Podcast #129: The Business of Public Access to Law, with Tim Stanley

In this episode, we discuss the business of public access to law with one of its pioneers, Tim Stanley, and wonder why it’s taking so long for courts and legislatures to get on board. Plus, a little karma.

Tim Stanley

Tim Stanley is a computer programmer and lawyer. He founded FindLaw, then Justia, and built both companies around free law. Tim is on the Board of Directors of Nolo and American Legal Net, and is on the Board of Trustees of Public.Resource.org, and he is a member of the American Association for Justice, American Bar Association, American Civil Liberties Union, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

You can follow Tim on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Thanks to Ruby Receptionists and Clio for sponsoring this episode!

Listen & Subscribe

To listen to the podcast, just scroll up and hit the play button (or click the link to this post if you are reading this by email).

To make sure you don’t miss an episode of The Lawyerist Podcast, subscribe now in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. Or find out about new episodes by subscribing to our email newsletter.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Lawyerist podcast with Sam Glover and Aaron Street. Each week, Lawyerist brings you advice and interviews to help you build a more successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. And now, here are Sam and Aaron.

Sam Glover: Hi. I’m Sam Glover.

Aaron Street: And I’m Aaron Street. This is episode 129 of The Lawyerist podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today we’re checking in with Tim Stanley, the founder of Justia and FindLaw, about private efforts to increase public access to the law and the role of karma.

Sam Glover: Today’s podcast is sponsored by Ruby Receptionists and its smart, charming receptionists who are perfect for small firms. Visit callruby.com/lawyerist to get a risk-free trial with Ruby.

Aaron Street: Today’s podcast is sponsored by Clio legal practice management software. Clio makes running your law firm easier. Try it for free today at Clio.com.

So this past week, our friends at Fastcase released their annual list of the Fastcase 50 Awards, which is their list of 50 of the most innovative, tech-savvy, forward-thinking people in the law. Since that kind of overlaps a lot with the efforts we’ve been making to build the TBD Law community, we thought it would be fun to note how many of the TBD Law alumni are also alumni of the Fastcase 50 list. This year’s Fastcase 50 list includes Joe Bahgat, Tom Martin, Allen Rodriguez, and Billie Tarascio, who are all TBD alumni–

Sam Glover: And have all been on the podcast.

Aaron Street: –and have all been podcast guests. You see how these things all overlap? But we have probably a dozen past Fastcase 50 attendees who are also TBD Law alumni. We’re really excited that it’s such a cool group, which includes David Colarusso, Sarah Glassmeyer, Alma Asay, Mary Juetten, Carolyn Elefant, Jeena Cho, Dan Lear, Joshua Lenon, Chad Burton, Adriana Linares, and then you, and our TBD Law co-host Matt Homann. I guess I’m notably missing from that list, but I’ll choose not to take it personally.

Sam Glover: Do something innovative, Aaron.

Aaron Street: I guess. Shit.

Sam Glover: Yeah. No. There’s no secret. We are obviously trying to get the most interesting, innovative thinkers in law to be at TBD Law, so there’s a lot of overlap. One of the neat things, it’s worth mentioning, that Fastcase does is every year they update a Twitter list of the Fastcase 50. I have found that to be an interesting list to subscribe to to figure out what the thought leader-y, legal people are thinking and sharing and talking about. So check that out.

Aaron Street: That explains it. The fact that I don’t use Twitter is probably why they don’t want me on their list.

Sam Glover: Could be.

Aaron Street: Oh, shit.

Sam Glover: I mean, I barely use it anymore either, but I do pay attention to it. The Fastcase 50 is a pretty cool list to follow, so I recommend it. So with that, let’s talk to Tim Stanley about the private efforts to increase public access to law. I am actually really excited to hear his thoughts on karma.

Tim Stanley: Hi. I’m Tim Stanley. I am the CEO of Justia. I work on a lot of free law, and free government information on our web portal. Previously, I was the CEO and founder of FindLaw, and worked at FindLaw for a number of years before starting Justia. We do a lot of free law stuff, and I’m happy to talk about it today.

