What's At Stake in West Deal, Legal Times (Washington, DC), November 18, 1996, Thomas Scheffey (two full pages with photographs of Judge Friedman and HyperLaw's attorney Lorence Kessler). [Available on Counsel Connect].
Operation of Shepard's May Hold Up Deal - DOJ Review Ongoing", Los Angeles Daily Journal, November 5, 1996. Anthony Aarons feature story describes the intervention of the Department of Justice in slowing down the acquisition of Shephard's by Times-Mirror (Matthew Bender) and the joint venture between Bender and Lexis to operate Shephard's. HyperLaw's President Alan Sugarman is quoted as questioning the DOJ's action after the approval of the West-Thomson merger: " How else are they [Lexis and Matthew Bender] going to compete with the enormous power of West and Thomson."
www.Block_That_Merger.com The American Lawyer, November, 1996.
HyperLaw's Web Site was feature in an article by John E. Morris, who said that HyperLaw had "made the most of the new communcations medium."
HyperLaw's Web Site was the "most convenient" source for information about the Thomson-West merger, says Wayne Dale Collins of Shearman and Stearling, counsel for West.
Washington Post Editorial, November 3, 1996. The Washington Post asked that the Clinton Administration not include database protection in the WIPO upcoming treaty negotiations in Geneva. HyperLaw has opposed the database protection provisions, and made critical reference to these provisions in its filings in US v. Thomson. HyperLaw was not quoted in the editorial, but recently has been meeting with Administration officials to express opposition to the database protection provisions -- the meeting included members of the newly formed Public Domain. HyperLaw stated during the meeting that "the database protection provisions were inconsistent with the free flow of information over the Internet." The Post stated in part:
" The immediate occasion of this worry is a proposal now headed, not for Congress, but for an international conference on intellectual property issues this December in Geneva. The proposal, one of a batch of possible amendments to existing international copyright treaties that will be debated at the meeting, would give private companies that distribute data electronically -- including those that contract with state or national governments to do so with public data -- much greater controls than they now have over the "reproduction or utilization" of the data in those databases."* * * "Then there are also borderline cases, such as that of West Publishing Co., which distributes federal court decisions with the addition only of corrections and page numbers. West was recently blocked from claiming monopoly distribution rights of that material -- public, of course -- merely on the basis of those additions. Many more such matters are under consideration The main concern about the Geneva meeting is that an international treaty could radically shift all these balances without even being weighed in Congress. The administration, and particularly the Commerce Department, which has generally supported taking such issues directly to Geneva, should insist instead on first airing the public's interests in access to information here at home."
As case law goes electronic, West Publishing Company faces mounting pressure from competitors, consumer advocates, and the courts to llose its grip on legal libraries. True to form, West has counterattacked, but the old order is fading fast.
The courts have lost their moral compass," says Alan Sugarman, whose company, HyperLaw, produces CD-ROMs of legal data. Sugarman points out that the US Courts have only two jobs: They resolve individual disputes and they publish their decisions as guidance for everyone else to follow. The fact that these decisions lack citable page numbers puts Sugarman into a state of voluble outrage. "We are talking about the law, here!" he says. "We're not talking about a by-product. Publishing cases for people to cite is one of their primary jobs. So, why don't they take some of their budget and spend it to get their materials into a an authoritative form?"