Ep 249: How The Free Law Project Works to Expand Access to Legal Information, with Cofounder Michael Lissner

This episode explores the efforts of the Free Law Project in making legal information more accessible and promoting competition within the legal industry through technology and open data.

1. The Free Law Project seeks to make the legal system more equitable by providing free access to a vast database of legal information.
2. CourtListener, its flagship initiative, houses a comprehensive collection of court decisions and filings.
3. RECAP is an extension that reduces PACER expenses by sharing documents among its users.
4. The organization plays a crucial role in supporting investigative journalism by providing data on judicial financial disclosures.
5. Future ambitions include enhancing legal data accessibility and developing tools to further support public and professional legal research.

1. Introduction to Free Law Project

Brief overview of the Free Law Project’s mission and history. Michael Lissner explains the origins and objectives of the organization. Michael Lissner: "Our big picture is we want to try and use technology and advocacy to make the legal sector better."

2. Technologies and Impact

Discussion on the technologies developed by the Free Law Project and their impact on the legal industry. Michael Lissner: "We're trying to make it more fair, more equitable, more competitive."

3. Challenges and Achievements

Lissner addresses the challenges faced and the achievements, particularly the growth of CourtListener and RECAP. Michael Lissner: "We've gotten to the point where we're like, let's have the ambition of having every piece of case law of all time in the system."

4. Supporting Journalism and Transparency

The role of Free Law Project in supporting journalism, especially in exposing financial conflicts of interest among judges. Michael Lissner: "It's fun to be Pulitzer adjacent."

1. Utilize CourtListener: Leverage free access to legal documents for research and education.
2. Install RECAP: Use the RECAP extension to save on PACER costs and contribute to the pool of accessible legal documents.
3. Support Transparency: Engage with and promote platforms that enhance transparency in the legal system.
4. Stay Informed: Regularly update knowledge on legal innovations and data access tools.
5. Contribute to Open Data: Participate in or support projects that aim to make legal data openly accessible to enhance public knowledge and legal competition.

Since 2010, the nonprofit Free Law Project has been working to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive using technology, data and advocacy. It may be best known for CourtListener, its flagship project that houses an immense collection of court orders and opinions, and for its RECAP suite, which is the largest free collection on the internet of court filings and dockets.

But there is a lot more to the Free Law Project, as you will hear from our guest on today’s episode, Michael Lissner, the Free Law Project’s cofounder, executive director, and chief technology officer. Lissner started the Free Law Project while earning his master’s degree at the University of California Berkeley School of Information, with the assistance of cofounder Brian Carver, who was then an assistant professor at the school and who is now copyright counsel at Google.

Since then, the Free Law Project has expanded into a multifaceted source of legal data and tools, all with the goals of providing free access to legal materials and developing technology to enhance legal research and innovation.

The Free Law Project’s data also supports a range of academic research and investigative journalism, including having provided data that fueled the recent Pulitzer Prize awarded to news organization ProPublica for its reporting on the financial conflicts of Supreme Court justices.

People

Michael Lissner, Bob Ambrogi

Companies

Free Law Project

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Michael Lissner

Content Warnings:

None

Mike Lissner
So you can go on Courtlistener, you can do search. We've been working for the past two years on our search engine. It's pretty good and you can share links, which is pretty cool, so you can share the information. The second way we look at it is that we want to drive competition in the legal sector. Not only are we collecting this data and being greedy and keeping it to ourselves like certain other groups may be doing, we collect this data and we put it out as bulk files. We put it out in a database that you can connect to. We put it out with APIs. And the idea is that if you are doing tax work, workers comp building, the next tool for in house counsel, all of these things can benefit from good legal software and data, and we're making that available.

Bob Ambrogi
Today on law next since 2010, the nonprofit free law project has been working to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive using technology, data and advocacy. It may be best known for court listener, its flagship project that houses an immense collection of court orders and opinions, and for its recap project, which is the largest free collection on the Internet of court filings and documents. But there's a lot more to the Free Law project, as you will hear from today's guest, Mike Lisner.

Mike is the Free Law Project's co founder, executive director, and chief technology officer.