Sam Glover: Fantastic. Thanks for being with us, Tim. I realize that Justia is your current project, and I want to talk about that, but it feels like it has its roots in FindLaw, which feels like a pretty different thing today than it was when you founded it and built it up. I remember it was this amazing thing. All of a sudden, you could find the law online just by searching. I wonder if you could walk us through where you got the idea for it, how you went about founding it, and how you funded it?

Tim Stanley: Yeah. With FindLaw … Beforehand, I was in a PhD program at Stanford, and Stacy had just graduated from a law school. Each of us had put up some sort of a segmented legal portal. We put up a bunch of stuff on cyber law and internet law, and I put up some stuff on law and economics. We were doing that for a while. Then with Martin Roscheisen, another Stanford PhD guy, we got together and we combined the resources and went ahead and released FindLaw. We started it, I think, December of ’95, and had something up, really by early of January of ’96. Obviously there weren’t as many things. If you thought about it back then, it was initially sort of a link directory. It was kind of like Yahoo was, but just focused in on law. It was a little bit more detailed.

Sam Glover: Yeah. You’d come to the front page, and you’d want to learn about criminal law, so there’d be a link for that.

Tim Stanley: Yeah. At that point, just a lot of criminal law resources. Separately, we started working with law reviews. Martin and I, back even before FindLaw had started, had gone to this computer freedom and privacy conference that Jim Warren was the guy who ran it. We had met with Rick Klau and some of the other law review guys out there. Rick had started the first online law review. We started doing a project with them as well, and then that eventually became sort of a combo project with the law review group run by Rick and also at FindLaw.

Then there was a guy named Jamie Love, who was running the Taxpayer’s Assistance Project, part of a Ralph Nader group. He did a big debate with a former Democratic Congressman from Minnesota. It was about access to the law and copyright ability of some of the corrections or some of the citations, and West was claiming copyright of both those at the time. It was an interesting debate. Martin and I both saw it, and we came back and we thought, “Well, that would be interesting for some of the PhD work we’re doing.”

Later on, we started doing the free case law, as well, and had to correspond a lot with Jamie over time about that. It was sort of a … As we’re going, we’re taking some of the stuff we’d done previously, which is some of the meetings, some of the stuff we’d done with law reviews and academically, combined with some directories that Stacy and I had put together. We sort of combined it all up.

Once we put it up, we would basically sort of see what people were doing and we do normally a project every couple of months. We did 9th Circuit, then we did all the circuits. Then we started doing the state case law. We’d just grab it, navigate it, and we’d slowly start marking things up and just kept adding. We added free websites. We started putting together a lawyer directory. We started putting up all different types of government contacts. We worked on with eGroups, another company that Martin was working with was [inaudible 00:06:50]. We started doing mailing list archives. I worked with [inaudible 00:06:55] on some of that stuff, too.

It was just … At that point in time, our real skill set was we had … With me and Stacy, we’re both lawyers. With me and Martin, we were both programmers. We just started programming away. We would just think of something, and we’d do it. And we’d think of something, and we’d do it. We just kept working. It was really just the three of us for a number of years. It worked out pretty well. We were doing quite well, very profitable and everything else before we even touched VC money.

Sam Glover: Where did the money come from? Was it advertising then, or were you charging for things, or what?

Tim Stanley: Yeah. It was advertising. At that point, the vast majority of the revenue came from West and Lexis. They were probably two-thirds of the revenue. We had a very large client base or lawyers using our site. They were reaching out to do up-sales to their own new online products that they had at the time.

Sam Glover: Interesting. So even at that point you were starting to charge money to lawyers for some additional stuff, or no?

Tim Stanley: No. We weren’t charging. West and Lexis were charging. They would see the ads, and they would go purchase stuff. We did nothing. At that point, we weren’t charging for anything. We weren’t even charging for the websites or directory stuff. We’d just do it. We just tried to keep building stuff. It was easy, and it was fun, and we didn’t have … We were students living in an apartment, so not too bad.

Sam Glover: At some point you did take VC money right?

Tim Stanley: Yeah. We took an angel round at the very beginning of ’99, and took a larger round in October of ’99.

Sam Glover: Was the goal just more of the same, or was there a specific target at that point?

