rick / www.lawskills.com

The static website www.lawskills.com

lawskills.com

Back in ~1999, many former lives ago, I was co-founder of a company (Eastcore, Inc.). My business partner (Earl Howard Merry) is/was a lawyer in Georgia. In this era getting access to GA statutory and caselaw involved either digging through books, using (for statutes) a really crappy website, paying $$$ to the only provider of CD-based (proprietary formats and tooling) PC tools, or paying Lexis-Nexis or Westlaw ~$10 per search to look up documents.

The short version of the story is that we spent a lot of time learning reviewing caselaw about statutes and caselaw and convinced ourselves that if we were able to procure and extract the core statutes text and caselaw opinions text (by which we mean removing any and all add-on opinions, classifications, cross-referencing, etc.) then the data we had was the raw law. We could then add our own metadata to the collection (indexing, cross-referencing, extract definitions and citations of legal terms, etc.) and make it available.

We did that: collected a raw version of the Georgia states and caselaw from the 2000 era, cleaned it up and added our own structure and indexing, linking, definition extraction, etc. We made the organized legal data free and added a subscription layer to provide searching, citation linking, definition linking, etc. Our rates were super cheap ($1/day, $70/year, all you can eat). We probably covered maybe maybe the cost of having put it online.

We didn't really treat this as our primary business, and, really, we always considered it a win if (a) people were able to get access to the law without paying through the nose, and if (b) Howard had a useful legal search engine for Georgia caselaw.

Anyway, as such, we didn't really have the time or machinery to keep the site updated. After a couple of years we flipped the subscriber features switch so all features were free, but added the disclaimer that the legal info was not being updated.

Over the years, finally, other sites began to make this body of law (and other state and US federal laws) available online for free.

We hosted this for years and now are moving it to GitHub as an archive, and, if it works, we'll leave it available as a website on GitHub Pages (or similar?).