He started the Free law project while earning his master's degree at the UC Berkeley School of Information with the assistance of his co founder, Brian Carver, who was then an assistant professor at the school and who's now copyright counsel at Google. Over the years, the Free Law project has expanded into a multifaceted source of legal data and tools, all with the goals of providing free access to legal materials and developing technology to enhance legal research and innovation? This is Bob Ambrogi and you're listening to Law next, the podcast that features the innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what's next in law.

Before we get to that conversation, please take this moment to learn about the sponsors whose generosity supports this podcast.

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Now on to today's conversation with Mike Lisner.

Mike Lissner, welcome to Lawnext.

Mike Lissner
Thank you, Bob. I'm excited to be here. Finally.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah, finally, right? And we've been talking about this for a while, and for all the times I've thought about having you on, I thought about you most recently just because of the announcement of the Pulitzer Awards last week and the fact that you guys had some bit of a role in that. We can talk about that a little bit more later on. But, you know, first I just kind of like to start with maybe the overview of what the heck the free Law project is, because not everybody listening to this podcast is going to know. So let's, let's start with the nutshell of what you do, and then we'll dive a lot more into it.

Mike Lissner
Sure. So if you haven't heard of the free law project, you may have heard of recap and you may have heard of Courtlistener. And if you're a social media fiend that follows legal issues, you may have heard of the big cases bot or one of the other bots we run there. Free law project runs all of those initiatives, if you've heard of those. And our big picture is we want to try and use technology and advocacy, and we try to make the legal sector better, try to make it more fair, more equitable, more competitive, and a variety of ways, a big way, you.

Bob Ambrogi
Try and do that. Or maybe one of the earliest ways you tried to do that was by expanding access to legal information, right? Is that fair to say?

Mike Lissner
Yeah, that's absolutely right. So I think we are getting close to half a billion records, depending on how you count, between our databases of case law and our databases of federal pacer data, financial disclosures or argument audio judges, and other things. So, yeah, we collect a lot of data, more than 100,000 items additionally each.

Bob Ambrogi
So this all started, if I have it right, when you were a master's student at UC Berkeley School of Information, working on your master's thesis, what was the kind of the original idea? Or how did this come about in the first place?

Mike Lissner
Yeah, at the School of information, which I always have to give a plug because they're amazing if you haven't heard of schools of information, they're wonderful. You should check them out. If you're thinking about a grad degree, you have to do a final project. And I was fishing around for that. And it can be a paper or technical thing.

And one of the professors sort of pitched that. They had a problem.

His name was Brian Carver, and he went on to become one of the co founders with me of free law project.

Bob Ambrogi
And he's still on your board as well?

Mike Lissner
And he's still on the board. That's right. And the problem he pitched was the simplest, stupidest little thing he wanted to know. As a professor that studies intellectual property, anytime there's a copyright or trademark case in a circuit court, the day it comes out, he just wants an email. That's it. And he didn't have a solution to that. He could go and he had the fancy west subscription and all this other stuff, but he didn't have that. It would take a week before west got the document and processed it and finally got him an email. Maybe that's where I started. I went and I built that.

I'm one of those people that snowballs in ambition.

It's like, well, okay, if you're going to build an alert system, you need what you need to collect the data. You need a login system for people to set up accounts and stuff. You need a search engine, and you need to keep that data around so people can click through and read it. That's where I started. I built out that, and I said, oh, hey, well, if we have some of this case law coming in every day from the circuit courts, let's collect case law from the state courts. Okay, well, our collection starts in 2010, but this guy, Carl Malamude, is collecting older stuff. Let's put it in there, too, so everybody can search across everything that's on the open Internet. It just spirals from there.

It's gotten to the point where we're like, hey, let's have the ambition of having every piece of case law of all time in the system, starting in the colonial days. And what do you know? We're getting really close, and our case law database is just rounding the bend on being complete in almost every way you could hope for.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah, I was looking back, and I first wrote about you in 2011 in a blog post saying free service alerts you to federal cases of interest. So that was that kind of alert service that you're talking about. And then it went from there. And probably what most people who know of you are going to know of, as you say, the court listener or recap project. But how have you sort of, how has court listener expanded over the years from when you first started to kind of build this database of cases and to where it is now?

