How Free Law Project Is Opening Access to Legal Data (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: They don't charge you to walk into a court, they shouldn't charge you to use a court's website. We love capitalism in America, but the pursuit of money does not always lead to the pursuit of justice. We have laws in this country that we expect people to follow, but the interpretations have always been in a silo. So that's what we try to fix.

[00:00:24] Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Stephanie.

[00:00:25] Speaker 3: And I'm Zach. Welcome to The Lawyer's Podcast, one of the many ways that we help lawyers build healthier firms, better businesses, and more sustainable lives. Today, I talk with Mike Lissner of the Free Law Project about the importance of the access to the law, big L, and the utility of their Court Lissner Project for attorneys, now that we've got Claude and MCPs and everybody running around trying to connect their stuff to the law.

[00:00:53] Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that. I mean, I feel like I'm hearing about the Court Lissner everywhere I go. So this will be a great chance to actually find out the details and learn what the heck they're doing.

[00:01:02] Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a fun one. It's a fun one. Stephanie, we just got done, I guess, a couple of weeks ago with LabCon, which is always one of my favorite times of the year, because I get to actually kind of go and sit with people and work on their computers on their firms. Yeah, and I love that aspect of what we do in lab, but you've come up with some other ways to build with people, to extend that.

[00:01:33] Speaker 2: Yeah. We in lab, we want to build, right, to your point. We want to help you build things, work on your business, and actually get some stuff done. So the end of the year is coming up. If you haven't woken up and realized that, it's kind of either your, I don't know, your favorite time of the year, your most dreaded time of the year, all the, maybe both as a business owner. But it is time, guys. It is time to start planning and making a plan for 2027. So we got to take a look at how we did in 26. Did we hit our goals? Did we not? Why? What are we focused on next? We don't have to linger too much on 26. There's some good, good lessons to be learned there.

[00:02:13] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:02:13] Speaker 2: So we're going to be hosting, I'm going to be hosting a series of working sessions. These are not going to be webinars. Stephanie talks at you. These are going to be two hours virtual, but get on a call. We're going to roll up our sleeves and we are going to get stuff done. We are going to build your 2027 strategy for your business on these calls.

[00:02:37] Speaker 3: Well, I want to say something there about like doing this virtually, because a lot of times it's like, well, we've been doing this type of stuff virtually for a considerable amount of time now, at least since 2020 COVID. I don't want to toot our own horn, but we know how to do an actual hands-on thing virtually.

[00:02:59] Speaker 2: And you know, I'm going to toot my own horn because I'm always trying to up my game too, right? Just like we teach our lawyers, you can always improve. And I've been working behind the scenes on my presentation abilities and, and some software and some tools. Right. And I think we are going to knock some people's socks off because this is going to be a Zoom room like you've never seen before. And I think you're going to be like, wait, I didn't know Zoom can do that. So I think it is going to kind of blow some people's minds and it is going to be fun. It's going to be interactive, but more importantly, like we are going to really make progress and get work done.

[00:03:39] Speaker 3: I love that. Well, I know we're, we're still figuring out some of the details. Where can people find information about this?

[00:03:46] Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, go to the show notes for this episode. We'll for sure have a link there. And then by the time this is, you know, airing, I'm sure that all of our social media and our homepage and all the other places where you find information about us, we'll also talk about this. Look for the 2027 Work Build Sessions. I don't know. We're going to come up with a cool name before we actually finalize.

[00:04:09] Speaker 3: A little look inside of, inside of how we do it here. But I mean, yeah, it's really just kind of like, as they say, mash that subscribe button, just follow, you know, where we're doing. We're obviously going to be talking about this a lot in the coming, coming weeks.

[00:04:22] Speaker 2: Yeah. So now let's check out Zach's conversation with Mike.

[00:04:26] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Mike Lissner and I run Free Law Project. We try to make the justice system better.

[00:04:32] Speaker 3: Mike, thanks for being with me. I really appreciate you taking the time. You've got Free Law Project and Court Listener, among other things going on. So looking at the amount of people in my inbox saying, hey, Zach, I've created this product using Court Listeners, MCP or API. I imagine you're pretty busy right now. So thank you for taking the time.

