After five years of work, nearly 6.5 million US court cases are now available to access for free online.
The news: The Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School Library has completed its Caselaw Access Project, an endeavour to digitize every reported state and federal US legal case from the 1600s to last summer. The process involved scanning more than 40 million pages.
Why is this needed? One of the biggest hurdles to developing artificial intelligence for legal applications is the lack of access to data. To train their software, legal AI companies have often had to build their own databases by scraping whatever websites have made information public and making deals with companies for access to their private legal files.
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