Mass Law Blog

Westlaw, Lexis, Announce That They are Yielding to Google Scholar, Terminating Legal Search Service Effective Immediately

by | Nov 30, 2009

Just kidding, but Columbia Law School’s Altlaw, which I’ve used off and on, really is shutting down:

Nov. 19, 2009.  Earlier this week, Google announced the addition of legal cases to Google Scholar. It’s good, very good. But you don’t have to take our word for it: try it out yourself.

Everything we have done or planned to do with AltLaw, Google has does better. What else would you expect? Search is their core business; they have hundreds of brilliant engineers, a vast computing infrastructure, and billions of dollars invested in it. . . .

Therefore, we are happy to announce that Project AltLaw (Phase One) is complete. We will continue to maintain the web site and search service for a few months, but we will not be adding new features or new content. AltLaw.org, in its current form, will shut down in early 2010.