Add State Bar Court Decisions to our Case Law DB #99
Description
Headline
"Free Law Project adds State Bar Courts to CourtListener, so you can monitor your ethical duties as an attorney."
Or:
"Ethical Guidance Monitoring: Free Law Project Adds State Bar Courts to CourtListener"
What is the Feature?
State bar associations issue decisions with ethical guidance. We should state collecting these and make them available in our case law DB.
Here's an example of CA's decisions:
https://www.statebarcourt.ca.gov/Case-Dispositions/Published-Opinions
These can go in a new section of the court picker under the Territorial Courts, in the State tab:
What Problem Might it Solve?
A user requested this and put it well:
I think access to bar courts in particular is important for counsel to review and comply with their ethical obligations when it matters.
Describe a Scenario in Which the Feature Might be Used
A lawyer wants to monitor the latest ethical issues and stay up to date with things. They could subscribe to particular keywords or to all decisions from the court and get updates as things happen.
Technical Requirements
I think this is a easy difficulty. We've done this a zillion times.
Best guess, how long would it take to make, roughly?
- Probably about 1-2 months if one person is working on it. Depends how many courts.
What would it require that we do technically?
- Figure out how many states issue things this way.
- Add a new jurisdiction type to the DB model.
- Build scrapers for each court.
- Add each court to the DB.
- Backscrape existing content.
- Tweak the UI to show the new jurisdictions.
- Maintain the scrapers.
Existing Systems or Alternatives?
Is this niche already being filled? If so, by whom? How is ours different?
- Lexis makes this avialable for CA and Los Angeles, but ours would be free (and probably lack LAX): https://supportcenter.lexisnexis.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/1086693/~/finding-california-professional-responsibility-and-ethics-committee-opinions-on
- California makes their system searchable, but ours would be full text searchable and would include monitoring: https://discipline.calbar.ca.gov/portal/Home/Dashboard/29
- MO has something here: https://mo-legal-ethics.org/informal-opinions-search/
- Louisiana has the LADB, which is not a database, but rather a "Disciplinary Board": https://www.ladb.org/index.aspx
- This query shows a bunch of other state-based solutions (including CL as the third result, perhaps validating that we should do this!): https://kagi.com/search?q=search+state+bar+decisions+-california