Fastcase Public Library of Law Offers Best Starting Point for Law Online
WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Fastcase today opened the doors to the
largest free law library on the Web. The Fastcase Public Library of Law
(http://www.plol.org) launches as the most comprehensive free resource for
legal research online, making it the best starting point for anyone who wants
to learn about and use the law.
The Fastcase Public Library of Law (PLoL) is powered by Fastcase, Inc.,
the premium provider of next-generation legal research. Since its founding in
1999, Fastcase has worked to democratize the law, making it more accessible to
more people.
"American law used to be controlled by foreign-owned publishers," said
Fastcase CEO Ed Walters. "Over the past eight years, Fastcase has smashed
through those bottlenecks with our premium service for lawyers. Now, by
launching the Fastcase Public Library of Law as a free service, we are also
empowering non-lawyers to learn about and use the law themselves."
In the past, many different Web sites contained pockets of free legal
resources. PLoL brings all of those resources together in one place, and adds
more than 2 million pages of cases that were previously available only by
subscription -- making PLoL the best starting point for legal resources
online.
Fastcase has made a number of recent moves to democratize the law,
including a November 2007 agreement with PublicResource.org to make
1.8 million pages of federal cases available in the public domain. Fastcase
included those same cases in PLoL and added an additional 10 years of caselaw
from all 50 states -- the only collection of its kind on the Web.
PLoL also features an intuitive interface that works like popular Web
search engines, making it more accessible to all researchers. "By listing the
most relevant cases first, our PLoL search sorts the haystack, putting needles
on top," said Walters. "It makes first-time legal research as easy as using
Google."
This is important to the latent market of non-lawyers who seek access to
the law that Fastcase identified; four out of five people who sign up for a
trial of the full Fastcase service are not attorneys. The Fastcase PLoL will
give students, small business owners, people litigating small claims, and pro
se litigants a free and user-friendly law resource online.
"Just as the Internet has made it possible for people to book their own
travel, manage their own investments, and file their own taxes, PLoL will
enable individuals to find answers to their routine or small-claims legal
questions online -- either by themselves or in conjunction with a lawyer,"
said Phil Rosenthal, President of Fastcase.
Unlike other free resources, Fastcase backstops PLoL, so citations to
older cases not in its database appear as links to Fastcase, increasing the
size of the PLoL library to virtually the entire American law library.
Additional professional research tools are available through Fastcase.com as
well.
To ensure that the PLoL remains up-to-date and comprehensive, Fastcase
will also update PLoL with new law books as they come out, unlike many
services that simply update from court draft opinions online.
For more information about the Fastcase Public Library of Law, or to
experience it yourself, please visit http://www.plol.org.
About Fastcase
As the premium provider of next-generation legal research, Fastcase seeks
to democratize the law, making it more accessible to more people. Using
patented software that combines the best of legal research with the best of
Web search, Fastcase helps busy users sift through the clutter, ranking the
best cases first and enabling the re-sorting of results to find answers fast.
Founded in 1999, Fastcase.com has more than 275,000 subscribers from around
the world, and the company recently launched the Fastcase Public Library of
Law, the most comprehensive free legal research site for consumers and lawyers
alike. Fastcase is an American company based in Washington, D.C. For more
information, visit http://www.fastcase.com.
SOURCE Fastcase, Inc.
Lisa Miller of Fleishman-Hillard, +1-202-857-2209, lisa.miller@fleishman.com,
for Fastcase, Inc.