Mike Lissner
Yeah. So we started in the case law, and around the time we started that out in Princeton, a couple of people were working on building recap, which if you use Pacer, you should go and install recap because it'll lower your bill and give you some nice little features. And so they were working on that, but they went and got jobs. Right. And so it was kind of falling into bad maintenance and needed love. And so we took that over, and that sort of got us into this federal filing pacer data world. And every now and then we hear from people who want federal filing data, and they'll say, hey, we want 10,000 items. We want to know every complaint in the labor world. Right? Can you go collect that so I can build an LLM or so I can do whatever, analyze it, digital analytics, you name it. Right. And so we do those kinds of data gathering things, and that's how we've gotten to have just, just a huge amount of content.

We've got 20 or 30,000 people using the extension. They contribute anything they buy in Pacer, we get a copy, and then we have these bulk collection projects we do. So that's how we got into Pacer data.

Bob Ambrogi
Just to stop you there, again, for people who don't know recap, and I'm sure a lot of my listeners probably have heard of recap, but recap, the basic idea is there's a browser extension. I'm going into Pacer. I'm getting a document. Maybe I just got a notice of electronic filing or something. I'm involved in litigation. I download the document. If I've got this extension file, then it's automatically going to give you a copy of it. Once you've got a copy of it, then the next person who comes along who needs that document can get it out of recap without having to pay the pacer fee to get the document. That's an oversimplification. But is that the basic idea?

Mike Lissner
Right. That's the basic idea. And the two really cool things it does is as you're using Pacer, you never have to leave Pacer. You just use pacer. Things automatically get uploaded. And then anything somebody else has ever uploaded, right inside pacer itself, you'll see a little icon for recap, and you click the icon, you get it for free. So you just keep using Pacer. You install the thing takes 30 seconds and you start saving money. It's the simplest thing. And then if you want, you can go. And there's other features, like you can use it to start getting alerts and go to court Lister and makes the content searchable and all this other stuff. But at its most basic, install, it takes 30 seconds and you start saving money.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah. And is that, I mean, has that been a source of controversy at all over the years? I mean, the idea that you should be able to in some way circumvent having to pay for this system that the government charges for, you know, have you come under criticism for that at all?

Mike Lissner
Yeah, it's a funny thing, right? So Congress said that the courts can create pacer and charge money for it. And, you know, so cool. The courts are out to do that. But the way we always look at it is we are there making their jobs easier. We are helping them provide the public access Congress asked them to do. And so where's the controversy in that? Right? They're not supposed to be using Pacer as a line item on their budget. It's supposed to be a break even system. So if we're detracting from their costs, we're also detracting their revenue and it all works out and everyone's happy. Right? Of course. Of course that's how it works. But I think in reality, yeah, Pacer is a big slush fund and they've been found now in the class action they've lost. They have to pay out $125 million to the pacer class action. So if you're your pacer user, you should be getting a check in six months or something. So, yeah, they're not always happy with us. They put warnings on court websites and saying, oh, no, these academics that are running software, who knows what they're going to do with it? They've said, oh, it's going to leak your sealed content. And some of these are really important concerns. Nobody wants your sealed content. We certainly don't want it. And we work really hard never to get it. We've never had any problems in ten years. But we're going after their slush fund a little bit. So, yeah, occasionally they like to go after us, too.

Bob Ambrogi
And so recap has been part of what's been kind of feeding this larger court listener entity that has various components to it at this point. But you mentioned the case law part of it. And how extensive is your case law collection at this point? Are you tapping into? I forget whether you were. I know. I saw you at the case law access project event recently when they kind of announced the culmination of their full, non commercial release of everything they've gathered.

Do you have all of their stuff, or what do you have at this point?

Mike Lissner
Yeah. So for those that aren't familiar, and I'm guessing a lot of people on this, listen to this, probably are, but Harvard did an amazing thing. Right? They somehow got the money and the institutional support to rip up all their books and scan them all and put them under a salt mine. Right. Like, digitize everything and put it into a salt mine so it'll stay dry for the next $0.05 from a no.

Bob Ambrogi
Longer existent legal tech company.

Mike Lissner
And those books are no longer in the library at Harvard in physical form. It's crazy.

So we've been working with that data for years now, and we have incorporated everything from that collection. So, like, to answer your question, how extensive is it? If you think that librarians collecting important case law over the past several centuries is a good measure of completeness, then we have all of that.

