Structured Casenotes: How Publishers Can Add Value To Public Domain Legal Materials On the World Wide Web

The days of proprietary legal databases are rapidly ending, as primary legal materials become available on the World Wide Web. In the United States, for example, the decisions of the Supreme Court are now available on line all the way back to 1893. The decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeal are also available, dating back several years in most cases. State materials are not as complete, but many state courts have recently matched the federal courts in putting their decisions on line. For statutory materials, the record is even stronger. There are mutiple sources for the United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations, and complete statutory databases are now accessible on line in at least 41 states. How can legal publishers adapt to this new environment? Most analysts agree that legal publishers must now add value to public domain legal materials (statutes, cases, etc.) in the form of secondary legal analysis. Although publishers have always done this, the added value has traditionally taken the form of additional texts: treatises, annotations, practitioner’s guides, etc. A good example would be the West Headnote and Key Number System, which