I'm fine. 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've been reading about from SCOTUS, all of my students and their assignments there at SCOTUS. And one of the themes of the program was authentication of the information. That's the person who was running the panel said, you know, what's your view? How do you go about authenticating your information? And he said, oh, we don't authenticate anything. That's up. I think the Library of Congress might be doing that. I'm not sure, but that's not what we do. We provide, we get information out there fast and we get up to something a little tight-knit. And, you know, that's for all of the great reputation that it has and the great information to provide, which is not in that business. And so I think that's a huge challenge. And I don't know how you get over that, whether it's popular culture or it's inevitable because of the change in generations, or you're gonna have to sell out state legislatures or you're gonna have to take out ads in the Super Bowl. But you gotta make people believe that some new tool that's gathered together is something that they can rely on and bet that they're... Questions or comments? Yeah, I'm gonna just sort of follow up on that. And I think that, well, a couple of things. First, I think there's a lot of free information right now on the internet, which might not be case law, which is certainly worthwhile. Some things, for example, the SEC documents, which came out. Well, there's a lot of good contract language in there. I know that we were in fine law that we used to use the SEC contracts to negotiate our own deals. And now one CLE, another site that Kentree and our office runs. Lots of contracts all broken down. There's a lease agreement. Now, the part where Roshai's in the house now is being fine law founder used it for doing sort of university licensing, found the actual deal terms, written by really top lawyers. And it's something that's a little bit outside of the scope of case law, but certainly there. 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 gonna sort of use it. The case law part, in the codes, I think the codes could sort of be solved by states or the federal government at some point. It's not as big of a deal, but it certainly needs to be done and be nice to have multiple years for those. It's something that Florida and some states have done, not all the states. But on the case law part, what would be nice would be until they see the federal Pell Accords, the state Supreme Courts put up the final official version of the payment 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, click through agreement. And I think if they did that, and again, there's a lot of money to spend on litigation. You've got to first you have to get into conflict, and then you've got to hire lawyers, and then you have to file a lease, and you have to argue it, and then you finally get up to an appeal. So lots of free, lots of lots of work. The actual amount of work that I think that it takes to proofread, sort of do the spell checking, the grammar checking help, use Microsoft Word, it does a pretty good job. And then do the cross preferences. And so some of the checking for quotes and things like that. It's really minimal compared to all the amount and the expense of the litigation is taking place. So the question is, how can the courts do that? And I think the courts basically, by 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. Maybe without the page numbers, maybe without the parallel 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 either people at publicresource.org who download the large tar files, take it and do the markup. And I think other things like citations and stuff can resolve, but at least get the official text of the opinion itself. And that's something which I've not seen. And I'm not sure what your thoughts are on that, but that seems to be the big thing on the case law. Well, I think actually I'd take it further. I mean, it's a 10-year-old problem again. We have Ed Jessen come to talk to her against at a research class. He's the California Record of Decisions. And he talks about how well there's different versions and we have the kind of Lexus, but I think they might scrape off the first one. And then there might be a second one. We're not sure exactly, and if you compare it might not be exactly the same. Now, some of these are tiny differences. They don't really matter very much. But the courts have the whip hand here. I mean, if you could mobilize somehow the judiciary, 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. Very hard to get courts and the court structure. But do you think it would be competent to do that? I mean, do you think that if they were motivated that the government would be competent to actually put up the official payments where 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 trust commercial budgets. I'm just cynical about the ability of government to operate very well. I mean, I was really hard on my secretary of state. But while I'd be happy to vote for governor. I mean, given the track record of the federal government on this and the various state governments as they come and go, I just don't view them as reliable partners to lean on. The other thing you were talking about was even if you've got the same copy of the same opinion, people have this view that Lexus Westlaw are more authoritative. So one of the things that you probably also need is a way for the various websites that are hosting the opinion to mark that their product is the same as the Westlaw Lexus product. Just because I'm authentic? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's the same problem that I'm sure Crystal talked about in terms of privacy of like, if you can find a badge 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 talk 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 if it really counts. We're not holding back on this one. And then they don't even have a paper version. It's just this general paranoia and fear of that. I always feel heartened 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 paid for. I'm pretty good at that. I actually was on a commission about this about 15 years ago about getting authentic information. I got myself acquainted with the American Law Institute. And I went to the American Law Institute and said, you know, I try to think, what's the most sort of prestigious blue ribbon, nonpartisan organization you can get to the rubric to get the authenticate stuff? Set up a way to authenticate information. And of course, I'm sure it's different now because I stopped going to the meetings, but the board for all sub-deterians and archaic historians, and they all said, well, that's a wonderful idea. I think they're still having that same answer. So I couldn't find me. What we need, someone to authenticate. Someone to just say, yes, this is a version that should be relied upon by everybody. 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 is, right? You might trust West or Lexus much more. But if you really care, you can go back to the government, call 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. Maybe someday compete with West, 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 gonna move on to our next panel now, which is the technical... Thank you.