The Commons Your Practice Runs On

Over two days this week, this firm researched, drafted, and published thirty long-form articles on Minnesota law. Every statute quoted from raw Revisor HTML. Every case read in full before it was cited. Every quotation checked character-by-character against the source text, then checked again by a second reviewer that didn’t write the article. Marginal cost from commercial legal research databases: zero.

I’ve written about that already as a reason to cancel subscriptions, and it’s a good one. But there’s a second invoice nobody writes, and I’m going to write it here. I came out of those two days knowing a lot more exactly what was holding up the floor.

Four institutions were. A fifteen-year-old nonprofit. A research lab at a law school that’s moved on to other work. A statutory office in the Minnesota legislative branch. A legislative-branch federal agency that’s been printing government documents since 1861. None of them sent me a bill. Three of the four have no way to send me one.

Here’s my claim. The free-law commons is now holding up real small-firm practice. It isn’t a nice extra. It’s the foundation. And it’s fragile in ways you can point to, ways that are already showing. If you build on it, you should fund it the way you fund anything else you can’t practice without. Not as philanthropy. As a maintenance line item, right next to malpractice coverage and the e-filing subscription.

Here’s what I mean by fragile, with receipts.

The archive stopped in 2019

The Caselaw Access Project is the reason a solo can read a 1955 Minnesota Supreme Court opinion at two in the morning without a library card. Harvard Law School Library digitized roughly 40 million pages from about 40,000 bound volumes and put the whole thing online in a consistent, machine-readable format. It’s one of the most generous things any institution has ever done for this profession.

It’s also finished, and CAP says so. From its own About page: the Library Innovation Lab “transitioned case.law to a static state” because the industry agreements that funded the access layer “have now expired,” and LIL “is primarily a research organization.” The scope statement is just as direct — CAP “includes all official, book-published state and federal United States case law through 2020,” and “The Harvard Law School Collection includes volumes published through 2018.” Everything from 2018 to 2020 came in later as a donation from Fastcase.

Now the part you only find by going and looking. A scope statement is a claim. It isn’t a measurement.

CAP’s static archive serves the Northwestern Reporter, Second Series through volume 932. Volume 933 returns a 404. The most recent Minnesota decision in volume 932 is dated September 4, 2019. There’s no nw3d directory at all. The entire Third Series, which is where Minnesota’s recent appellate law lives, just isn’t there.

For a Minnesota lawyer that’s not academic. It means that for any Minnesota appellate decision issued after roughly the fall of 2019, there’s no free source that’ll give you the opinion text with the reporter pagination attached. You can get the opinion — the Judicial Branch posts slip opinion PDFs, and our pipeline pulled them and read them in full — but a slip opinion has no volume and no page. Over those two days that bit us again and again: articles citing recent decisions had to cite them by case name, docket number, and date, with no N.W.3d cite, because a reporter page we couldn’t verify would have been a guess in a nice suit. One time we got a recent case’s reporter cite only because a later opinion quoted the citation string word for word in its own text, and we could read that later opinion.

The people who run this stuff describe the problem better than I can. Free Law Project, announcing in April that it’s picking up the scanning where Harvard stopped, explained why its 200-odd court scrapers don’t fix it: because they scrape court websites, “it does not get the official pagination or citations for the decisions… until the content is in a book, there’s no volume or page to cite to.”

That’s the crack. The free corpus isn’t unreliable. It has an edge, the edge has a date on it, and the edge sits right where a litigator most often needs to be.

The scan isn’t the opinion

The second weak spot is inside the data, not at its border, and it’s the one most likely to put a bad quotation in a brief.

CAP’s own data-quality statement: “Case text and general head matter has been generated by machine OCR and has not received human review.” Metadata — party names, docket number, citation, date — got human review. The words of the opinion didn’t.

So the archive is honest and a little broken, and you have to build for that. Here’s actual corruption our drafters ran into and wrote down over two days, in cases they were quoting:

• eoncededly for concededly
• herjself for herself
• UCG for UCC
• re-suits obtained for results obtained
• Due Pi'ocess
• plaintiffs reputation — the apostrophe silently gone
• Ateas for Atcas, a party name
• Colder for Calder, in a citation
• modem trend for modern trend

Look at the last three again. Those are the dangerous ones. herjself waves a flag. Colder v. Jones doesn’t — it’s a real English word in a plausible spot, and a drafter who’s skimming instead of reading will sail right past it and put a misspelled party name in a brief. modem trend is worse, because it’s exactly what a spell-checker waves through.

