 I'm going to agree with Professor Samuelson. Most of the vendors feel very strongly that they add true value to this data. They're not simply taking public domain data and offering it up, that they actually offer things that people will pay for. And as we said earlier, this is as much about innovation. I think companies like West and Lexis-Nexis will face an IBM moment. And they have to decide whether their business model will evolve over time. But they certainly have a tremendous opportunity. And when you think about it, we're trying to make legal information available to a much broader audience. That's a bigger market. And that's a market opportunity for the established vendors. So for our next session, we have Tim Stanley and Erica Wayne, if you guys come up to the front. Erica is the deputy law librarian at Stanford Law. Has been a strong player in helping get this national inventory of legal materials off the ground. Tim Stanley is the CEO of Justia. But he was previously the founder of Five Block, which, as you know, is one of the premier services that West provides. Tim has been active in putting information on the internet since 1993, I think, is when you started your operation a lot earlier. I went back to the final one previously at Stanford. So absolutely. And so we've asked him to talk today about the national inventory of legal materials to describe what it is, but also to focus particularly on the situation in California. So Erica, I'll let you take over. You've got about 30 minutes, and then we're going to break for lunch. That's it. And Tim, I assume you'll just pick up. Yeah. All right. So I'm Erica, I guess, for purposes of that. And we just get started. So California Chief Justice Ronald George recently wrote a Golden Gate University Law Review. We cannot afford to operate an electronic tower of battle. And even though Chief Justice George was only referring to California's court's case management system, the Tower of Babel frustration, I think, exists for anyone attempting to do legal research right now. Many of the things that are primary legal research materials are not freely available. What is free often carries a warning that it can't be relied upon, that it isn't official. For every state, there are different kind of relationships when it comes to publishing the code and the assertion of copyright. And in our opinion, we think that the, let me say, we feel that a lot of the concept behind a lot of that might help us in that confusion. So for a lot of gov to work, a group of librarians are really interested in helping perform this national inventory of primary legal materials. We think it will really help kickstart a lot of the law initiative. And the inventory for what it's worth, definition, it's going to be like a packing list. Describing, detailing, cataloging, where you can find the laws of our federal and state systems, and then it's up. I want to say that it's not just what we consider primary. You might want to know the availability of those things that are created along the way in that process. Things like briefs, hearings, things of that sort. And for what it's worth, the definition that I like to use for primary authority comes from Elise Fox's legal research dictionary, and she just says that primary authority is the law itself, the authority that issues from one of the branches of federal, state, or local government as part of its function or issues from the Constitution. There are other definitions, but that was a nice simple one. And at the first law.gov event back in January in Stanford, one of the big issues was what about this national inventory? And we were really fortunate to have lots of local law librarians there from local, the Northern California Association of Law Librarians. Lots of leadership, too, I should say, past, current, and former presidents, future presidents. And there was a lot of interest in some of the questions that we were most interested in included what should we include in this inventory, what type of content should we collect, what formats, et cetera, and price, what form should it take, how do we know copyright issues, what about the IP issues regarding briefs and violence to the court, not produced by the court, but submitted to. How do we organize this effort? Is it done locally, statewide, and we get double A, double L to help legislative efforts and so on. And so we realize that for the inventory to really take hold, it would take a lot of effort across a lot of states with lots of volunteers. And right then and there, the group of no-cal folks, the good no-cal folks, decided to form an informal group to start working on this problem. Our mission was to create a prototype of the national inventory, focusing on California resources specifically. After a few phone calls and chats and emails, we started a Google group to start talking about all this and we decided to go with a very simple platform. No one wanted to master new skills or develop the greatest database product ever for this. We just wanted content to reign in this realm. And we figured after the inventory was created, we could leave it to technological innovation of someone else to kind of make it better. So we moved the Google spreadsheet. There were better solutions perhaps, but that's what we went with because it's very easy to use, very easy to share, and very easy for us to manually edit and a simple form can be generated for the spreadsheet. So if folks were not comfortable with the spreadsheet environment, they could just use a form and input data. It was very easy to track changes, which has been very helpful when you have lots of different people define the data. As with anything with a spreadsheet, you always have a real strong sense of hindsight, like, oh, I really should have done it that way. We did it. So we're learning. This is a learning process. So for example, we