Judge sued for Lexis doc filing restrictions

Texas state court judge, Frederick Edwards and his clerk are requiring parties to file court documents electronically, with LexisNexis, and don’t allow filings to be delivered in person, according to a federal class action. This Montgomery County system, north of Houston, gives Lexis Nexis, income from each civil filing, according to the complaint.

The bigger story is how increasingly online legal services which incorporate everything from court filings, to law books, to legal website developers, marketing services, accounting software etc. are control by the two legal corporate giants – Reed Elsevier (Lexis/News) and Thomson Reuters (West publishing, Findlaw and HubbardOne.)  While those two companies are definitely competitive with each other, once they purchase vibrant smaller companies providing important and useful niche services, I’ve seen those companies wilt and stultify.  Meanwhile, companies that should have died a natural death – like Martindale Hubbard – have been kept on life support in order to milk clients of revenue without providing any real value.

Google takes on Lexis and Westlaw

Not quite but Google has added free case law to its Google Scholar offering.  Quickly searching this database I was struck by two things:

*In terms of content, this is a limited database which could serve as a quick and cheap alternative when I need to find out something about a legal issue.  It isn’t appropriate for any question when the goal is to be exhaustive. 

*The Google interface is far superior to anything the proprietary legal vendors offer.  It’s very straightforward and easy to use in a way that I hope is keeping Lexis and Westlaw product developers up at night.

Courthouse news sues Missouri state courts

The national court news service is claiming that as a result of an RFP process, the Missouri state courts are providing preferential treatment to one vendor.  The complaint states that this vendor will get access to court documents before other vendors and will have exclusive rights to this information and have the right to sell it to other news outlets.  

From the complaint, it appears that the courts haven’t chosen their preferred vendor though one of the candidates is the legal information service giant, Lexis.  I would be surprised if one of the others is Westlaw.

I was surprised to learn that Courthouse news has “hundreds” of subscribers.  I would have guess it was thousands. 

Complaint courtesy Courthousenews