And that starts in the colonial days, and it goes to 2018, then it gets complicated, and that lasts six years because we've been gathering that data.

But citations are really hard and page numbering really hard, and so we're working really hard. That's where our focus is now, is finishing that, and we're going to start a scanning project soon to start scanning the books. And we're doing a lot of stuff to close those gaps.

Bob Ambrogi
To close the gap, you're saying, between the end of that project and the current time? Is that what you're talking about?

Mike Lissner
That's exactly it, yeah.

Bob Ambrogi
Why do you have to scan that? I mean, isn't that digitally available to.

Mike Lissner
You somehow or so, the main reason is citations. And west and Lexus have effectively a monopoly on citations. Right.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah.

Mike Lissner
Before you can really talk about this stuff, you have to go. It has to get published in a book, first of all, an actual book, and then you have to look at the page where it occurs in that book, and that's your citation. And so if you want to know the citations, you can either violate their terms of service and scrape west law, or you can buy a book and effectively scrape that with a scanner. Right?

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah.

Mike Lissner
So that's what we're going to do.

Bob Ambrogi
All right, so ambitious. Round two.

Mike Lissner
Yeah.

It's about 220,000 pages per year, so it's not actually that bad. That may sound bad, but it's actually not that bad.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah. Having all this court data, having all this court filing data, having docketing data, the court cases, the opinions, what's kind of the overarching goal of that? How is this being used? How can members of the public use it? How can others use it?

Mike Lissner
Yeah, we look at it in two ways. One, we're going to build tools and we're going to build that baseline level of legal research tools. So you can go on courtlistener, you can do search. We've been working for the past two years on our search engine. It's pretty good. And you can share links, which is pretty cool, so you can share the information. Basic stuff. The second way we look at it is that we want to drive competition in the legal sector.

So not only are we collecting this data and, you know, being greedy and keeping it to ourselves like certain other groups may be doing, we collect this data and we put it out as bulk files. We put it out in a database that you can connect to. We put it out with APIs. And the idea is that if you are doing tax work, workers comp, building, the next tool for in house counsel, all of these things can benefit from good legal software and data, and we're making that available and that should make the whole sector more competitive. And if we can do that, that will provide a lot of benefit to actual people and organizations.

Bob Ambrogi
So, and if I recall, because I think I wrote it out of the time, there was a point at which you had been giving access to that data available at no cost, and then at some point you decided to start charging for bulk access to data. Was that, I know you came under some attack at the time, but at least from one person who was benefiting from access to that data.

What was the rationale for the free law project charging for access to this data?

Mike Lissner
Totally. To be clear, case law data is and has always been available for free. We make big bulk data files. Once a month, you can go download them.

What we charge for on the case law side is if you want API access, if you're building a business using our data, if you want access to the database itself, those are the kinds of services organizations tend to want, and they tend to be actually very happy to pay. They look at it and they go, why is that free? I don't trust it.

Where there was more controversy was we took over recap and if you wanted API access to that, it used to be more free. And we dialed that in a little bit for the same reason. We want to be sustainable, we want to grow, we want to make a bigger impact. And if we just give everything away for free, that doesn't work and you have to eat. We do give it away to. A lot of folks are free, like journalists. You can try and strike a deal with a journalist, but unless they're the New York Times, you're just going to feel bad about taking their money. So go do your good work. Take the data. We're all going to be happy and benefit from that. But if you're the next hot legal AI startup, yes, we're going to make a deal, and that's good for everyone.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah. Yeah.

You are a nonprofit. You are a fairly thinly staffed nonprofit, I think. I don't know exactly what your staffing is, but just what I know of, there aren't a whole lot of people working there. So how do you support the work that you do?

Mike Lissner
Yeah, we are indeed thinly staffed, and we are supported by donations. We are supported by some corporate donations, and we're supported by those sorts of deals I was mentioning. And it's sort of a blend. We also have memberships. If you want extra benefits on our website, then you can sign up for a membership. But we're always looking for more support. We have a whole backlog of big services. We want to do that. Hit that sweet spot between providing that base level of functionality for people who need it and encouraging the legal sector itself.

We're going to do a big fundraising round to build a citator in the next few months. And that's going to be, it's expensive and hard, and it's going to cost a lot to do the AI on that citator in the style of a.

