 Thank you very much Mike and thank you Carl and John Podesta and the team of Center for American Progress for having us here today. It's so exciting for me to be in this room because it's so many friends and heroes and new acquaintances kind of all in one place and you know I'm deeply nerdy about this stuff but it's cool to be in a room where other people are too and I really love to see like the innovations of like a gub pulse or a fed thread or organlaws.org or even public resource there's a lot of people who are innovating at the kind of end result but it's also really cool to see the government innovating too you know you see like Ray or Mike or Beth Novak people who are really concerned about getting it right from the government's perspective and that's a really exciting development for my perspective. What I feel like is happening right now is they're kind of converging on each other but they're not quite connecting and I thought maybe from that perspective it might be a good idea to take just one step back and think about what law.gov might do to connect innovators on both sides of the spectrum. I was very pleased to be a part of the first law.gov workshop at Stanford where somebody asked the difficult question is law.gov trying to put Westlaw and Lexis out of business. This was right in the middle of the health care debate and it had a little bit of the flavor of is this socialism? Will there be law.gov death panels? And I suggested at the time that no this is not something that's striving to put Westlaw or Lexis or Fastcase or Justia out of business it's public infrastructure. It's like the interstate highway system and after that meeting I actually read a little bit about the interstate highway system and as the law.gov workshops progressed over the last few months it's really fascinating to me the way in which those two stories kind of converged. You know the interstate highway system in the US has its origins in World War One. It was the first war where moving stuff by cars over roads was a big part of the war effort and after World War One when the troops came back the secretary of the army said hey you know what we might need to move troops in the US it's important for our common defense to make sure that our roads are ready for it so much like our inventory of legal materials the army said in 1919 we're going to take an inventory of our public infrastructure we're going to find out what it takes to move a convoy of military trucks from a spot not far from here at the ellipse across the country over public roads to San Francisco. Chronically this was a young lieutenant colonel named Dwight Eisenhower. The trip covered an unprecedented 3,251 miles it took 62 days the average speed of the convoy was six miles an hour it lost nine out of 54 vehicles most of these vehicles were being lost in washouts they were getting lost in quicksand or falling into mud it wasn't anything like the kind of modern system of roads and it wasn't that long ago there were 230 separate traffic accidents and mostly it was because the roads well couldn't support the infrastructure so this was the first real survey of the readiness of our infrastructure of our roads and it reminds me quite a bit of Erica Wayne's effort to take an inventory of legal materials what does the infrastructure of our public laws look like today in World War Two Eisenhower drew the short straw and he had bad road duty again two things he had to do one he had to build a supply chain across North Africa from Casablanca to Tunis obviously there were no roads it was deserts it was mountains some parts of his supply chain were supplied by goats so this is a guy who feels the imperative of good infrastructure then after D-Day he was a part of the race to Berlin and he had to go from basically the beaches in Normandy through these terrible head roads with trucks tanks equipment water food gasoline and so he trudged slowly in this terrible race for time across France until he got to the German Autobahn which at the time was this beautiful six lane highway it was the most gorgeous example of public infrastructure that he'd seen obviously terrible but in the same way he realized the military significance of it and once they hit the Autobahn they were straight into Berlin when he saw that he said I've got to have one of these so when Eisenhower became president one of the first one of the most important things he did was to spend 25 billion dollars in 1956 in the federal aid highway act which would establish the first interstate highway system there have been attempts before 1938 1944 but without any funding there were really just blueprints there were a good idea with a dedicated funding source we were on our way to our first real infrastructure I think it's important to realize also that in 1956 we had a very good railroad system if you were a business and you needed to move 18 tons of grain from Chicago to St. Louis you'd had a really good system to do that unfortunately for the you know for the railroads which are the Microsofts or the Apple computers of that age you know they were really only affordable to the biggest of American businesses if you needed to move 18 bushels of apples from Seattle to Salt Lake City you probably couldn't use a railroad to do it and if you needed to move trucks and materials from Washington to San Francisco the railroad just wasn't going to be your way did Eisenhower want to eradicate the railroads no way he just said roads are going to be important for our infrastructure and this interstate highway system is going to do all sorts of things to create commerce to move cargo to help us move materials it wasn't nationalizing the railroads it was building new public infrastructure and what did this do first of all it built new markets for the railroads I mean suddenly things that you move by rail had all kinds of retail outlets that they never had before so it was kind of market creating and market enhancing for railroads second of all for shipping companies it created the opportunity for the first time to have a shipping company of national scale and third of all it allowed all kinds of entrepreneurs to create new businesses around the interstate highway system so I sort of think of my company Fast Case as like the UPS of 1956 UPS started in 1907 it was a little shipping company a chipped stuff by truck up and down the west coast it was the establishment of the interstate highway system that said now UPS could be a truly national industry creating markets where they want ones before not to try to get rid of the railroads not to try to drive anybody else out of business but to create new commerce where it didn't exist before so what lessons do we learn from the creation of the interstate highway system well today we have very efficient private railroads for moving legal information they're expensive and they're often worth every penny they're fantastic we also have a system of state roads for information they're maintained by state government organizations they don't exist with very good standards they don't interoperate very well but they're there some of the infrastructure is already built and believe me we spend a fortune every year kind of navigating these state roads so I can tell you what Erica tells you they're they're in some pretty bad disrepair and they have a big need for infrastructure there are very few new challenges in law.gov we see these throughout our history the interstate highway system the creation of the internet putting the sec data online in the past so a lot of these problems we've seen before recognizing there's a problem to be solved patchwork state and federal systems that don't interoperate the difficulty of establishing meaningful standards between the government states individuals and then finally the challenge is a funding which you see up and down organizations like this both for nonprofits for the government itself and for entrepreneurs second the thing we've learned is that creation of a new public infrastructure doesn't necessarily have to compete with private industry it can create new markets for incumbents and create great opportunities for entrepreneurs third vision is really important but nothing important happens until a sustainable dedicated source of funding is identified these 1938-1944 bills had beautiful ambitions for what public roads would look like but until Eisenhower in 1956 put 25 billion dollars behind it you really couldn't build the roads and then finally I think we tend in hindsight to view these kind of events as inevitable I mean of course there was going to be an interstate highway system but I can assure you there was nothing inevitable about it it wasn't until a group of very smart very dedicated people I would postulate much like the group of people assembled in this room today decided that they were going to make it happen and really put their shoulder behind it that actually occurred Eisenhower I think put out a pretty good mission statement for law.gov when he signed the bill in 1956 he said our unity is a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods the ceaseless flow of information throughout the republic is matched by individual and commercial movement over a vast system of interconnected highways crisscrossing the country together the uniting forces of our communication and transportation systems our dynamic elements in the very name we bear united states without them we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts thank you