Tim Stanley: Well, in hindsight, I’m not sure what the goal was. I think the goal was … Everybody was offering money to us and everybody was putting pressure on us to take money. So we did it because everyone else did. I guess that would probably be the best reason that I can think of that we did it. I don’t think it added anything. We hired random folks. I don’t know what the hell some of them did. I don’t think it was good. Also, I had never managed a larger group, but even when we hired stronger managers, I don’t think that really led to any sort of better results.

Sam Glover: You guys kind of protest that you’re a technician, not a thought leader. Right?

Tim Stanley: Well, I don’t know. I’m a programmer.

Sam Glover: Yeah. Yeah. You like to do the …

Tim Stanley: I have thoughts, but I don’t know if … I’m not telling you what the future is with robot law or things like that. I’ll leave that to Ed Walters and the guys here focused on the bigger picture things sometimes.

Sam Glover: So that was in, what? ’99-ish that you started taking money?

Tim Stanley: Yeah. So that was then, and we grew up the staff quite a bit. Then we cut back the staff, and then we sold to Thomson West at the time. January 2001. So it’s pretty quick.

Sam Glover: Yeah. Wow. Since then, it’s gone on to become the FindLaw we know today, which is more … It feels like it’s more about a directory and websites.

So when did you start Justia? How long did you sit on the FindLaw sale before you started something new?

Tim Stanley: I was at FindLaw for two years.

Sam Glover: Oh. Right.

Tim Stanley: Then I left FindLaw, and I started Justia with Ju Wang two days later. I didn’t wait too long. I incorporated in Vegas and had incorporation papers within a day. Then Ju and I just started programming for a bit. That was the beginning of Justia. Then Justia got sued by West. We got shut down for a little bit. We sort of stalled out a bit, and then we came back really to the current Justia, again sort of growing organically, the end of 2004–

Sam Glover: Gotcha.

Tim Stanley: –is sort of when we started growing things.

Sam Glover: And how … I realize there may be some politics tied up in this, but how similar to FindLaw is Justia? Why did you decide to do something so similar again?

Tim Stanley: Well, I think that Justia, when we started back up … We did a couple things differently. One is that we focused on the revenue first before we started building up a portal. The initial portal of Justia was actually really just doing pure search engine optimization consulting. So we did that, and then we slowly added websites. We didn’t really add a directory until much later. So I think that … The big part I think when FindLaw sold to Thomson West, now Thomson Reuters, was that we were doing free case law and that was not a revenue business model within their organization that they thought made any sense at all.

Sam Glover: Right.

Tim Stanley: They have some work to do if they actually wanted to keep their stuff up-to-date better, do a better job on some of their summaries and things. It’s just not a priority for them, the free law side at all.

Sam Glover: No. They bought the traffic. Right? So that they could sell websites and …

Tim Stanley: I think they had tried LawOffice.com. They had spent a lot of money on that. That was not working. I think they bought traffic to a certain extent, maybe control of a potential free law competitor, which I don’t think probably should have worried them quite as much as it might have. Also, you had LexisOne at the time, so they weren’t a competitor for that.

I think what they really got was an engineering team. A team that was very strong. On the engineering management side, we were very good. I mean, I was good. [inaudible 00:11:57] was good. We know how to run engineers and get projects done. That part we’re really, really good at. I think they got that, and FindLaw for Thomson West was extremely successful. Always grew beyond any expectations. It really grew quite fast. We took an engineering team. We came up with some of the core products on Mountain View, and then you added a sales team. You had something there.

I think its sense has changed a bit on what they’re doing, but I leave that to them. They certainly aren’t focused on the free law stuff. They have stuff up, but a lot of it’s out of date and not quite … It’s not really what I would necessarily do.

Sam Glover: So you started Justia, and you’re obviously still elbows deep into the free law world, and I’m curious about this. We talked to Carl Malamud recently, and he’s doing free law from the non-profit crusader side of things. You’re doing it from the for-profit side of things. Is the free law … Obviously, it’s because you believe in free law, but it’s also a way to bring in traffic so that you can sell websites and marketing services and stuff like that? Do I have that right?