didn't cluster cities under their counties, which would have been such a logical thing to do. We can clean it up later, but we're like, we had this dull moment from the time it was so easy. We didn't include a column for permanent public access, but we can include that going forward. I think probably one of the most famous things we did include is Contra Authenticated Data. Pearl has talked about this, and then you always also talk about this. That probably leads back to that first meeting when one of our volunteers, Susan, who's here, famously kind of explained nothing in California is authentic. We don't even need to document it. So no column for that. Nothing in California is authentic. I don't know if she was just referring to a wall, but nothing in California is authentic. Anyway, but there were fields that were important and relevant to me, started filling those up. And the key ones for us, at least kind of what we're seeing so far, copyright assertion and language, disclaimers, official status, and price information, and that's somewhat true. We're still entering data, but we're seeing some interesting things, and we're sure some of these things will be mirrored in other states as we go along. I just want to add a tidbit. I co-teach Advanced Liberal Research with Paul Lomio at the law library, and sometimes we'll bring in our frustrations to the students about how much something costs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the students will politely have been going, ah, very interesting, thanks for sharing. But we have started to actually use some, what I would call law.gov type of assignments with our students. We're getting them to actually look. Each student will get, we have four new questions. Each student will get a state, and they're looking at the administrative codes and the state codes, and all sorts of materials to see are there copyright assertions? Is it official? How easy can you find it at all? And they're really surprised, and I think they're actually enjoying it. And we can talk about some of the fun states at another time, but they're seeing some interesting things. Some of the things that we're seeing when we're doing this. So for California, what are the interesting things? So there are about almost 540 municipalities and counties in the state of California, and nearly 80% of them have outsourced their municipal and county codes to four commercial members. Almost all of them seem to be free online from what we've seen so far. However, over 40% claim to be unofficial and have disclaimers. Almost 50% have copyright assertions. And I think those numbers are actually gonna go up as we keep fine-tuning the data, and this gets to lots of folks with different interpretations. Some things that they don't say official, folks are uncomfortable saying, well, is it or isn't it? And so we have a lot of things with question marks or don't know, we'll come back to it. So I think that number could actually go up. Paper versions of many of these codes are also printed by the same publisher that produces it online. Not for free, I might add. And a question of bulk access came up and a good question, how easy it is to get bulk access. And the answer is nearly impossible. So we recently conducted a small sample of some of these municipalities trying to cover the different commercial vendors. And none of them had bulk access available. The best, I guess the second best at the Ruby Prize on this one was a PDF version. Not bulk access. And that was for a few hundred dollars. So still, not the perfect world. I'm getting price information on these things also is really tricky. Even though I work at a major law library, most university law libraries, most Canada law libraries, they only have their local municipal codes available. They're not gonna have all the state's codes. That's not from this realm. And so we are limited to the price information individual volunteers might see. And calling each city in California is very time consuming. And not always an all that helpful experience. So I have a few good examples to share with you and I'm not targeting anyone's hometown, if it is your hometown. So Laguna Beach, looks like a nice place to go. Their municipal code is polished by Quality Code Publishing. And they produce about 90 of the state's municipal codes. The sites look almost identical except for the city logo. And this is the disclaimer that's on all of theirs. This electronic version is provided for information only and should not be considered the official version of the code. Please consult the official printed version before citing provisions of this code. If inconsistencies exist that it does, please look at the official legislation. Well, so I was like, okay, how do I go to the official version? And I called the nice city clerk's office at Laguna Beach, very nice woman spoke to there. And she's like, well, it's online. I said, well, I want to see the official version. How do I do that? Well, gee, people haven't asked me about that in Enons because it's online for free. And so, well, how much is it? And she said, I'll have to get back to you. So the day, I mean, the woman was so nice and she got back to me the next day. It was about $125. And she said to me, I haven't sold one in, who knows when? And for what it's worth, yes, that was that example. Poser to Home San Jose. American legal publishing produces their municipal code. 43 of the state's codes are also produced by them. All of them also look just as with the other sample the same. And they all have a copy registration at the bottom of the site. And their disclaimer, similar to the other one, they'll have to share with you. This code ordinances and or other documents that appear on this site may not reflect the most current legislation adopted by the municipality. American legal publishing provides these documents for