. . . if you want to cite to judicial law, you must pay to access the Reporter’s opinions.

Sounds crazy, but it’s true.

As a law student I wasn’t aware of the problem. But it frequently holds me back, now that I’m building online information systems. E.g., say some text on oregonlaws.org contains a citation to an opinion, such as

PGE v. Bureau of Labor and Industries, 317 Or 606, 859 P2d 1143 (1993)

. . . one of the most important Oregon cases; and of course law, owned by all of us.

To make the website more valuable to my visitors, I want to grab the text of that opinion and display it. Or, failing that, I’d like to simply hyperlink to it, online.

But neither of these are possible. The unique identifiers we’re provided to this public law: “317 Or 606″, “859 P2d 1143″ — point to resources accessible only behind a pay-wall. If you’re skeptical, try googling for ”859 P2d 1143” or ”317 Or 606“. Zilch.

Quisitive is a one-of-a-kind app for screening name ideas, searching U.S. trademarks, and learning about branding, naming, trademark, and copyright.

We’ve developed it to the same high standards as OregonLaws.org: citations for every piece of information, high readability, and excellent user experience.

See the Quisitive website for more information.

I love gaming. So I subscribe to Big Fish Games for $6.99/month. For that I get one game per month, and a discount on extra ones I buy. Yesterday I checked up on my account and what I saw made me love Big Fish.

I hadn’t logged in for six months, and so hadn’t taken advantage of my monthly game download. But it turned out that I hadn’t wasted my money: I had six months’ credit waiting for me to use. Plus, for getting six games (even though included in the subscription price), they gave me credit for a free seventh. Plus, as thanks for being a member for a year, they’re sending me a plushie. They are awesome; I’ll probably never cancel my service.

Big Fish is doing it right: rewarding customers for their loyalty and giving them the feeling that they’re getting something for their money. I want our customers to feel like they’re getting an incredible value too.

Then get satisfaction. We’ve created a Q&A site with Get Satisfaction; an excellent platform for building community and responding to peoples’ needs.

If you’ve got questions, gripes or feedback you’ve been wanting to share, now’s your chance.

One year ago, we were serving around 75,000 page-views per month. We’re now doing 200,000. Looks like it’s time to upgrade our server plan and do some “scalability” and throughput testing to see how the current architecture is holding up.

John was awarded the Lawyer of the Year award for his pro bono work with Marion-Polk Legal Aid Services elder law clinic known as ELVIS (Elder Law Volunteers In Service).

If you’re interested in joining our sponsors, you can get started here.

Background Info

Every year, the Oregon legislature meets and passes new laws. Many of these update the ORS in various ways. However, the ORS is published only every two years. Therefore, to know whether a statute is really the latest version, getting the latest ORS (currently 2009) is just the first step. One needs to then find out if the section has been amended or repealed. The legislature makes all this information available online: here are the laws passed in the 2010 special session, and here’s the main page for bills and laws.

The Project

Luckily, the legislature’s documents allowed us to parse their documents and integrate the information into the web site. This is because of their very clear structure and concise style. After parsing the data and adding it to the database, we inserted icons and notifications everywhere that made sense. Besides the amended/repealed status, we display the effective date, bill number, session name, hyperlink to the original document, and a summary of the changes. We aimed to make the icons show a little splash of color without distracting much from the content. Personally, I like the way the Chapter pages look now; giving an overview of amended and repealed sections all on one screen. We have some good ideas for taking this further. Examples: viewing the list of amendments, sending e-mail notifications for changes in particular areas of law, and viewing the changes to the ORS in a time line. As always, feedback is welcome.

Examples

ORS 659A.033 — Violation of ORS 659A.030 by denying religious leave or prohibiting certain religious observances or practices, amended, effective July 1, 2011. ORS 166.274 — Relief from prohibition against possessing or purchasing firearm, amended, effective 3/18/2010; ORS 348.117 — Repayment of loans for nursing program, amended, effective 3/10/2010.

Chapter screen providing an overview of amended and repealed sections

Proposed Q&A site for lawyers, law librarians, law students, and others to share information about finding and using primary sources.”

At Stack Exchange.

It’s exciting to see the speed of our project picking up and the website getting closer to covering its regular operating expenses.  Corporate sponsorship is a way for organizations to support our programs and reach a select audience of people searching for legal information.  Contact us to learn more.

Here’s the backstory on how it came to be.

EDIT:

The story’s gotten a little more complicated:  In the past day or so, I discovered that it’s possible that my work is superfluous: The “TARR” USPTO web app provides single-document retrieval via URLs that don’t time out.  Many (most?) practitioners seem to only know about the TESS service, though, which *does* time out.  Also, the TARR data seems to come from a different source, and is definitely a different format.  For example, the IBM registration I use as an example:

http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=75871833

“The end result is that the city would focus on what only it can do best: providing raw data about itself, and, similar to the Secretary of State’s business registry, acting as a means of identification and authentication.”

“The workshops have examined copyright restrictions, privacy implications, and the technical underpinnings necessary to provide authenticated access to bulk legal materials.

“This workshop will be streamed live on the Internet, and video will be posted after the workshop on YouTube and the Internet Archive.

http://www.americanprogress.org/events/2010/06/lawgov.html

A person commits the offense of operating a motor vehicle while using a mobile communication device if the person, while operating a motor vehicle on a highway . . .

ORS 811.507

It will be “donation-ware”: all the proceeds will go to the Public Interest Law Project at Lewis & Clark Law School.

See the Flickr image set for more pictures.  It’ll be finished at the end of May.