[00:04:54] Speaker 1: Yeah, we, we are up to our ears right now. We are hiring. We got seven positions we're hiring right now. We can't hire people fast enough.

[00:05:04] Speaker 3: Oh man. I mean, that's, that's awesome. That's fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is a good problem. Well, in case people kind of don't know or aren't, I guess the last time we had you on the podcast was 2019. It was talking about the Free Law Project, but a lot of things I feel have changed since 2019. But in case people don't know, give me kind of an intro into what Free Law Project is and Court Listener.

[00:05:30] Speaker 1: Yeah. So Free Law Project, just to start off, we're a nonprofit. And we try to make the legal system better by using technology and data. That's the core of what we do. Our biggest project is courtlistener.com. Probably a lot of listeners have used it or heard of it. We've been around since 2009 in one form or another. So I think a lot of people may have like visited, but then, you know, didn't even realize it. But you know, most lawyers have probably been on there at one time or another. We host that we have a recap system that helps collect pacer data. And we have tools for all the you know, fits into chat GPT and into cloud and all that. And we have a justice initiatives division that's working to build systems for public defenders and to build things for courts. So we're doing a lot of stuff these days. And all of the most of this is all accessible to other systems. So other people use our system to build their system.

[00:06:31] Speaker 3: I kind of hang in for a second on that because I think that's that's really neat that other people use our system to build their system. That is that has been a lot of what I've what I've seen. And, you know, it's one thing to say free law project and then turn around and build it and build it and build it and then turn around and be like, oh, this has significant value, you know, because right now in this in this world of A.I. and world of A.P.I.s and M.C.P.s and data has value. And frankly, you've actually kind of fought against some of these platforms that silo their data in order to do this. So it's really refreshing to see, like, not only we're still, you know, free and open, but other people are building their stuff on top of ours. And we want that.

[00:07:17] Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, this is the lawyer's podcast. So I think people here basically get it. But, you know, for since the beginning, the data has been pretty siloed. Like if you want to do case law research, it's one of these closed platforms you're going to have to use. And way back in 2009, we said we're going to collect that data and we're going to make it available for free. We have bulk downloads for all of our case law.

[00:07:41] Speaker 3: And, yeah, we've been collecting that since then.

[00:07:44] Speaker 1: Others have done huge amounts of work on this. Harvard is probably the most notable. And they scan the work with you.

[00:07:51] Speaker 3: They've done huge work with you guys in tandem. Yeah.

[00:07:54] Speaker 1: OK. Harvard was sort of on. They were doing their thing. They did that. But we did end up pulling in that data into our system once they made it available. OK. OK. Yeah. We've been scanning for a while now, too. We scanned about two million pages of case law we're going to put in our system. That'll probably start going in next week or the one after. But the basic idea is that, you know, we have laws in this country that we expect people to follow. But the interpretations have always been in a silo. And that's crazy. Like, how are you expect to follow the law if you don't know how the law is understood? That's what we try to fix. And then we try to put that out like we don't want to be another silo. So, you know, right now we're getting about 30 requests per second of people that are pulling that data and building it into their own system. Right.

[00:08:45] Speaker 3: Thirty requests per second.

[00:08:48] Speaker 1: Yeah. Wow. So what is that? That's every 30 milliseconds. No. Something like that. Right.

[00:08:54] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. I can do the math for us.

[00:08:56] Speaker 1: Yeah. It's constant. Right. And that's because once you make the data available, especially with the vibe coding these days, people can pull it and come up with their own creative stuff.

[00:09:07] Speaker 3: And just to kind of make sure that we're buttoning everything up, the data we're talking about, we're talking about case law. We're talking about case law across the country. But you're you and I talked before your approach to the case law is I mean, there's I don't want to say there's an infinite amount out there because there's not. But there's also it feels like an infinite amount. But a lot of when people hear free case law, a lot of times they think, well, what's the catch? And they think, what is the well, it couldn't have what I need. Talk to me about kind of the corpus of what the court listener is.

[00:09:47] Speaker 1: Yeah. People ask that a lot. And I think it's very reasonable because we've been putting our data out there for, you know, 17 years. And if your case law is missing some important decision and the other person uses another system and they get that decision and, you know, then you show up to court. Oh, boy. It's not. Yeah.