informational purpose filming. Oh, great. These documents should not be relied upon as the definitive authority for local legislation. Additionally, the formatting and pagination of the posted documents varied from the formatting of the official copy. The official printed copy of code ordinances should be consulted prior to any action being taken. So if I did want to consult the official version, it would cost me about $300 plus $150 a year for updates. And one of our volunteers actually called American legal publishing and asked them about the copy registration on the bottom of the screen. And they didn't really have any answers. They said, we'll get back to you. We still haven't heard back from you, college students. And this actually got a few volunteers talking because we all are librarians. When do you ever see a like, this thing was like this in books. And certainly printed materials of primary materials have mistakes in them all the time. And any librarian here has gotten the notices of replacement pages of self-adhesive correction sheets he's slapped in the book. But something about the web keeps prompting these disclaimer so that you cannot rely on material again and again. You're gonna forgive them, there'll be a few more quick examples as they're good. The office of attorney general went to their site to look for the opinions. And they have a really interesting one, this disclaimer. Disclamer of duty to continue provision of the data. Due, I don't know, it's due to the dynamic nature of the internet. Resources that are freely and publicly available one day may require a fee or restrict access to the nest. And the location of items may change as menus, home pages, and files are reorganized by the online internet. User agrees that the use of the attorney general's home page is at the user's sole risk. And they cannot guarantee that it will be error free. So I guess if you wanted to be error free and it's due to, we'd like to say, the dynamic nature of print. I'm gonna buy it, it's about $400. And we've been to the California Supreme Court and they're contracted the California Court decisions, which is contracted with access. But I wanna share kind of a bit of the language from the over 2,500 word license agreement that you have to get through to read the material. It's saying that there is no charge, no copyright on the opinion text, but the text, the page is limited to personal use. And see the lengthy publisher's limitations on use. The official reports summaries and head notes are subject to copyright, are not included in this site. The official reports page, and this is the best part, is primarily intended to provide effective public access to all telecom, just presidential, repellent decisions. It is not intended to function as an alternative to commercial, computer-based services and products for comprehensive legal research. Such as Lex's, who produces the service. And this section when we talked about this with our students, one of our law students came up to us after class and said, would I be, would you malpractice to use this site? And that's the next one question. One of the copyright examples I wanna share with you, the California Civil Jury Instructions. This is also similar with the criminal jury instructions. Produced by the Judicial Council of California. This one is freely available in official form on their website, but it has some interesting copyright language. So it says on the online version and in the paper, it's identical. Copyright 2010 by the Judicial Council of California, all rights reserved, no copyright is claimed by the Judicial Council to the table of contents, table of statutes, table of cases, index, or table of related instructions. And below that, 2010, Matthew Bender and company, a member of the Lexis Nexus Group, no copyright is claimed to the text of the jury instructions and verdict form, directions for use, sources of authority, or other advisory committee commentary, user's guide, life expectancy tables, which were shrinking for us as we were reading this, or disposition table. And the paper version is identical. What's interesting is even though Matthew Bender is the official contract for this, Westlaw, who produces an unofficial version of this, has the same copyright language, just substituted Westlaw for Matthew Bender. And this was a difficult one for us and our spreadsheet for like checkbox, wouldn't put down for this. And a recent example just came up, a patron came by the library and was using some public utility commission materials. And they are all on the web, but this is an interesting nuance we hadn't even thought about. It's mentioned, this isn't just now. You know, page numbers on any of the materials. This patron is a local attorney who wants to cite it in briefs. The online version is useless to her. She said there are no paragraph numbers, so it's really difficult and she had to find a paper version of her library, which is what Robert R. Hubert wrote. And those are some of the challenges that we're facing is kind of getting consistency and definitions, getting and keeping volunteers. We're lucky they have over 20, but it's keeping them going is always an important piece. The price information we're dealing with is a moving target. Every library and every librarian here knows that price relations to vendors vary. So the price I might have, like the difference in the price Susan might have and from a county library and so on. So we're just kind of taking a stab. What price information we have we're gonna put in there, but it's not perfect, do we know that? And I think looking ahead, the really great thing is the AAAL, the American Association of Law Libraries is behind this process. And as of this moment, besides the California inventory, which is alive and well, there is, I think there's seven working groups right now that are currently starting on