Will Local Bar Associations Put Westlaw Out of Business?

Local bar association membership is dropping nationwide. Although we have a glut of lawyers in this country, tightening budgets mean that many experienced lawyers find no need justifying the membership cost and young lawyers don't have resources or the cause to join.

When this sort of thing happens to local organizations in America, do they just roll over and bend under systemic pressures? No, of course not! They develop gimmicks to draw renewed interest. And the Philadelphia Bar Association is doing just that:

...the bar association also will launch a legal database of Pennsylvania case law and statutes available free to members, with the hope of getting more dues-paying lawyers.
...
[Bar Association Chancellor Rudy] Garcia, 59, says the centerpiece of the membership drive will be the new legal database, offered as a free service to firms with 100 percent membership. The bar association projects that of the 25 largest firms in Philadelphia, each will be able to save at least $35,000 a year on top of new membership costs by using the service in place of other commercial legal databases.

Watch out, Westlaw.

All hints of sarcasm aside, I actually quite like this. Justice is an important public commodity in any democracy, and it bothers me that in our common law system the case law, especially for lower-level courts, is ultimately the province of two monolithic media companies, one Canadian and the other European. Legal opinions are in the public domain and there's no reason our courts and/or local bar associations could not keep databases of their own opinions.

And to get really crazy, it would be nice if there was maybe a national organization that represented attorneys that could run something similar. One of the biggest bars to entry (and high prices) in the legal field in research costs. For a young attorney starting out, it either takes prohibitive time (going to a law library) or cost (subscribing to a commercial service) to ensure that he or she is relying on good law. Given modern database technology, it's absurd that a simple search through the application of a particular state statute could cost hundreds of dollars.

If local bar associations (or even a national one) take back our case law from the foreign capitalist oligarchs, the cost to the associations shouldn't even be that high. I would think it would be a productive way to earn CLE credit to volunteer on such a system, and if volunteers can fill a site like wikipedia (or even a site like gutenberg.org), I think a comprehensive system of case law would be feasible.

I don't mean to suggest that the Philadelphia Bar Association is the first to do this. They aren't. I just think it's a welcome trend for which a national collective project would greatly aid all parties save the Canadians and the British.