Support of legal information supply
Lars Klasén
More and more of the legal information produced by the authorities is made available for free on the Internet. The use of this information, directly via the source or via search engines and other free search services, has a growing role for the information provision for both professionals and citizens. Despite this, lawyers rely largely on commercial online legal information services. The yearly revenues for such services, more than EUR 3 billion globally, speaks for itself. A main reason for this is that these services offer comprehensive access to a wide range of information that is consistent, or “standardized”, in all reasonable respects. To achieve this, much effort is put into conversions, restructuring, editing etc. of the information that is gathered from the source, e.g. the authorities. An adoption of national and international recognized legal information standards as regards format, structure, naming conventions, metadata etc at the source should minimize the need for such efforts, thus leaving room for investments in for example better searching and other functions, interfaces, or more information. At the same time it should pave the way for new, free, services promoting legal information provision in general but also challenging the established actors. Yet such a development is inevitable, even if it will take a long time to achieve due to a general lack of standards, apart from some national. This should produce a number of positive effects, among them better means for interconnecting, referencing, archiving and last but not least facilitating the re-use of information.