The rules that come out of this are simple, and they hold for any OCR corpus, not just this one:

1. Never quote a corrupted string. If the sentence you want has an artifact in it, quote the clean part or paraphrase. One of our articles paraphrased an eminent-domain fee-factor list rather than quote re-suits obtained.
2. Never quietly fix something inside quotation marks. A reader who checks the source and finds different words has caught you altering a quotation. That looks a lot worse than a paraphrase.
3. Never take a number out of OCR’d body text. Reporter volumes and page numbers inside an opinion’s own citation strings are OCR output. One stray digit gives you a citation that’s wrong in the hardest possible way to catch. Take numbers from structured metadata, or from star-pagination anchors, or not at all.
4. Expect corruption near a clean quote. More than one of our verification passes had to warn the next reviewer that OCR damage two paragraphs away from a quoted sentence doesn’t mean the quote is wrong.

None of that is a knock on CAP. That’s how you use a scanned archive, and CAP told you it was scanned.

The state’s own websites won’t let a machine in

The third one surprised me, and it’s the one where the profession’s own institutions are the problem.

Minnesota’s Office of the Revisor of Statutes is terrific. Over two days, revisor.mn.gov served us raw statute HTML, court rules, and struck-and-underscored session laws in response to a plain command-line request with a browser user-agent, hundreds of times, and never blocked us once. Session laws in amendment markup let us catch 2026 changes the codified statute pages didn’t show yet. That’s what it looks like when a public body actually publishes.

Then there’s the rest of Minnesota state government.

• mn.gov — the executive-branch portal, and home of the State Law Library’s slip opinion archive — sat behind a Radware bot-manager CAPTCHA. Our drafters could sometimes grab an individual PDF at a guessable URL, but the archive’s directory index was closed. When we needed to know whether the supreme court had decided a case since granting review, we couldn’t read the index. So we probed 462 candidate filenames across 231 dates and reported the result for what it was: filename-pattern evidence, not an index read.
• sos.mn.gov threw up a Radware interstitial, so an article about LLC statements of authority couldn’t confirm the Secretary of State’s current filing fee. It quoted the statute’s own dollar figure and told the reader to confirm the current amount.
• mncourts.gov returned HTTP 403 behind a JavaScript challenge — for the HTML page and for the linked PDFs. The casualty is worth naming. Two articles about prejudgment interest couldn’t get the State Court Administrator’s published annual interest rate. So they state no rate. They explain the statute’s mechanics word for word and send the reader to look up the year’s figure. That’s the one number a reader most wants, it’s missing, and it’s missing because the court system’s own website wouldn’t hand its own published notice to a program.

Bot protection is a reasonable call made by people defending real infrastructure from real abuse, and nobody at those agencies set out to shut lawyers out. But it costs something, the cost lands on exactly the people the agency exists to serve, and nobody on the agency side is counting it. In 2026, a public record a machine can’t read is most of the way to not being public. Posting a document isn’t the test anymore. Publishing it is — addressable, stable, machine-readable, and served to anybody who asks.

Nobody’s telling you it was overruled

The fourth gap is the one I keep coming back to, because it’s the hard limit on everything above.

A verification pipeline built entirely on free sources can show, to a very high standard, that a case exists at a given citation, that it says what you claim, and that your quotation is word for word. It can’t tell you the case is still good law. There’s no free citator. Not a thin one — none.

Two things here are easy to get wrong.

CourtListener’s coverage claim is precise, so read the fine print. Free Law Project says its database “encompasses more than 99.9% of all precedential legal case law published in the United States.” Precedential. Unpublished court of appeals decisions — which Minnesota lawyers cite all the time, with the usual caveats — are outside that number. So the tool not finding a case doesn’t mean the case is fake. Our own testing of the CourtListener interface turned up three ways it fails that you should know about: citation analysis that dedupes by reporter cite can hide a citation bolted onto the wrong case name; citations broken across a hard line wrap get silently dropped and never extracted at all; and a citation that resolves only proves the reporter cite is real, not that the proposition or the quotation is. Every one of those failures is silent. None of them throws an error.

And CAP can’t help with treatment even in theory. It’s frozen at 2020. A frozen archive can’t tell you what happened to a case last Tuesday.

So here’s what a small firm can and can’t do without a subscription. Existence, yes. Text, yes. Verbatim quotation, yes. Pin cite, yes for anything pre-2019 with star pagination. Subsequent treatment, no. Checking treatment is still a separate, paid step, and a firm that tells itself otherwise is running an uninsured risk. That last sliver is hard editorial work done continuously across the whole corpus, and the commercial vendors have earned their money on it.

You owe the maintenance bill either way

Now the part this essay is for.