Tim Stanley: I don’t know if the free law stuff, at least what I’ve seen in terms of sales and things like that, I don’t know if that actually increases revenue, really. I work with Carl because I’m on the board at PublicResources.org and been on that for a long time. We work a lot with Cornell, with Legal Information Institute, which Peter Martin and Tom Bruce had found and Tom Bruce is currently running with Sara Frug and Craig Newton. We do a lot of stuff with Cornell.

I think for us … I certainly speak for myself, I guess. I think most people in the company feel the same way. Our goal is just to help get the law up and make it free. That’s really the purpose of the company. It’s sort of what we want our end result to be. I mean, I’m certainly not against making profits and things like that, but we’re trying to use the business aspects to put up the free law stuff. I don’t think that if we stop doing free law that would really have much impact on our business at all. I think it would probably be pretty much the same.

We’ve done a lot of stuff, which some of it is just aggregating. Case law, codes, patents, trademarks, which we also share out. Some of that we actually get from Google, like some of the patent, trademark stuff. [inaudible 00:14:15] the patent stuff, we’ve gotten from Google. We do the case summaries themselves, so we write case summaries for all the federal appellate courts, Supreme Court, all the circuits. We do it for all the top-level state courts and all the California appellate courts. We send those out free. We put ’em on blogs. We do something with FastCase. They get a copy, a CD of the continuing education of the bar here in California, getting a copy of all the California stuff.

We just distribute the stuff out. It’s a lot of other free content that we’ve aggregated and are storing, which … I think it’s pretty worthwhile, what we’ve done. It goes to the guys at Free.law, Brian Carver and Mike Lissner. It goes over to Internet Archive. There’s some folks that just use lists for daily updates of all the cases that people can get in a TAR file if they want daily or weekly. Whatever they want.

But that’s sort of the core purpose of it. We’re certainly about free access, but more than free access, I would say we’re about free law, which is we want it distributed out to folks. Some folks have done a great job, if you’ve ever seen … I don’t know if you ever look at it … the WebLaw site that Robb Shecter did. If you go to weblaws.org, it’s pretty good. He’s done a bunch of really nice code mark-ups. Certainly, Cornell’s doing all types of stuff. It’s really more of the purpose of the company than … I don’t think it’s a … It’s certainly not a profit generator. It’s a cost generator. But, right.

Sam Glover: Right. We just need to take a quick pause to hear from our sponsors, and when we come back, I want to ask you a little bit more about your approach to that, because I think one of the first things I heard about you and Justia is your belief in karma. So I would like to talk to that when we come back. So we’ll take a brief break.

This podcast is supported by Ruby Receptionists. As a matter of fact, Ruby answers our phones at Lawyerist, and my firm was a paying Ruby customer before that. Here’
s what I love about Ruby: when I’m in the middle of something, I hate to be interrupted, so when the phone rings, it annoys me, and that often carries over into the conversation I have after I pick up the phone. Which is why I’m better off not answering my own phone. Instead, Ruby answers the phone, and if the person on the other end asks for me, a friendly, cheerful receptionist from Ruby calls me and asks if I want them to put the call through. It’s a buffer that gives me a minute to let go of my annoyance and be a better human being during the call.

If you want to be a better human being on the phone, give Ruby a try. Go to CallRuby.com/lawyerist to sign up and Ruby will waive the 95 dollar set-up fee. If you aren’t happy with Ruby for any reason, you can get your money back during your first three weeks. I’m pretty sure you’ll stick around, but since there’s no risk, you might as well try.

Tim Stanley: Imagine what you could do with an extra eight hours per week. You could invest in marketing your firm. You could spend more time helping clients in need, or you could catch your daughter’s soccer game. That’s how much time legal professionals save with Clio, the world’s leading practice management software. With Clio, tracking time, billing, and matter management are fast and easy, giving you more time to focus on what really matters. And Clio is a complete practice management platform with plenty of tools and over 50 integrations to help you automate daily tasks, such as document generation and court calendering.

See how the right software can make it easier to manage your practice. Try Clio for free today at Clio.com.

Sam Glover: Okay. We’re back. Tim, tell me about karma and how it’s important to Justia and you and why it’s part of your business strategy.

