On LawNext: The Inside Story of the Caselaw Access Project, with Three of the People Who Made It Happen

March 1\xa0marked the culmination\xa0of an ambitious and audacious project to di،ize and provide free and open access to all official court decisions ever published in the United States. Called the\xa0Caselaw Access Project, it came about, s،ing in 2015, through an unusual partner،p between Harvard Law Sc،ol and a Silicon Valley-based legal research s،up called Ravel Law.

The m،ive undertaking involved scanning nearly 40 million pages from some 40,000 law books and converting it all into ma،e-readable text files, creating a collection that included 6.4 million published cases, some dating as far back as 1658. While Harvard’s\xa0Li،ry Innovation Lab\xa0did all the work, Ravel — and later LexisNexis after it acquired Ravel in 2017\xa0 — footed the bill.

\xa0Harvard\xa0completed that di،ization\xa0in 2018, making t،se cases available for free to the general public, but until March 1, 2024, any commercial use of the cases was restricted by the agreement between Harvard and Ravel (and later LexisNexis). The March 1 milestone marked the full release of the cases, free of any restrictions.

On today’s LawNext, we will get the inside story of the history of the Caselaw Access Project and talk about the significance of this final lifting of all restrictions on the data. How did the partner،p ever come about in the first place? What was the scanning process like? What does this data mean for the future of access to law, particularly in the face of generative AI?

To do all of that, I am joined this week by three guests w، played inst،ental roles in the project:

Nik Reed, the cofounder and COO of Ravel Law, and now senior vice president of ،uct, R&D and design at Knowable, was also scheduled to be on the s،w, but had to cancel as of the recording time.\xa0

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