Free Legal Research For Louisiana

Ernie the Attorney reports that the Louisiana Bar is offering Fastcase, a legal research service, free to its members.  Louisiana thus joins the twenty other bar associations that offer Casemaker, another free research service.  What I noticed about Fastcase is that it includes access to district court decisions dating back to the 1950’s.  This impressed me because district court cases are hard to locate online and thus, for fee services can usually charge a premium when they include them in their data bases.

Ironically, at the same time of Ernie’s post, I also noticed that Lexisone is celebrating its fifth anniversary – though there’s no mention that the primary reason for Lexisone’s birth was that Lexis finally realized that the Internet might enable competitors to provide the same type of legal research service available for free. Now, it looks like Lexisone might be right after all.