On March 1, 2024, an ambitious project came to fruition that has digitized and provided free and open access to all official court decisions ever published in the United States. This project is dubbed the Caselaw Access Project. By commencing in 2015, it was the product of an unusual partnership between Harvard Law School and a Silicon Valley-based legal research startup, Ravel Law.
The huge undertaking of this initiative involved scanning almost 40 million pages from approximately 40,000 law books and converting them into machine-readable text files. Thus, a comprehensive collection was made, which included 6.4 million published cases, with some dating as far back as 1658. Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab performed all the heavy lifting, while Ravel, and later LexisNexis after its acquisition of Ravel in 2017, footed the bill.
Harvard completed the digitization process in 2018, allowing these cases to be freely available to the general public. However, until March 1, 2024, the agreement between Harvard University and Ravel (and later LexisNexis) restricted any commercial use of the cases. March 1 is a milestone that marks the absolute release of these case laws, free of any restrictions.
In today’s LawNext update, we revisit the history of the Caselaw Access Project and discuss the impact of the final lifting of all restrictions on the data. Key inquiries are involving how the partnership originated in the first place, and the challenges and hurdles the scanning process faced. The implications of this data for the future of law access, particularly in the context of generative AI, are also a stimulating topic of exploration.
To discuss all these aspects, we’re joined by three guests who played instrumental roles in the project:
- Nik Reed, the co-founder and COO of Ravel Law, and now senior vice president of product, R&D, and design at Knowable.
Unfortunately, Nik Reed could not participate in the discussion at the recording time.