Bob Ambrogi
Shepherds or that kind of a thing or.

Mike Lissner
Yeah, so, you know, finding bad law, we didn't used to be able to do that before AI, but now it's feasible. And so we're going to raise that bar again and say, okay, now everyone in America has access to a free citator.

Bob Ambrogi
Just a week before Mike and I spoke, the Pulitzer prizes were announced, including the prestigious public Service award given to the investigative news organization ProPublica for its reporting on the financial conflicts and holdings of Supreme Court justices. While you may have heard of some of that reporting, you may not know that the free law project played a role in that reporting and that it has also supported related reporting by the Wall Street Journal.

Stay tuned to find out more about how the free law project supports investigative journalism.

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Welcome back to Law Next, where I am speaking today with Mike Lissner, the co founder, executive director, and chief technology officer of the Free Law Project, a nonprofit devoted to making legal information publicly and freely available.

You've already heard about some of its major projects, including court listener and recap, but there are a number of other projects in the works, including one to develop an open source e file system.

In this second part of our conversation, we'll get deeper into the work of the Free Law project. But first, I asked Mike about the project's role in supporting investigative journalism and the Pulitzer Prize recently awarded to the news organization ProPublica. Let's get back to the conversation.

You mentioned the fact that you make some of your data available to journalists. And as we're talking, we're about a week past the announcement of the Pulitzers for this year in which the news organization ProPublica won a Pulitzer. A couple of Pulitzers, I forgot now for its reporting on judges financial improprieties, financial conflicts.

And you played a role in that, and you've previously played a role in some significant reporting around those issues. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Mike Lissner
Yeah. It's fun to be Pulitzer adjacent.

I'm going to somehow insist on getting a byline in one of these because this is twice now where it's like always, the bridesmaid, you got a shout.

Bob Ambrogi
Out from the Wall Street Journal. Gave you a shout out, though, when you were.

Mike Lissner
Yeah. So a couple years ago, Wall Street Journal did their business big thing where they identified over 1000 times where federal judges did not disclose conflicts that they had, and we were the data provider for that. They didn't get the Pulitzer for that, but they repeated it the next year doing something very similar for administrative agencies. They got a Pulitzer for that.

And then on ProPublica they sort of took the same concept, but they started from a different place. They started with what are the gifts and things that we can identify about judges? And were they disclosed in the database freelaw project is providing? And of course, many of them were not. And, you know, and you, I think, I don't know if other people figured this out, but I felt pretty sure they were getting the Pulitzer. They were obviously going for it. They had a couple of you write these really long articles that no one's going to read because they just want to show you've covered it exhaustively. They were working on it. Right. They were after it and they deserve it. It's amazing reporting.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah. And they built out an app that you can kind of go to and search for information on judges financial interests. And a lot of that is based on the data that you helped provide for them.

I think I read your blog post which indicated they did some work on the data after they got it from you as well, to clean it up and normalize it a little bit.

That's pretty cool.

I think it's good for you for doing that.

Mike Lissner
Yeah.

It's a really important dataset and I think it, plus the reporting has sort of shifted how Americans think about judges to see, like, you can look at it and it's an open dataset. I encourage journalists, if they're listening, to go and play with it. There's a lot more stories in there.

Like, no one has reported on who the wealthiest judges are, but let me tell you, they are not your every man off the street.

The average wealth of a judge will surprise you if you've never looked at it. And it's in these documents.

There are ones that have, they disclose art that they've purchased and I forget the numbers, but it's obscene. You want judges that are your peer. I think that's an ideal we have and some are, some are not. And that's not ideal.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah, well, I mean, I've been a lawyer for a long time and I've known a lot of people who've become judges and they often tend to be people who are, to start with, are politically connected. I mean, we're not. I live in a state where the judges are appointed, not elected, but they still tend to be ones who are very politically connected. And one of the ways they're politically connected is they give a lot of money to candidates and they give a lot of money to candidates because they have a lot of money to give in the first place. And it is a vicious, vicious cycle in terms of perpetuating a certain class of people becoming judges.

Mike Lissner
Unfortunately, that's not how you evidence in the system.