Tim Stanley: Well, I think for us, we just try to be nice to everybody. We don’t really worry about things, and things are going well, so you can … When things are going well, it’s easier to be nicer to people. That’s always helped, and it’s come back, and it’s helped us out, as well. Some folks, even when we were in our beginning stages, having our toughest days of Justia, like folks at [inaudible 00:18:02], FastCase, and other people like that came and helped us out and gave us some moral support when we were beginning.

My overall take, at least on the internet side … It’s just a better way to go. I think there’s some folks that are a little bit more cagey with their stuff, or I want to say more self-interested, which … It’s business, I guess, to be expected. I don’t know if that’s as good a strategy on the internet at this point, but that’s certainly a different strategy.

But for us, we’re much more laid back. We’ve not been super aggressive on anything, but we do a good job, and we’ve got top engineers. We know the SEO stuff, so our business stuff works out well and we can still be nice to folks like Avvo. It’s fine, like Mark and those guys. Everybody else’ll get along, and whoever other competitors are … Nolo, Lawyers.com folks, [inaudible 00:18:54]. It’s all been pretty good in terms of working with people. I just think it’s a good strategy, I guess, if you want to take it like that.

Sam Glover: It feels like the internet is sort of in a struggle between closed ecosystems and open ecosystems, and it’s sounds like you fall down pretty hard on the latter, plus you’re reaching out to people. You’re very supportive of both free law, but legal tech and law in general. I suppose you come firmly down on the side of the open internet.

Tim Stanley: Yeah. And I think most folks, at least on the internet business side, have really benefited from the work elders have done. The ability to start something with very few costs and few engineers … It’s night and day to what it was even a decade ago. You could start a case law business right now, there’s some big archives over at Free.law, get all the really good quality cases since the 1930s, start doing the updates, and you’ve got yourself a case law archive that was certainly better than anything that FindLaw had back during the time we sold. Not quite West quality, by any means, but it’s really good.

Then the other stuff, a lot of the free law folks have benefited from litigation that attorneys have taken on. Certainly, Carl’s one example with some of the litigation he’s doing right now on the regulations, but whether it’s Google Scholar, us, anybody. Alan Sugarman, he had an attorney, Carl Hartmann. They took on West. They took them on, and they won decision so that West could not claim copyrights on the corrections they made in the cases, which then became official cases, or their citation in the internal pages. That’s a non-trivial thing. If you didn’t have Alan and Carl leading that charge in the courts when he was running HyperLaw, you don’t have any of this, because West would be pretty good about shutting stuff down and doing secret licenses like they did with Lexis for 50,000 a year and nobody else would know about it.

The litigation strategy in combination with the free tools and free content … That all ties in together as far as the legal stuff goes. Certainly, we’ll see how Carl and PublicResource.org … I expect to … they’re on the right side of history, if nothing else. That’s where things go in terms of some of the laws and legislative history setting everything in place, but it’s not just technology. It’s not just content. It’s also litigation. And Alan and Carl, some of those other guys sort of get that and push things and, in Alan’s case, really succeeded, on the litigation side. That needs to be a bigger part, I think, of the strategy as anything else.

Sam Glover: It feels like we’re … Would you say we’re kind of in the middle of trying to open up law? How far do you think we are from courts just making the law available and legislatures just making the law available in electronic formats so that anybody can go grab ’em?

Tim Stanley: Yeah. I’m absolutely amazed that it’s not been fixed already. I mean, I’m just amazed. If you had asked me back in ’95 that in 2017, courts would be randomly putting up PDF files, and they would take stuff down, and it wouldn’t be the official opinions, and half of them would still be using West citations for official citation, I’d say, “No way. Never gonna happen. We’re gonna have some sort of standard format. It’ll be an easy mark-up. People will be able to download it in batch, and courts should have the desire to make the lawyers better researchers. At least, I think they should be part of their job.”

We have none of that. And if anything, we’ve seen more closed systems. Certainly, Lexis has taken over some of the codes, trying to keep some of those things or California case law. You can’t download California case law off the California site. There’s a Lexis licensing agreement. So you have all these additional licensing agreements and things in place, and what courts have done … It’s not the free law part. They’ve done the free access part. So they’ll give you free access to it, and often it’s a chopped-down version, but it’s very limited utility. So you might be able to find a case or do a case pull, but can you get all the cross-links, get the internal page numbers all the time [crosstalk 00:22:52]–

Sam Glover: You can’t do research.

