TAXPAYER ASSETS PROJECT Crown Jewels Campaign - JURIS October 28, 1993 The following report of the October 25 meeting with DOJ was written by Professor Carole Hafner, and posted on TAP-INFO with her permission. Carole is a computer scientist who held a faculty position at Harvard Law School last year, and is currently the co-director of the Center for Law and Computer Science at Northeastern. She is one of the nation's leading experts in natural language processing for legal texts. (She can be reached at hafner@ccs.neu.edu) On the Need for Free Competition in the Legal Information Field by Carole D. Hafner Associate Professor, College of Computer Science Co-Director, Center for Law and Computer Science Northeastern University, Boston MA 02115 On Oct. 25 I had the opportunity to participate in a meeting at the U.S. Department of Justice at which a group of concerned citizens expressed their concerns to Assistant Attorney General Stephen Colgate about the government's decision to shut down the JURIS legal database, and more generally about the the anti-competitive situation that is currently stifling research and innovation in the legal information field. Since 1971, the U.S. Department of Justice has maintained a large computer database of Federal cases, statutes, regulations, briefs and other legal documents. On December 31, 1993, the JURIS system, which serves the entire Federal government, is scheduled to shut down because one powerful corporation that sells legal information wants to prevent public access to the documents stored on JURIS. Since 1982, the Justice Deparment has contracted with West Publishing Company, the largest vendor of law books and legal information services, to supply computer tapes of Federal case law. The contract with West prevents the government from sharing its electronic data with the public, even for purposes of pure research, as I discovered in 1991 when my request for samples of legal text for research in computational linguistics was denied. At that time, I became concerned that progress in understanding legal communication, as well as innovative ideas for new kinds of legal information systems, were being stifled because the text needed to do even basic research is inaccessible. (I offered to make my text samples commercially worthless by deleting some fraction of the documents on a random basis, but my request was still denied.) Attending the meeting were representatives of public interest groups, universities, small businesses and library associations. Government attendees included five Department of Justice officials, staff from Senate and House Congressional Committees, and representatives from GPO and the Congressional Research Services. Public interest groups such as the Taxpayers Assets Project (a spin-off of Ralph Nader's Center for Responsive Law) are concerned about the implications for government openness and accountability when government documents generated at taxpayer expense, residing on government computers, can be denied to the public by the terms of a private contract with a supplier of computer services. TAP has filed a Freedom of Information Act request, to test whether this type of contract restriction is legal. How could West force the U.S. Government to shut down an information resource that many view as a "national treasure"? Unfortunately, the fine print in the West/JURIS contract requires the government to return or erase all West-supplied data at the end of the contract. On September 30, West declined to renew the contract, and on December 31 JURIS will lose 80% of its data, according to Asst. Attorney General Colgate, making the system economically non-viable. James Love, director of the Taxpayer's Assets Project, organized the Oct. 25 meeting in the hope that a plan for saving JURIS might be found. Government officials and other participants at the meeting said the WEST withdrawal from the JURIS contract was a direct result of citizen efforts to obtain access to the JURIS database. One non- government participant at the meeting recounted a discussion with a West official at last week's Information Industry Association (IIA) meeting where West expressed great alarm at the expanding role of the Internet in the dissemination of government information, and expressed hope that West could find ways to stop such efforts. As a case in point, once JURIS is closed down, citizen requests for access to it will become moot. Unless JURIS is saved, starting in January 1994 the government will be in the unenviable position of having to buy from West the right to access its own legal documents, at more than twice the cost it previously spent to maintain JURIS. (This estimate is based on current Federal government rates for West on-line services. Private attorneys must pay an even higher rate of $250/hr or more -- an expense that adds significantly to cost of legal bills for everyone.) And perhaps the last chance for researchers, public libraries, and small businesses to obtain large collections of electronic legal documents will disappear. At the meeting, the participants described their needs for access to electronic forms of government documents. I explained that I had created a computer-based alternative to some parts of the West paper-based bibliographic system in 1978, but that my ideas, and the ideas of other researchers, could only be refined "on paper". Since West and and its only major competitor, Mead Data Systems, refuse to sell their text to the public, the government is the only possible source of large bodies of legal text. I argued that free competition in the legal information industry would lead to a wide variety of innovative products -- instead of two almost identical ones -- and would lower the cost of all legal information. Two small businessmen who are attempting to develop competing products in legal information systems explained that a virtual monopoly (or "duopoly") on legal text has obstructed their ability to innovate. Several ideas were proposed to save JURIS, including one proposal to replace the missing text at a cost that would be outweighed within one year by the savings. While Mr. Colgate and his staff were sympathetic to these ideas, they said there was not enough time to develop such a plan before the end of the year, and in any case the 30 employees of the JURIS project had already been advised to seek other positions. A final issue that was brought to the attention of Mr. Colgate is the need for a non-proprietary system of legal citations. Currently, many courts require attorneys to use citations that include the page numbers in law books published by West. Since West has recently asserted copyright ownership of these page numbers, free competition in the legal market now requires that a non-proprietary system of legal citations be developed. Although it was understood that the Justice department does not have authority over court rules, the participants asked Mr. Colgate to use the considerable influence of the Justice Department to help bring about this much-needed change. Mr. Colgate said he was suprised and impressed by the variety of needs for access to legal documents that were represented at the meeting, and by the arguments that there is a problem with anti-competitiveness in the legal information industry. Although the Justice Department apparently will not respond immediately to these concerns, the participants at the meeting were energized by the discussion and plans were made to try to organize a Congressional hearing. --------------------------------------------------------------------- TAP-INFO is an Internet Distribution List provided by the Taxpayer Assets Project (TAP). TAP was founded by Ralph Nader to monitor the management of government property, including information systems and data, government funded R&D, spectrum allocation and other government assets. 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