Free Law Project is a 501(c)(3), founded in 2010, and it runs CourtListener, the RECAP Archive, the oral argument collection, the judges database, and open-source tools — eyecite, juriscraper, x-ray — that a good chunk of the legal tech industry quietly builds on. Its tax returns are public. It publishes what it costs.

And right now it’s fixing the exact gap I described three sections up. In April it announced it’s scanning the post-Harvard books itself — “picking up where Harvard left off,” to “fill the gap between when the Harvard data ends, in 2018, and today.” As of that announcement: over 200,000 pages scanned, an immediate goal of 2.5 million pages, and nearly two million pages still without high-quality scans and complete metadata. The announcement doesn’t sugarcoat it: “Scanning and processing at this scale requires sustained funding.”

Read that sentence like a practicing lawyer. The single biggest hole in the free legal research stack — the reason your recent authority has no pin cite — has a known fix, an organization doing the fixing, a published page count, and a funding gap. That’s a purchase order waiting for a signature.

The ways to pay already exist, and they’re priced for small firms, not institutions:

• Individual memberships start at $10/month or $100/year, running up to $100/month. They’re not symbolic. API rate limits go up with the tier, from 5 requests per minute on the free tier to 25 per minute at the top. If your assistant hits CourtListener a hundred times in an afternoon, like mine does, you’re using capacity somebody pays for, and the membership is the meter.
• Group memberships for firms start at $30/month for one to five seats and scale up to organizations of a hundred.
• Legal services organization memberships are free. Civil legal aid offices and clinics get group access at no cost. That’s an access-to-justice commitment built into the price list, not just talked about.
• The Justice Partner Circle, launched in September 2025, is a program built for law firms. Somebody at Free Law Project already did the work of making it easy for a firm to say yes.

The state side has no donate button, and it needs a different kind of help. Minnesota’s Revisor operates under Minn. Stat. ch. 3C, and every Minnesota lawyer should read the first sentence of § 3C.03: “As far as personnel and available appropriations permit, the revisor’s office shall perform the drafting duties described in subdivisions 2 to 4.” The office’s powers are exercised “subject to the control of the Legislative Coordinating Commission.” That’s the legal plumbing for the entire Minnesota statutory corpus, and the statute itself tells you it runs on an appropriation. At the federal level, govinfo is a service of the Government Publishing Office — a legislative-branch agency — which applies digital signatures to its PDFs “so users can verify documents have not been altered and are the official versions,” and runs an ISO 16363 certified preservation repository. That’s a budget line too.

So the ask comes in two halves. Fund the nonprofits with money. Stick up for the public offices with what lawyers actually have, which is a voice in front of legislatures and courts about what public legal information should cost and how it should be served.

Here’s what would change my mind

A claim nobody can check is just a mood, so here’s mine, in a form you can check.

Every piece of this stack is kept up by an organization that doesn’t make its money keeping it up. The profession pulling the value out of it pays in what looks to me like next to nothing. And when it fails, it won’t collapse. It’ll drift. Gaps that stay open. Coverage that stops at a date and stays stopped. A bot shield that goes up and never comes down. Nothing dramatic enough to make anybody act.

Four things would prove me wrong, and I’d be happy to see any of them:

The scanning project lands. If Free Law Project hits its target and post-2018 reporter citations become routinely resolvable from a free source, the worst hole closes and my “gaps stay open” prediction is just wrong. They’ve got a plan, a tool, and a page count. Watch the number.

Neutral citations spread. About twenty states already have them. A neutral citation kills the whole pagination problem — no book, no scanner, a citable identifier the moment the opinion issues. If Minnesota adopts one, most of section two of this essay becomes a history lesson.

A free citator ships. I think this is the least likely, because the work is editorial, never-ending, and expensive. But CourtListener already keeps the citation graph a citator sits on. Getting from “here is everything that cites this case” to “here is how they treated it” is a long walk. It isn’t an impossible one.

A commercial vendor sells cheap metered API access. If the big vendors ever price the citator and the editorial layer like infrastructure instead of by the seat, the commons stops carrying the firms that can pay, and my argument shrinks to the firms that can’t. I’ve argued elsewhere that they should, and that the first one to do it wins.

Short of those, I’m sticking with the prediction. And it isn’t really about technology. It’s about who pays for maintenance.

The line item

Here’s the accounting I actually walked away with.

Two days. Thirty articles. Every statutory quotation word for word from a state office funded by an appropriation. Every case read from an archive a university built and then stopped building. Federal materials from a printing agency Congress set up in 1861. Case law search and citation resolution from a nonprofit with a donate button. Marginal cost we paid any of them for any of it: nothing. None of them sent a bill, because none of them can.

That’s not a scandal. It’s just what happens when a profession quietly rebuilds its research around infrastructure it doesn’t fund. Nobody decides to free-ride. You use what’s there, which is what everybody does with a commons right up until the commons is in trouble.

