Following up on my post this morning about the Free the Law partnership between Harvard Law School and Ravel Law to digitize and make available to the public for free Harvard’s entire collection of U.S. case law, I just had an opportunity to discuss the news with Daniel Lewis, Ravel Law’s cofounder and CEO. Here are some additional details provided by Lewis:

• Lewis confirmed that access to these cases will be free to everyone. Ravel Law will continue to sell access to advanced tools for case analytics and research, but the basic access to searching and reading these cases will be free.
• When I asked Lewis about the scope of this collection, his answer was, “Everything.” It is literally every published opinion from every U.S. jurisdiction from all time. It does not include opinions that were never published, such as many state-level trial court opinions.
• California cases will be available in November and New York by the end of the year. All cases will be online by the middle of 2017.
• Researchers who are doing empirical research will be able to apply for access to the bulk data prior to the expiration of the eight years.

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