Bob Ambrogi
I like your comment that, you know, a lot of Americans have been sort of made aware of this now because I'm not sure a lot of people care. Not enough people care about it. I mean, I wish more people would care about it, but this kind of reporting will hopefully help drive more concern about that.

Mike Lissner
I think so. And I think, you know, to be clear, like, I think by and large, federal judges, which are what I know best, they are some of probably the most transparent, most honest, most ethically, they think about ethics probably more than almost anybody. And I think the sense I get is a lot of them are really frustrated with the reporting because they try so hard, and the message from the top is just not pretty.

Bob Ambrogi
Something else that you've started working on it.

You're working on so many things. I'm jumping a little bit from thing to thing, but I know that last year I wrote about something that you've started working on, which is the idea of develop an open access e filing system. Tell us about that.

Mike Lissner
Yeah, this is sort of the vanguard, and we sort of identified that. We're on the outside gathering data, and we have been since forever.

And that comes with compromises. If a court decides to block you, as Missouri has, then it's hard, right. It's hard to provide the guarantees you need to both to your users and to the legal sector that's relying on you.

And we said, how can we fix this?

Well, we need to get inside somehow. Right? And so we were able to get a grant to study that issue, and we've been sort of looking and interviewing and studying. We also did some freedom information requests to try and understand what the systems are inside the courthouse, what features they have, how much they cost, where people are not happy, where the courts are not happy, where the user's not happy, who are the users? All of these questions, and then once we've sort of analyzed what you might call the market, we're going to try and find our spot where we fit, where our set of skills and sort of motivations is going to make a difference.

Bob Ambrogi
Is it in conjunction with that work that you've been researching, some of the contracts that courts have with these technology providers who are providing the e filing systems or the docketing systems or whatever else they're using?

What are you finding there?

Mike Lissner
Yeah, so the idea is we wanted to figure out what are the systems and what are the contracts for the systems, how much do they cost and what features and all this. Right.

Bob Ambrogi
There's just a few major providers, right. Most courts are dealing with one of a few, a handful of major providers, if not one, largely.

Mike Lissner
I mean, Tyler Technologies is the elephant in the room, but there are others, and there's some home built systems as well. So we started just asking the top five states by population, what systems do you use, what contracts do you have, what amendments to the contracts? All of that fun stuff.

So far we got back Texas.

We learned they're paying $1.5 million a month for this website.

I like to remember at the end of the day, it's just a website, maybe some hardware somewhere, but every website has hardware. Now, as a taxpayer, you can ask yourself, is that $1.5 million a month? Is that reasonable? And that's before all the amendments because that's the base price. And you start adding other features they want on top. A lot of it is redacted. If you want to go and look at the price per feature, they have a covenant with the state where the state cannot share the price of the things that it is buying. Ask yourself if that's good policy. And so there's a lot of black boxes we're looking at, but that's Texas, and we're waiting to hear back from more states.

Bob Ambrogi
So if you were able to develop an open source version of this, and if you're able to get courts to adopt it, what would be the advantages of that? Is it simply a lower cost to taxpayers? Does it enhance access? Does it enhance standardization?

What are the goals, all of that?

Mike Lissner
I think it shifts the motivations a little bit. I'm going to be critical of them. But where they are strong is procurement, getting stuff into governments, building these systems and supporting them.

You know, AI is here, are they innovating? Are they providing useful tools? Is it clunky? Is it good? Right? Is it a fair cost? Is it secure? I think this has gone pretty unnoticed. But there's a one man researcher and they have been probing e filing systems and cmss for the past six months. And oh boy, these things are a disaster. They are totally insecure. This one person has been just running amok, finding vulnerabilities. I think they're up to like 20 vulnerabilities across several different systems. So more secure, I think would go in checklist too.

Bob Ambrogi
So for all the courts expressing concern about ensuring that the documents that are in some way supposed to be unavailable to the public, the fact of the matter is that in a lot of these systems, they're extremely vulnerable. It's really bad, if not extremely, they are potentially vulnerable.

Mike Lissner
Yep. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of problems in them and I think they've been patching them, but which is actually more than I expected. I expected them to be sort of unpatchable because they're deployed in so many places and unmaintainable. But they've been patching. But yeah, it's not pretty.

Bob Ambrogi
As I say, there's a, somebody can go to your website and see a long list and a blog of the various things that you're working on. But I've talked about some of the highlights. But what else are you really interested in right now that you're working in, or what else is new coming down the pike?