[00:10:06] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:10:07] Speaker 1: So this is a question we get all the time. The way we're looking at it is Harvard scanned all their books up through twenty eighteen. So if you believe that Harvard did a good job collecting all the important books in the country, I think they probably did. Then you're in pretty good shape right through twenty eighteen. Since then, that's where our scanning picks up and we're going to put that content in. We also are scraping 200 court websites in real time that brings in unpublished content, as well as the latest thing from today that may not even be in a book yet. So, yeah, I I think we're basically there already. The piece that's missing is the citations that you can only get from the books. That's what the scanning is going to bring in. And yeah, maybe one of our scrapers went down in 2020 and we didn't catch it for a week. And the books will patch those holes, too.

[00:11:00] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, it's it's interesting. I was actually using the Court Listener MCP. And for for those people who don't know, the MCP is a model context protocol. Yeah. It's a really complicated name. Yeah, it is. But but essentially it's a way for these LLMs like Claude or Chet GPT to connect directly to the platform in a way that is palatable to Claude or Chet GPT. And I was using one of these and I thought, you know, I'm going to make a make a six degrees of Kevin Bacon sort of game out of out of the cases and citations. And the way that Court Listener did citations is interesting because it kind of gets to a fundamental aspect of like what makes a case important is it's less about or I say did a quote unquote shepherding, you know, shepherdizing. It gets to like, was this cited by something else? It's not does this case exist in a vacuum and has an attorney that has read it, you know, said, hey, this case that exists in a vacuum is phenomenal. And just nobody else has ever cited it. It goes into, you know, kind of what has cited it that that seems to rise the importance. But you've got some obviously ideas on that of how citations work into this whole thing.

[00:12:24] Speaker 1: So the MCP, although it has a terrible name, people should try it out. You know, they really should.

[00:12:31] Speaker 3: This is why I was like, hey, I need to talk to Mike was because I was like, this MCP is amazing. So, yes. Yeah.

[00:12:37] Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, it basically just brings in the Court Listener data into cloth or whatever. Right. And I've had super fun with this, too, like on the Citation Network, where you're like, build me a graph of all the cases that, you know, three, three levels out from case ABC, build me a graph of all the cases, make it clickable and, you know, allow me to do whatever you want. And we'll just go and do it. You know, it might take it a few minutes, but it will just go do it. And so it's really cool. What we're doing next is actually that shepherding piece. And that'll be coming probably early next year. We've been working on that since the beginning of last year. So it's going to take us about two years in total. And that will bring in, you know, is it overruled? Has it been this or that? Right. But we do have the Citation Network now. So the next, you know, you can do that fun stuff, but we don't have any like, you know, this one overruled, this one abrogated, this one, whatever. Right.

[00:13:33] Speaker 3: But at the end of the day, you know, as an attorney, you should be reading these cases, right? You should be reading the cases that you're that you're citing. And in my experience in doing research, as you kind of get to the end and you get to the case where you go, OK, this is the one, even in my research, is this the one that's cited? Is this the one that, you know, and the mass amount of citations will get you there if you read it and then you look for something else that's cited it, like you'll figure out if it's overturned. You know, at least, you know, that has been my experience is that I haven't had to say like, oh, that one has a red flag or whatever the different, you know, organizations.

[00:14:13] Speaker 1: We keep investing in this and then we tell people we're working on it and then lawyers tell us, oh, we don't trust those flags anyway. Right.

[00:14:21] Speaker 3: What are we even doing this for? Yeah, it's kind of an in name only sort of thing, because it feels like you have to have it. But I mean, I'm the one doing the research. I'm the one responsible. It doesn't matter. I can't just go into court and go, well, you know, this organization told me that it was overruled. Well, you're the lawyer, man. You better check. Yeah, get it figured out. So, yeah, the court listener is all of this case law and you can you can go into it with the MCP and connect to these things. But that's just one aspect of the Free Law Project. I think that's a really cool aspect of it because it fits into my concept, my personal concept, and hopefully it's everybody else's concept of how to kind of use Claude and insert different connectors into something like Claude you can now insert the law into there and be able to, you know, query and and bring that into the things that you're working on.

