Something remarkable happened in 2018. Back in 2018, something extraordinary happened.He Caselaw Access Project is a part of Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, completed its three-year project to digitize all U.S. case law — some 6.4 million cases dating all the way back to 1658, a span of 360 years.
The project was massive. The company scanned 38,6 million pages of 39,796 legal books, converted them into machine-readable files and created a collection with 6.4 millions published cases. This collection has grown since then.
Ravel Law, a legal research startup, initially provided financial support to the project. Ravel Law, which was acquired by LexisNexis in 2017 and continues to provide financial support for the project.
The goal was for all published U.S. courts decisions to be freely available in a digital format that is standardized. Caselaw is a simple tool that makes the cases available to everyone. Page or bulk downloads.
However, until this month, CAP’s contractual relationship with LexisNexis limited commercial use of the cases. Under Harvard’s agreement with LexisNexis (and originally with Ravel), LexisNexis retained control over the commercial use of the data through March 2024. The data could be used for commercial purposes by any company.