Mike Lissner
Yeah, I mean, I think we've touched on a lot of it. The scanning is an exciting new project. We're excited about that. On the case loss side, we're going to add, if folks are familiar with parallel citations, we're adding about 7 million additional citations to the data we already have.

So that'll get us to about 16 million citations, I think. So that's exciting there. Beyond all this, I think the other thing I would mention is that we have a lot of open source tools. So a lot of what you, the systems you see on our site, a lot of that's all open source. You can take it. We have a tool for finding bad redactions in PDF's where people don't redact things properly. That should get integrated everywhere.

If you have a system where people upload PDF's, legal PDF's, or if you're a journalist that looks at PDF's that are sometimes redacted, you should just automate it and make it so that bad redactions are flagged somehow. We have a tool for that. We have a tool for converting documents and audio files. We have podcasts. If you want to listen to a podcast, that's a fun one. That's coming up. We have the biggest collection of oral argument on the Internet, and we are going to start transcribing it so that it's searchable. And once we've done that, you can make a podcast from any search query. So you could search for Robert Ambrosi.

And anytime your name comes up in one of these oral arguments, an entry will be made into your podcast feed.

So that's coming up soon.

Bob Ambrogi
That's part of the oral argument database or that's something.

Mike Lissner
Yeah, that's part of the oral argument database.

So that one's pretty fun. I want to do it too many.

What's that?

Bob Ambrogi
I said, I hope I don't come up in too many court arguments.

Mike Lissner
Yeah, I want to do a swear words. Anytime somebody swears in court, put it in my podcast.

That's a fun one. We're going to do alerts for pacer data. So any query you want, you can do. Anytime there's a complaint with the nature of suit of habeas, habeas corpus, send me an email.

Anytime a term comes up in a legal document, whatever that document may be, send me an email that's coming up that'll be scalable. So if you want to put like 10,000 alerts, one for every client in a big firm.

Cool, right? No problem.

Those are two exciting things that are coming up.

Bob Ambrogi
Are there people or entities using your data in ways that may surprise listeners that they might not be aware of, other than the journalists we talked about and maybe some of them you can't talk about? I don't know. But are there other applications out there that are in some way using the data that you have that may be of interest to our listeners?

Mike Lissner
It's a fun question. There are, and I think what surprises me is that the legal sector sort of intersects a lot of other sectors. And so, like insurance companies, right? They want to know when the people they're insuring or the organizations they're insuring are in lawsuits. And as an individual, that makes me feel a little bit like, oh, no, right. My insurance rates are going to go up, but it actually is a nice economic thing. Right. Like, insurance rates are going to become more accurate and that should make them go down overall. So there's a lot of things like that where you have to sort of be like, okay, if you take a couple steps and you think about the downstream effects it's actually producing this data is helpful in a lot of sectors you might not think of.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah. Do you see your mission at all as being one of putting yourself out of business?

I mean, if we do ever get to the point, or would, could we conceivably ever get to the point where law is freely available through all sorts of media to the public and dockets are wide open and easy to access?

I mean, is that a pipe dream that that will ensure your long term operation, or is there a point where you become irrelevant?

Mike Lissner
This might be an overstatement, but I think almost every nonprofit should be trying to put themselves out of business.

There should always be, that higher goal of society got better, and now I'm not needed. So, yes, I think in one sense, yes, in another sense, this problem is so big that will probably always be here. There will always be a need for the data. There will always be a need for legal services for that baseline level.

And I think this comes up in the pacer context a lot because there are active bills in pacer trying to make it free.

And people are like, oh, isn't that part of your revenue? What are you going to do? And I'm like, no, it's going to be fine. We're going to collect the data like we do now, and we'll do the cleaning and the organizing. We'll make it easy for people so they're not scraping pacers. So I think there'll always be a role for us, practically speaking. Ideally speaking, it would be, it would be a beautiful world if we worked ourselves out of it.