[00:15:20] Speaker 1: But everybody, right. Like we're going to make legal research available to everybody. That's the thing.

[00:15:27] Speaker 3: Yes. And that's the interesting thing from from one of the things you were saying earlier. A lot of times when we think as lawyers, oh, I want, quote unquote, free law. Oh, I just don't want to pay for law. It's like, no, no, no. It's not that it's inexpensive or cheap or free. It's that it's free and open. How do you expect humans, you know, the quote unquote reasonable person to understand what they're supposed to do if they can't go look at the law? You know, and I think that's an interesting aspect of this whole thing.

[00:15:55] Speaker 1: Yeah, I completely agree. And, you know, I think I everyone talks about it constantly. Everyone has opinions about it. It's easy to be. There's lots of reasons to be angry about it, but I'm trying to be like, yes, it's got its problems. But also, if we can make it so that the average person can just type in in plain language what their legal problem is and then get decent answers. That's huge and new, and I think that that's a reason to be a reason for excitement.

[00:16:29] Speaker 3: Well, along those same lines, you had said that the Free Law Project also has this justice initiative. And this is really interesting to me as well, because like where it kind of puts itself. Talk to me about some of the justice initiative things that y'all have going on.

[00:16:45] Speaker 1: Yeah. So a couple of years ago, we started a division, our first division within the organization. And the basic premise is that like capitalism is good. We love capitalism in America, but the pursuit of money does not always lead to the pursuit of justice. Yeah. And so that's where this tries to fill in the gap. Right. So, for example, pro se litigants that can't afford an attorney, which, by the way, is probably you and me, right? It's so expensive. Yeah. That's everybody, more or less. They need good tools. And it's a market. They're not going to pay much of anything. So that's an area where justice initiatives can step in. Another one is public defenders. We're working on a project there. They have the worst tools and the highest responsibility. They literally have people's lives on the line. Meanwhile, prosecutors have excellent tools. That doesn't sound like justice to me, right? It doesn't sound like the scales of justice. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:17:50] Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, so when you talk about this, it actually sounds, you know, there are a lot of people out there doing some amazing things for pro se, for A to J, but this sounds like it's actually entering into the places where kind of the cogs and construct of the justice system, as opposed to just saying, here's a website, you know, you go to freelaw.com and you can download this PDF, fill it out.

[00:18:21] Speaker 1: Go do the thing. Right.

[00:18:22] Speaker 3: Hopefully the clerks like it, you know, which is fine. Like that's at least a step. I don't want to, I don't want to talk bad about that. That's at least a step, but this is more than that.

[00:18:31] Speaker 1: Yeah. That's the hope. And the platform we're making for pro se litigants will be installed by the court. So it will be run by them. And, you know, they'll link to it. It'll have an AI version if you want that. It'll have a regular sort of traditional version too. It'll help you, you know, is it a name change? Is it an eviction? What do you, what's your problem? And then it'll give you the form, help you fill it out either with just, like I said, like there's the AI version, the not, so you can pick and choose how comfortable you are with that. Yeah. And then you're right there at the court, right? Like you're on the court's website. It gives you the thing all done, ready to go. It gives you instructions that are approved by the court built hand in hand with the court. And then hopefully you can start solving whatever problem it is. And we are looking for court partners. If anybody knows those courts. Yeah. Let us know. We're looking for more courts. We already have four signed up, which was how many we wanted for now, but we are, we're trying to get folks onto the waitlist.

[00:19:34] Speaker 3: So once those four launched. Great. Yeah. So if anybody is, is a clerk or a judge or, you know, all that, I'm sure we have plenty of those people contact Mike. And I mean, it's free.law, right? That's that's y'all's website. Well, so we've talked about court listener. We've talked about free law project in general. We've talked about the justice initiative. We haven't talked enough about any of them. But I do want to dig also into a recap, which I think you told me last time we were, we were talking that. So that's your pacer product and recap is actually pacer backward. Yeah. Which I just think is kind of neat.

[00:20:15] Speaker 1: Some people figure that out after many years and they're like head explodes. Yeah. There is a hint. If you're on court listener, we have like a tab at the top that says recap. And if you hover your mouse on it, it looks like it reflects the word recap underneath, but it's actually reflecting the word pacer underneath.