their projects and they're kind of random individuals who are actually doing little bits and pieces in their states. And so I think that there's some good momentum on it and hopefully we can kind of generate some more interest. Right, so I'll sort of follow up with some of the stuff that Erica was covering on. Just some additional things about the stuff in California as well as in the US is that a lot of times that the state government will put out things but they don't really do the full job of it. And so for example, we talked a bit about the working code and the headings and things like that, the Oregon sort of state government was clicking copyright on. If you go to the legislative council, you go to the California code, you don't even have the headings. They actually strip those out. So one way to keep people from copying those is just not to put them up for free. And I'm surprised that this is happening in California which is having to go down for over years, but it's the way it is right now. When you look through different administrative agencies sometimes they might have a section closed that relates to their agency. So sometimes you can find those headings. I know Rob, who does the Oregon Law Sites, can look at this for California as well. But it's gonna be quite a bit of work. They just didn't put it up. So that's sort of one thing to note. The other thing is that the national inventory is sort of going through and getting done. A lot of the stuff that's out there on the web right now is not on Lexus and West. So Lexus and West have a lot of things out there, certainly on the case law, the statutes and the codes on the state level and the federal level. But they're not dealing with all the cities. I mean, this is sort of a hodgepodge of different sort of regulations and regulations and code sections. And so I think a large part, if you're an average person, you're just looking at longer everyday life. And certainly you've got some state things you need to focus on and make sure that when you buy driver's license, it's like that. But other items like labor and tenants or when something's rank-controlled or not rank-controlled, everyday life types of things is often at the city level. Small things like, how can I fight my parking ticket or something like that? So there's a lot of stuff that I think impacts everyday people that's at the city level, which has not been available on the West. So I just don't have everyday people who tend to go there the West as much as anyone's. Where I think the city governments and the county governments did a great job in getting this stuff up. And bringing contracts that require this stuff to be online for free. So that's one sort of core thing because you look at the internet. The actual amount of content, legal content that's out there is incredibly high. As I sort of look through sort of dealing with the different state governments, I think one of the big things that I think that we want to work on is not just sort of get things involved so that we can download it or get it everywhere for download, which is fine. I think it's also to help the state governments or the county and city governments publish this stuff themselves. So while I think it's good that we find what's out there and what's missing, a secondary part of this will be sort of finding the best practices, finding ways to do a great job of it and get these guys in communication with each other so they can actually use some of the tools and share the tools across different governments. And ideally, at some point, especially with some of the tech people that Carl's put together, Tom Cruise and some of the guys at Cornell, some of these other places, gets some open source publishing tools and some open source open citation systems, which are consistent across many different sort of levels of government. And I realize, you know, this might take a long, long time to do, but we do have a lot of good tech people that are very interested in this right now. They've shown a good ability to really, you know, program all very, very pro-free law and getting things out for free and they'll be more than happy to provide these tools and stuff so the government can even help train them, even help set them up with different types of servers. So, you know, I think there's lots of work finding out what's there and what's not there, but also going through there and then trying to get these different government entities sort of connected with each other and use the best practices. The other thing I want to quickly mention is just sort of, I'll run into the California case law, just sort of as an example, mainly because I look for the contract from Lex's hand with the state of California and just give it for an RFP. I just sort of want to do a few items here. The first thing, you know, if you go, if you look at the California case law online, the stuff that's provided by the law is sort of the archive back to this Cal law or just California courts and this sort of help. They do have to provide it online for free, so that was part of the contract and that part was there. That's basically all it says. It doesn't say you have to do anything else that I can provide for free. They can put it on licensing restrictions or whatever else they want to in front of it. The goal, I think, of the California court system was at least allow public to be able to bring in a case if they wanted to read a case. But beyond that, there's not a lot to it. No internal page numbers. They're there. Head notes. So this contract with Lex's, as well as the one that's, you know, just, I guess the RFP closed a couple weeks ago, but we'll see if Lex's gets it in or maybe it might be Lex or maybe the case or we'll just blur it. You know, depending on who gets it, but the head notes are required to be written as part of the contract. The company, like Lex's, that