Some highlights in legal publishing history.
Before the internet
case decisions were published in books.
Some of the earliest American court reports
date back to 1789,  and they were printed privately.
For nearly a century case publication was sporadic and confusing
Court reporters could be unreliable
And they printed cases under their own names, making it difficult to determine what court each opinion came from.
In the early 1870s two extremely important figures entered the legal publishing scene:
John B. West
Frank Shepard
West started a publishing company that mostly traded in legal texts like dictionaries and treatises.
He saw a gap in the legal market and  he and his brother Horatio began working on an eight page weekly newsletter
providing summaries of Minnesota Supreme Court cases.
What we now know as syllabi.
Which was game changing for Minnesota lawyers.
After his success in Minnesota, West  expanded to five additional states.
And eventually developed the National Reporter Series we're all familiar with today.
By 1866, the National  Reporter Series covered 40 states
and West started work on his digest  system
still available in Westlaw today as Keynumbers.
While West was charming the Minnesota courts with his Syllabi
Frank Shepard was working on an innovation of his own.
A list of citing references that traced cases citing to one another.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote.
I regard Shepard's Massachusetts Annotations as the
most thorough labor-saving device that has even been
brought to my attention.  No one owning a set of reports
can afford to be without one.
The books became so popular that the name became a verb.
To Shepardize.
Between the late 1880s  and the early 1970s
John B. West company continued to grow.
Buying up smaller competitors like  Little Brown and Company's U.S. Digest.
Other law reporters like Lawyer's Competitive Publishing Company
gave up publishing  competing law reporters all together.
The next major innovation came out of Ohio.
which launched Ohio Bar Automated Research.
or OBAR.
Which included a full text case searching option.
By 1973 OBAR evolved into  what we now know today as Lexis.
Westlaw started an online database shortly afterward
but it didn't contain full text decisions until  three years after Lexis launched.
From there it was a race to add features
with Lexis and Westlaw in lock step to provide competitive legal research databases.
In 2018 the Case Law Access Project made history
digitizing over 40 million pages of U. S. court decisions.
and providing them free of charge online.
Want to check it out?
Go to case.law/search
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If you have questions on this topic or other subjects please contact us.