[00:20:32] Speaker 3: That is what it's doing. I've got it up right now. That is pretty neat. Well, talk to me about recap. What, what is, what is that? I know that some of it is obviously inside of court listener, but what is recap and its relationship to pacer?

[00:20:46] Speaker 1: All right. So the motto is turning pacer around. And so if you're someone who uses pacer and you have a minute of time, you should go and install recap because basically what it does, it's an extension for your browser. Everything you purchase from pacer, you'll send a copy to us. And anything someone else has purchased in the past, you'll get for free from pacer. So you help build us this archive of federal filings, which is really useful to these access access to justice issues. So people can actually use it for research and you save money. So you can be selfish or altruistic or both. Either way, you should install the thing.

[00:21:30] Speaker 3: And this is like when, when we're talking about the pacer stuff and I've used pacer, I did some, some bankruptcy work when I was practicing. We're not talking about the case law again, where, you know, federal case law, you've, you've got that handled in the core listener. We're talking about, about filings. We're talking about the portions, the actual like stuff that is in the case of the matter.

[00:21:53] Speaker 1: Okay. For the most part, the case law does wind up in pacer too, of course. Right. When they file their decision, that's there too.

[00:21:59] Speaker 3: But theoretically those are free.

[00:22:02] Speaker 1: If the clerk remembers to check the free box when they upload it. Gotcha. Often it's not sin.

[00:22:09] Speaker 3: So even the case law is paywalled, which is stupid, but that's, I mean, this is a, this is a government organization that we have to go through in order to do our filings are like case law, all of that. I would say, don't get me started with that's part of this, right? We like the law itself, the words, the substance is supposed to be free and accessible. You would think that the government organization managing that would make it free and accessible.

[00:22:37] Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, they don't charge you to walk into a court. You don't have to like buy a ticket or something. They shouldn't charge you to use a court's website. That's, that's the heart of it in my mind, at least. And, and I should be clear also that like Pacer is one of the cheap ones. Right. It's going to be 12 cents a page. If you have any bulk Pacer downloads, this is the time to do them before the rate increases by 20%. But like, you know, we're looking at the chancery court right now and I don't even remember, like, I think my brain can't remember how expensive it is. Cause I think it's $50 a document or something. And so we're probably going to bring recap there too. Cause it's just outrageous. Yeah.

[00:23:18] Speaker 3: And I mean, I, I, I get it. I'm not insane. Like I get that there are infrastructural, you know, things that need to be paid for, but at the same time, when we're talking about a governmental entity, our tax dollars should be paying for this in the first place, everybody's. And, and that is, that is in my opinion, um, the, at least one of the points of me sending my tax dollars to, to the, the, the government, if people want to, to kind of get involved, people want to help. If people want to be a, even a small part of, of what you're doing over there, obviously they can download the, the recap. Um, uh, what is it? Add on the, uh, what else could they do?

[00:24:02] Speaker 1: There's so many things. We're a nonprofit. Uh, we love donations. We, we thrive on donations that gives us flexibility. Um, so please, please consider donating or, um, we do corporate sponsorships. We do all, you know, any way you can think of to give a nonprofit money. We're happy to, happy to work on that. But then, you know, beyond that, like check it out, um, send in use, use court listener for your next research project. Use the, um, the club plugin, the chat, GPT plugin. Um, try them out. Give us your feedback, install the recap extension. Uh, if you're a librarian, we're actually doing a project, um, on that citator, uh, where we're having folks like read decisions and tell us like, okay, how did that citation treat that case? Um, so we can build up like a, a grounding data set. Yeah. I don't know. Uh, there's a lot of things we work with a lot of folks.

[00:24:51] Speaker 3: Awesome. It seems like there are, yeah, a lot of ways and a lot of ways that our listeners, um, would, would want to get involved. They can, they can connect at court listener.com or free.law. They can obviously find you on LinkedIn. We'll put all those links in the show notes. Um, as we go, Mike, thank you. Thanks for your time here. I appreciate it. I appreciate your knowledge and, and, uh, expertise in this.

[00:25:16] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a pleasure. I appreciate the opportunity.