Legal research and the need to be “more like Google”

A few months back, there was a good amount of copy about Google Scholar features for searching federal and state court decisions — an impressive step up for using Google, at least at a consumer-user level, to find court decisions, but (puhleeeze) not as a tool for serious research of legal consequence. More recently the New York Times ran a feature article about changes afoot in Westlaw and Lexis, both of which “will undergo sweeping changes in a bid to make it easier and faster for lawyers to find the documents they need.” The opening salvo in this clash of the legal research titans occurred this week with debut of WestlawNext. To hear Westlaw and Lexis talk about it, what they are in part reacting to is the perceived need to be “more like Google.”

Yes, but one’s understanding of that conclusion depends on how one defines or explains what it means to “Google” things. At the recent TIG conference, during the “findability” segment I presented, I made a point stressing the significance of Google as not being “Google” itself, as pervasive as it is in all our lives. Rather, the significance of Google is the dramatic paradigm shift that has occurred in how we search for and use information. Google is a primary agent of this paradigm shift but certainly not the only one. And the connections between specific search paradigms (universal search, vertical search, faceted search, and so on), the relative ease of locating or discovering information, and improvements in user-interface and usability design — all are converging to enhance the findability of what one is looking for.

That said, the impact of all these trends on specialized (re)search tools like Westlaw and Lexis is pretty obvious. If “Wexis” users are demanding their research tools become “more like Google,” what the users are saying is that those companies must make a paradigm shift, or they’ll go to a company that gets it.