Tim Stanley: No. It’s not research quality. You can’t go between the courts. So I would have thought something like that would have changed, and I know Carl set up a law.gov meeting to start looking at that, as well. At least my take is that needs to be driven from the court system itself, and I don’t think judges in courts look at decisions the same way. I still think they are really focused on their decision between the parties. They might look a little bit towards the future of their decision, but I don’t think they’re thinking of it as an overall operational system.

Sam Glover: But they obviously take advantage of it. I mean, they use WestLaw and LexisNexis, maybe Fastcase. They’re researching all the time. It’s frustrating that they couldn’t see beyond that.

Tim Stanley: I think some can, but I think you need to come up with standards and you’ve got too many … It’s like more governments. Every government’s different. Every court’s different. Even in the federal district courts, they’re all different. So it’s almost like a balkanization of all the different jurisdictions. It’s very hard for them to coordinate on stuff, and when they do coordinate on stuff, I don’t believe they’re thinking of, “How can we make it free?” They’re thinking of, “How can we cover our cost?” And then once you start covering cost, then you start saying, “Okay. We can charge for this stuff. That’s good. Let’s work more cost in here so we can charge more.”

That’s really why I think we’ve gone with PACER and some of the other stuff. You look at the PACER system, I can’t believe that’s that expensive. So there are ways to do things. I don’t really have a huge expectation of the government right now. When the Obama administration came in, I think there was a lot of hope, and I think they did a lot of stuff, but they don’t really control the judiciary because they’re the executive branch. So while a lot of executive stuff came online free, the judiciary stuff didn’t quite stay up to the state.

Sam Glover: It’s one of these things … You said “balkanization,” which is a really apt description. Every district court chambers can have their own rules for what happens in those chambers. It’s not just 50 different states and federal jurisdictions, it’s every single judge in the system you have to get onboard, it seems like.

Tim Stanley: I’m on the board of the American Legal Net, and the fact that every single court makes their own local rules, that’s a business for us. I don’t know if it should be a business for us, but it is. Yeah. It’s really much more random than people think. Even the district courts systems, when you … We download all the federal civil filings every day and we go to each court. All those courts have different systems. They’re on different versions of it. They’ll move forward. They’ll revert back. It’s very interesting. Even the courts aren’t all trying to stay in the same base system on a federal district court level, which if you’re going to be able to coordinate something, that’s a top down thing from the Chief Justice. So it’s probably easier to have someone command it.

I think there’s certainly improvements. I’m looking forward to the Supreme Court putting up the older briefs pretty soon. That’ll be good. ABA has been sort of handling that for the last bunch of years, but there’s still more briefs. I mean, they don’t get necessarily all the briefs all the time. So I think that’ll be interesting. Things are moving, but it’s always a little bit slower. But I would have thought a decade ago, we’d be done, but it’s just hard to coordinate sometimes.

Sam Glover: It’s a shame we’re not.

Tim Stanley: It’s a coordination issue, though. It’s not a technology or cost issue, even. Maybe a little bit of political stuff from West and Lexis, but even though I think they’re more just sort of filling in the vacuum. I don’t know whether they’re necessarily even driving it right now.

Sam Glover: So let me circle back to Justia and ask you, for our listeners, who are predominantly lawyers, maybe exclusively lawyers, what’s the best thing they should be getting out of Justia? How can they use it most effectively?

Tim Stanley: For lawyers, we certainly have the lawyer directory, which is free. People should fill out their profiles. Similar to Avvo in certain ways, but we don’t have ratings yet. We’ll be adding ratings at some point. But it’s free. It’s good. It’s clean. So that’s one I have from just a basic marketing standpoint. We do websites and blogs, too, but that’s the marketing side.

On the free law side, I think there’s probably two items. I think the number one item is getting the case law summaries that we send out every day, and we send out a weekly one for different practice areas. That’s free. You can get all the briefs and new Supreme Court decisions in your state. If you’re in California, you can get all the appellate decisions every day. All the federal decisions. We have a lot of law librarians at large firms that just subscribe to all of them, and then they forward over what they want to to different folks. That’s totally fine. It’s pretty good. We have attorney writers that are really good writers, and they just knock it out every day. That parts been really good.

