Google Scholar for lawyers and everyone else

If you haven’t heard about it yet, Google Scholar lets you look up both federal and state case law. Put in a case citation and bam — you have it.

It’s amazingly fast and accurate. Sure, it has limitations. It lacks shepardizing, cross-referencing, completeness and other important features that most lawyers need. But it’s still an amazing beginning.

Google describes it this way:

What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Does this mean Westlaw, LexisNexis, Casemaker and other fee-based or bar association sponsored programs need to be afraid?

Probably not in the short term.

But the long term is different, very different. If I were with those companies, I’d be afraid of Google’s ultimate plans. I’d be very afraid.