Enhancing Public Access to Legal Data

"In a few years, simplified case summaries, judicial opinions and audio recordings from all federal appellate and state supreme courts could be accessible at the touch of a button. The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law will spearhead the effort, aggregating documents and media from courts in California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas. The information will be reformatted and republished online following open practice standards.  Once the project is complete, content will be more accessible to non-legal audiences, including journalists and the general public. The remainder of state supreme and federal appellate courts in the U.S. will receive a similar treatment over the next five years provided additional funding is raised. The audio recordings and digital content will be available through individual websites for each court and a mobile app.  Helping to fund the work is a  $600,000 prize that the  Oyez Project received   as a winner of the Knight News Challenge on Open Gov, sponsored by the Knight Foundation. The foundation works to promote media innovation by funding innovative ideas in news and information.  The Oyez Project previously digitized U.S. Supreme Court documents from as far back as 1955, including an audio archive containing approximately 14,000 hours of court deliberation spanning roughly 6 million words.  Leading the new project is Jerry Goldman, Oyez Project director and a professor with the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. Goldman felt tackling the written and audio content of all the nation’s appellate courts would make covering the courts easier for journalists, and give the public a better understanding of judges and legal decisions ...  The project will require a great deal of teamwork between the Oyez Project and volunteers. The grant funding will enable Goldman to create a consortium of local partners from law schools to provide plain English case summaries, abstracts and biographical sketches of federal appellate and state Supreme Court judges. The Oyez Project team will build the both the websites and the mobile application for both iOS and Android devices for access to the content.  A prototype model of what the website will look like is already online, containing data from The Washington State Supreme Court. That site was built using WordPress, but the new project will operate using Drupal as a content management system.  Matt Gruhn, associate director of the Oyez Project, explained that users will see individual websites for each court. But 'under the hood,' all the data will live in the same digital repository, enabling advanced querying of data across multiple jurisdictions.  In the next few months, the Oyez Project will reach out to law schools to gauge their interest in being part of the new project. Goldman said he hopes to get a couple of schools interested, which in turn should snowball into more wanting to be involved as the effort will get them noticed by the state judiciary.  In addition, the archival work could help enhance a law school’s brand and reputation to help drive prospective student and professor interest in attending or teaching at the institution ..."