The second item, which is sort of a project we’re working on with Cornell right now, which is by way of Jerry Goldman, which is still Oyez site. We’re going to be really updating that Oyez site and make it a real Supreme Court center. I think you’re going to see a lot more stuff come into it that’s going to go beyond the audio. We’re going to bring all the cases into it. We’re going to be bringing in briefs. We’re going to be bringing additional research materials. And that’s going to become a much bigger deal.

Sam Glover: Very cool.

Tim Stanley: And we’re going to be working with a bunch of different law schools. Obviously, Cornell, but Chicago-Kent’s going to continue with it, and we’ve talked to folks at Harvard and Stanford and the normal suspects. So we’ll be doing stuff with them.

Sam Glover: When should we start looking for that?

Tim Stanley: We are meeting at the end of August in Ithaca to put together the final game plans. We’re sort of been running it now for a year just to make sure that we could run it and not screw everything up, which we got through a year. Pretty good. And my guess is, we’ll start making adjustments during the fall and we’ll look to release something … probably, my guess is early 2018. It might be during the summer of 2018. It’s possible. Certainly like yourself and some of the other tech folks and [inaudible 00:28:30] and some of the other people … We’ll be sending some invites to take a look at the beta as desired and … Not an invite. Just an email. You can take a look at it, and you guys can tell us what you think or what we should change.

Sam Glover: Very cool.

Tim Stanley: But I think it’ll be really, really good. From an educational tool set, it’s already a really nice site, but there’s a lot more stuff we can add. We might have some stuff for high school students, some for college, but we’ll have a lot of stuff for other attorneys. We’ll sort of bring those things in. Those are sort of the core things, but we have other portal things. You can get subscriptions to new questions on our site to answer, if you want to look for some clients that way. That tends to be a good client producer. And, of course, the case pools. Normally, people find us, but we have a Google search if they don’t go to FindLaw or Casetext or want the other ones to show up in the Google search or PublicResearch.org. That’s more of a Google case pull type world, but we get a lot of that, too.

Sam Glover: Very cool.

Tim Stanley: We’re working pretty well, and I think that on our side, I think our engineering team has just really been able to drive a lot of things, and we just do a lot. We have projects with the 7th circuit. We’re doing projects all over the place that you don’t always see that we have going on. We have a lot of projects, and if you sort of look at the amount of work we’re knocking out, it’s impressive. I mean, our guys have really good programs. I mean, really, really good. So that’s been a good thing, and it’s allowed us to put up a lot of free stuff, and then people take it from there, and you get web law.

Sam Glover: Are there any other side projects you want to highlight?

Tim Stanley: I think Oyez is the big one right now. The other projects that we’re looking at, we’ll be doing pretty soon or supporting and probably add some tech support to a fake news media product with some law schools, so that’ll be coming out pretty soon. We did the California Supreme Court Center for Stanford, which is pretty nice. We did a Fair Use site for Stanford that’s pretty good that a lot of people use, so we did that with the guys at Nolo Press. So those are other bigger sites, but we do a lot of death penalty focus stuff and anti-death penalty things. I mean, there’s a ton of projects. We’re pretty much always doing two or three projects in any particular time when … As long as we have the resources, we just sort of take it up and do it, so it’s always good.

Sam Glover: Very cool. Well, Tim, thanks so much for being with me today. It was really cool to hear more about you and FindLaw and Justia and karma. So thanks a lot.

Tim Stanley: All right. Thank you.

Aaron Street: Make sure to catch next week’s episode of The Lawyerist podcast. If you’d like more information about today’s show, please visit Lawyerist.com/podcast or LegalTalkNetwork.com. You can subscribe via iTunes or anywhere podcasts are found. Both Lawyerist and the Legal Talk Network can be found on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and you can download the free app from Legal Talk Network in Google Play or iTunes.

Sam Glover: The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own, and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by, Legal Talk Network. Nothing said during this podcast is legal advice.

Podcast #129: The Business of Public Access to Law, with Tim Stanley was originally published on Lawyerist.com.