The main source of their power is every single court case, and more importantly, tracking which ones interact with each other and how, such as being overturned.
This not only needs access to pacer, but a good algorithm and a huge staff to catch up to westlaw/lexis.
That's right. I once wrote the code for the now-defunct Courtbot.com, which crawled, stored, and indexed the majority of available U.S. court decisions as they were published. This was years before Google Scholar started indexing opinions.
But even a completely functional Courtbot-style site is really only a competitor to something like Findlaw.com, not Westlaw or LexisNexis. That's because those companies have features that would be difficult to replicate:
- Very complex and comprehensive search options and parameters. This is possible to do but time-consuming and tricky.
- LexisNexis has 15,000 employees, and I suspect a significant number are involved in reviewing cases, summarizing, noting authorities and conflicts, etc. It's not yet possible to replace a trained lawyer reviewing an opinion with a regular expression. :)
- A subscription to LN/WL typically gets you, depending on your package and how much you're paying, far more than just court opinions. You get news articles, journal articles, congressional transcripts, and a slew of databases that can be used to look up info on people, locate assets, etc. A lot of this means licensing deals, and LN/WL effectively gives you a one-stop shop for a wealth of data. Some of this is coming online and is becoming searchable, but not enough to make a real dent.
The one thing that challengers have in their favor is that Lexis and Westlaw are expensive. I've had free accounts because of faculty affiliations or a newsroom subscription, which is grand, but it's cost-prohibitive for many people and businesses. The ABA has published a list of alternatives; note the majority are actually still owned by Lexis and Westlaw:
http://www.americanbar.org/groups/departments_offices/legal_...
