Open Legal Research
By Pamela Jones Linux Journal One little Web site about a batty lawsuit became the tech news hit of the year. And Internet research can help clear the next legal minefield too. Open legal research isn't a phrase in law dictionaries. Law firms normally are secretive and keep everything very hush-hush. What we've been doing at Groklaw is pioneering work, what Open Source Risk Management's Daniel Egger called "a new kind of collaborative, real-time, you-can't-get-away-from-us legal resource". The Internet makes it possible. Like a lot of ideas that turn out really to work, it was supposed to be something else but morphed. When I started, it was only me, one geeky paralegal who didn't like what The SCO Group was trying to do to Linux and decided to help. SCO seemed to be pursuing a strategy of delaying any test of its claims in court, while at the same time maximizing fear, uncertainty and doubt about Linux. A lot of my early work was finding ...