PreCYdent. The Open Law Source in the United States

Precydent had and offered without charge around 1 million Opinions and more than 50,000 Statutes.

PreCYdent was based on two fundamental principles. First, they did believe that all lawyers, law librarians, law students, and the general public should have access to state-of-the-art search technology to help them navigate through the large and complex body of legal authority. Before WestlawNext appeared, they try to answer this online legal research question: “Why can’t I just do my search with a few search words, like I do on Google?” PreCYdent tried to be an answer to that question.

Second, they did believe judicial opinions and statutes must be in the public domain, in practice as well as in theory. To them this means that effective legal research in all of these materials should be free to the user — not expensive, not inexpensive. Free. They believe this principle is of vital importance not only to the United States, but to all nations that practice or aspire to practice the rule of law.

PreCYdent search technology ranked results by “authority”, using mathematical techniques, such as eigenvector centrality, similar to those used by advanced Web search engines, as well as proprietary techniques that they have developed that are specialized to the legal domain. PreCYdent search technology was, in their words, able to mine the information latent in the “Web of Law”, the network of citations among legal authorities. This means it was also able to retrieve legally relevant authorities, even if the search terms do not actually occur or occur frequently in the retrieved document.

The beta version they offered contained only U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Court of Appeals cases. They working hard on extending that service to cover all U.S. federal and state cases and statutory materials.