writes the head notes, they get to keep copyrighting those head notes in some of the other classification schemes. So that's kept by Lex's. But they have to give a license back to the state of California so that the state of California can use it in future editions of their code. So basically, if Lex's doesn't win this next, you know, roundabout in the contract, the next publisher of the official person of the California Code, does in fact, can in fact publish out the head notes that read by Lex's by way of the California government. But that said, those head notes and those classification schemes are not showing up on the free site that they're putting up on Lex's nexus or Lex's dash notes, just depending on how you have your cookie set.com. So this is just one sort of item. And I think it would not be too hard for the California government to require ownership of those, you know, head notes and things like that. I believe since they're basically be providing many ways out for free and the only real control over them from Lex's standpoint, I guess, is they don't count to everyone, but they somehow keep them off of the free system while they're running the site, the free site themselves. So that might be one thing to think of. The other item, I think from a Lex's standpoint, because they don't really get money from becoming the official publisher, what they really get is a large marketing benefit. They get the subscriber list of previous people that subscribe to the official code in terms of CD or what publications or if they want to sell them and move them out with the online system. So in that subscriber list, it has to be provided by the previous, previous entity that was actually producing the official version. So there's some real marketing value in there in terms of getting the subscriber list and your official publisher. And there's really something to be said when you're the official publisher to come. And, you know, I think there's probably, two companies that have very strong bringing through, I think West, you know, Township Writers West has a very strong bringing in terms of what they do. And I think Lex's and X's go. But, you know, someone, let's say, like, Fast Case came in and got all the California cases. You know, that would give them a very strong bringing proposition to be able to say they were the official one. So that's one huge item. And I'm pretty sure that's why Lex was probably one really good at this contract. I have an idea of what was going on with West, but I'm not allowed to say it. I was there at the time, and this is him. For a very brief reason. So, I mean, there's some real benefits on that. And then, you know, as far as the cases themselves go, just in terms of California, the cases right now basically says CalSec can grow up online for free. So I don't know if the deal net has them, the final has them, there's some other folks, I'm sure Google's gonna have them on relatively soon as well. So those are out and about. So for California, I think it's pretty much out there. It has with the internal page numbers and everything else. But you still would like to go back and sort of get these previous cases. So maybe a clinic or something, we might be interested in a test case for you. Maybe not that, certainly a possibility. But I would like to see some sort of litigation or something to sort of clarify some of the legal issues. So that was the main item I wanted to point out on the California cases. It is out for review right now. I obviously don't know who's gonna get it, but it's something where, you know, the corpus where it passes from entity to entity, it's just that Lexus made a choice not to put it online for free. That doesn't mean that if fast-paced or if Waltz Clover's got it, that they couldn't actually put it out as well as the headcounts and things like that. So I wanted to add two points on the California inventory. For the state court system, it's really quite interesting because it's part of the click-through license agreement to access the full court opinions of California. You click through an agreement that this is for personal use only and it explicitly excludes public and non-profit uses from the use of those materials. As far as the attorney general opinions, I actually, about six months ago, sent a note to the attorney general's office saying I would like to put all the attorney general opinions online and make them available. I received a note back from the attorney general's office saying, well, you will need to send us a proposal to get our permission. At that point, took all the attorney general opinions that were visible on the internet and made a copy of those. And sent the note back saying, guess what, I got a lot of them and they're available for $67 on BooBoo, which is less than $2,500 official attorney general opinions. And the case was referred to a deputy attorney general. They've conducted a legal review and for several months now, we've been asking them to make a decision on whether we're able to actually get the rest of the attorney general opinions and make them available to the public for free. And so we're still waiting. We have not sued or threatened to sue or doing legal actions. The attorney general is not only the chief legal officer of California, he's an elected official. And so we're hoping that perhaps that part of his personality will make him want to make the information available. So I wanna thank Erica for starting off this national legal inventory. You have postcards in front of you, one for each of the different states. We also made some very nice playing cards. We got some of them for which you can give out to your various volunteers. I also made another copy to give to Roberta Schaefer to donate to the Law Library of Congress so that we have a copy of that in perpetuity. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.