[martin_drapeau]

How did clerks/lawyers find those articles on Wikipedia? Through Google I reckon. I wonder how bad/good the search is for court judgements of their existing system.

Sounds like they need to put those court judgements online, or if they already are, do some SEO work so they rank. Wikipedia was a great way to do that.

[laGrenouille]

LexisNexis, which does other things now but started in the legal space, offers a huge collection of legal opinions with a fairly good search and linking capabilities. Most clerks and law professionals would have access to it.

I think the benefit of Wikipedia is not access to materials so much as it is the succinct summarization of the legal opinions. Perhaps now NLP could help with this, but it's a very complicated problem to provide a summary of the important bits from a 100+ page legal document.

[bdowling]

> ... the succinct summarization of the legal opinions.

LexisNexis and Westlaw produce succinct summaries of legal opinions. That's the basis of their value, because the legal opinions themselves are not copyrighted. They also categorize everything about an opinion so that their database is searchable by area of law, etc.

[delecti]

There are legal search engines which just about every lawyer should have access to. Resorting to google or wikipedia seems like a weird intersection of being comfortable with technology but unaware of any of the standard options.