The fix is boring. Put a number in the annual budget. It doesn’t have to be big — individual tiers start at ten dollars a month and firm tiers at thirty, and a solo who drops a legal research subscription frees up a lot more than that. Send it to the organizations whose data your systems actually touch, roughly in proportion to how hard you lean on them. Book the receipt as a cost of doing business, because that’s exactly what it is.

And the access-to-justice thread that runs through everything in this section runs through this one hardest. A solo can now check authority like a firm with a research department because a handful of people decided public law should be readable by a computer, and then did the huge, boring work of making it so. Every dollar of research overhead a small firm sheds because of that work is a dollar that doesn’t have to come from a client who could barely afford the representation. That saving is real, it’s going to clients right now, and somebody else paid for it.

The bill for keeping it running exists whether lawyers pay it or not. Somebody’s paying it today. It should be us.

Sources

• Caselaw Access Project — About (page content served from case.law/templates/cap-about-page.js; retrieved 2026-08-20) — “transitioned case.law to a static state”; agreements “have now expired”; “CAP includes all official, book-published state and federal United States case law through 2020”; “The Harvard Law School Collection includes volumes published through 2018”; Fastcase collection covering N.W.2d through 2020; “Case text and general head matter has been generated by machine OCR and has not received human review”; ~40 million pages from ~40,000 bound volumes
• CAP static archive — coverage limits verified directly against the archive’s own files on 2026-08-20: VolumesMetadata.json (no publication_year later than 2018; spine_end_year 2019 on the final N.W.2d volumes); static.case.law/nw2d/ directory index (volumes 56–932); nw2d/932/CasesMetadata.json (latest Minnesota decision date 2019-09-04); static.case.law/nw2d/933/ and static.case.law/nw3d/ both return HTTP 404
• Harvard Library Innovation Lab — Caselaw Access Project — digitization carried out 2013–2018 with Ravel Law; over 6.5 million decisions
• Free Law Project — Free Law Project Is Scanning America’s Case Law (April 16, 2026) — “picking up where Harvard left off”; gap “between when the Harvard data ends, in 2018, and today”; 200,000+ pages scanned, 2.5 million-page immediate goal, nearly two million pages still lacking high-quality scans; ~200 court scrapers and why scraped opinions lack official pagination (“until the content is in a book, there’s no volume or page to cite to”); about 20 states publish neutral citations; “Scanning and processing at this scale requires sustained funding”
• Free Law Project — About — “Started in 2010, Free Law Project is the leading 501(c)(3) nonprofit using technology, data, and advocacy to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive”
• Free Law Project — Support — tax-deductible donations; “our tax returns are available for public inspection”
• Free Law Project — Membership — individual tiers $10/$25/$50/$100 per month; API rate limits by tier (free tier 5/minute, top tier 25/minute); group memberships from $30/month for 1–5 seats up to $2,500/month for organizations of 100; free Legal Services Organization group memberships
• Free Law Project — Announcing the Justice Partner Circle (September 30, 2025) — law-firm partnership program
• CourtListener — Data Coverage: Case Law (FLP Wiki) — “more than 99.9% of all precedential legal case law published in the United States”; over nine million decisions from over two thousand courts; direct court-publishing partnerships beginning 2020
• Minn. Stat. § 3C.03, subd. 1 — “As far as personnel and available appropriations permit, the revisor’s office shall perform the drafting duties described in subdivisions 2 to 4.” (2025 Minnesota Statutes)
• Minn. Stat. § 3C.02, subd. 5 — revisor’s powers “subject to the control of the Legislative Coordinating Commission” (2025 Minnesota Statutes)
• govinfo — About — service of the U.S. Government Publishing Office, a legislative-branch agency established 1861; digital signatures applied “so users can verify documents have not been altered and are the official versions”; ISO 16363 certified Trustworthy Digital Repository
• The retrieval failures, OCR artifacts, and citation-tool failure modes described above are this firm’s own operating records from its 2026-08-18/19 publishing run, documented in the per-article source manifests and independent gate reports maintained in this site’s repository. No client matter, client name, or client data is involved in any of them.

Commentary on legal research infrastructure and the business of law; the opinions and the prediction are the author’s. Not legal advice, not ethics advice, and not a recommendation about any particular firm’s research stack — in particular, nothing here should be read to suggest that free sources substitute for checking whether an authority is still good law, which remains a separate verification step this firm sources separately. No client information appears in this article. Everything in this section is free; the only thing asked in return is that you use it to serve someone who could not otherwise afford a lawyer. Questions about anything here: Send us a message or 612-470-6529.