Free Law Project

When we started out, we needed a logo for CourtListener, so our founder played with some colors and fonts and it was done. A few years later, we launched Free Law Project as a non-profit, and our founder asked his roommate — a graphic design student — to help him make a logo. Twenty minutes later, our clip art mascot of the little person smushing money was born. And so it has gone as we've needed new logos for new projects. Bad process yielding, well, not great results. Today we plot a better course as we launch new branding for CourtListener, Free.law, Bots.law and all our other services and products. This has been months in the works, and it's about 1000× better. We're thrilled. More about that here: https://lnkd.in/gRMfac_m Also: - We're launching a bounty. Find our old logo somewhere, email it in, get stickers in the mail. - We have a new store where our supporters can buy Free Law Project t-shirts, totes, and much more. Check it out!

On CourtListener, we regularly deal with people that want their case taken off the Internet. We only ever do this for sealed cases, but if somebody asks, we remove their case from Google and other major search engines. In 2021, we and others* were sued in CA for posting a federal district court case. With support from Greenberg Traurig, LLP, we won. They appealed. Today we won again. The law must stay up. * Microsoft, Google, Alphabet, Casetext, PacerMonitor, Leagle, DocketBird, CaseMine, some Does and some individuals.

If you're into podcasts, check out our director talking with Robert Ambrogi on the Law Next podcast. We don't always broadcast everything we've got on our roadmap, but in this one our director does. This was a really great interview. We hope you'll enjoy! Thank you Bob!

We requested the contracts that state courts have with eFiling vendors in the five largest states. These contracts lay out the features and pricing for the websites courts use to manage their cases. So far, we've gotten back the contracts for Texas, which we're posting today. The price? $1.5 million dollars — per month. You can read the contract and be the judge of whether that's a fair deal for a website. We'll continue posting additional docs as we get them and continue requesting them until there's nothing more for the community to learn. https://lnkd.in/ekKnQxNZ

News about news! ProPublica got the Pultizer for their reporting about the conflicts and financial holdings of Supreme Court justices! We were proud to be their source of financial disclosure data. Here's our write up of just one of the ways our data empowered their reporting: https://lnkd.in/gUTeKuRa This award shouldn't come as a surprise. This was fantastic and deeply sourced reporting. We're thrilled our data could play a part! This is just one of the things data makes possible!

We have spent the past several months studying the design, economics, and shortcomings of software used by courts and filers. Our goal is to learn and share as much as possible about this so that we and others can make it better. Today we release our first report laying out the space entitled: "Problems with Court Filing and Case Management Systems: Perspectives from Advocates and Vendors" This is the first of several reports we will be writing and publishing on this topic. Give it a read and let us know what we got right or wrong! https://lnkd.in/gFGsNzpg

The Big Cases Bot is a bot we run on Twitter, BlueSky, and Mastodon that tweets and posts legal filings in real time from the most important cases in the country. We're trying a new thing and offering monthly sponsorships for it. The idea is to hit the sweet spot between getting your organization or brand recognized and realizing our mission of open legal data. How it works: 1. You pay to become the sponsor of the bot for the month. 2. The bot uses your sponsorship money to buy the most important PACER documents. 3. We watermark thumbnails of those documents with your message, and we send that out to the Bot's 55,000 followers. It's win, win, win: - You get about two million impressions for your brand or org during the month. - The followers of the Bot real-time access to the most important legal documents. - All of the documents get permanently preserved as a part of our cultural record. We're going to see how this goes, but we starting with a really low price to work out the kinks. If you're interested, there's more information and instructions to get started here: https://lnkd.in/gv7YP-Xj

We are seeking nominations for our board of directors! We are looking for experts and leaders in the areas of: - Non-profit administration - Non-profit law / compliance - Non-profit fundraising - Journalism - Advocacy - Legal librarianship - Open society - Civic technology - Access to justice - Legal research and education Members of our board of directors serve as a sounding board for our Executive Director, and are asked to attend quarterly meetings to set priorities and discuss ongoing initiatives. If you're interested, have Q's, or want to nominate somebody, please get in touch!

Today we're excited to launch a new API for combating hallucinated citations. Our new citation verification and lookup tool allows you to look up hundreds of citations in huge blocks of text so that you can separate the good from the bad. This builds on our strengths. To pull this off we needed: - A database of case law containing nearly ten million citations - Analysis of every reporter abbreviation in American history (back to the 1650's) - A tool to do performant citation extraction - An API to tie it all together Some of these pieces have taken years of community and FLP effort, like our database of case law, and our knowledge of every citation in history. We hope this API will help ring in the next generation of AI tools in the legal space! Read the full announcement and let us know what you think! https://lnkd.in/gHZP2zmr

🌟 Kudos to the Free Law Project for spearheading a legal revolution! Their commitment to making legal information widely accessible isn't just a milestone—it's a game-changer in democratizing law. 🚀 It's more than sharing data; it's about empowering everyone with tools to navigate the legal landscape effectively. In an era where technology reshapes our legal frameworks, joining this journey aligns perfectly with Legaliser's mission to foster a transparent, inclusive legal world. 🌐 We're thrilled to be part of this transformative wave! #LegalTech #Innovation #AccessToJustice #Legaliser #Transparency #InclusiveLaw