Bob Ambrogi
Right. Well, and then I think, as you say, there's so much of what you're doing around building tools and software that can help enhance the data or make the data more usable or whatever else in any number of ways. You know, I've had people, I've had Carl Malamude on this podcast who's been a, you know, through his publicresource.org for a long time, kind of leading his own particular charge toward trying to provide access to government information. And I've had the justia people who, going way back to their fine law days, have done a lot over the years to provide access to information and the case law access project people, as well, have been on this podcast to talk about that. Is there sort of a, is there sort of cooperation among these different groups that are working to try and enhance public access to legal information in some way?

Mike Lissner
Yeah, we definitely all talk, and occasionally we partner on things. You know, I think partnerships aren't free. Right. Sometimes it's easier just to do things yourself, but we're all following each other and fans of each other and carving out our little spaces. So the good news and the bad news is there's, you know, plenty to do. Yeah.

Bob Ambrogi
Is there anything more on your roadmap beyond these immediate projects you've talked about at the beginning, your scanning project? I mean, where, what are you looking forward to doing in two or three or four or five years down the road?

Mike Lissner
Yeah, well, we've been wanting to expand to doing more state court dockets and cases. So that's on the sort of glimmer in the eye kind of thing.

Bob Ambrogi
Do you have any state court dockets at this point?

Mike Lissner
No. I mean, we have the case law, but we don't collect the dockets.

We do lots of federal. So we're hoping to do more of that, but we need the right partner. I think the long term vision, the moment is to sort of raise the level of our research platform and get it to where if you are a pro se, self represented litigant, if you are solo and you don't want to pay for west, you have another option. Right. And that's where that citator comes in.

I think that's a big missing piece. And so we're going to identify all those little missing pieces and some will never do, like treatises. Good luck. Right. Copyrighted content, forget it. But other things, I think raising it so courtlistener becomes sort of the easy to go to trusted resource that's definitely on our roadmap. Just in terms of software, you mentioned.

Bob Ambrogi
Earlier that the generative AI is helping to make it possible for you to develop the citator. Are there other ways that you see yourself incorporating Genai into the products and tools that you're developing?

Mike Lissner
We're not looking at a ton of Genai. I mean, I think summaries are an obvious one.

A vector search is another one. So I think those are three. Maybe that vector is not generative. The other one is vision APIs.

Like the scanning project said earlier, it's 220,000 pages, no big deal. Well, it used to be a big deal and you used to pull your hair out trying to parse that stuff, but now you throw it at a vision API and you get back pretty good results. Shockingly good results, in fact. So yeah, AI is a big part of steering the ship at this point. There's just so much that it enables. And we are partners with OpenAI, so we talk to them and there's a lot going on there.

Bob Ambrogi
Well, I should point out to listeners that if they go to your website, which is just free law, there is a nice big red donate button up there in the upper right hand corner. And as you are a nonprofit, if people think this work is important, encourage them to go click on that button. I've clicked on it a few times. I don't know if I have in a while. I better go back and check my donations, but I've donated from time to time anyway. Yeah, I really appreciate the work that you're doing.

Mike Lissner
Yeah, thanks, Bob. I appreciate the plug. And if folks want to email me those larger donors thinking about corporate sponsorships, send us an email. Love to hear from you. Talk about that kind of stuff. We have some big plans coming up and we're going to need a lot of support.

Bob Ambrogi
Great.

I hope you got those scanners from Harvard out of their basement or whatever.

Mike Lissner
Oh, they got rid of that thing. It's gone. Yeah, I think they got rid of it. As soon as they could.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah, that's a big project. All right. Well, is there anything else that you'd like to mention about this that we haven't talked about yet or anything else you want to bring up?

Mike Lissner
No, I think this is great.

I mean, I think we're out there. We're trying to make as big a difference as we can, whether it's through technology, data advocacy, and hopefully people appreciate what we're doing.

Bob Ambrogi
Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I always appreciate the work that you and other folks at Freelaw are doing, and it's always a pleasure to talk to you as well.

Mike Lissner
Yeah, great to talk to you, Bob.

Bob Ambrogi
Big thanks to Mike, listener, for joining me today to talk about the free Law project.

You can learn a lot more about it by visiting his website, free law, and while you're there, consider donating to support its work. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. If you'd like to share your own thoughts or comments on today's show, please do so by messaging me on LinkedIn or X or email me directly. Ambrogiomail.com lawnex is a production of Lawnx Media. I'm your host, Bob Ambrogi. I hope you'll join us again next time for another episode of Law. Next.