|
1.1 Massachusetts Casemaker Online Law Library Development
The Massachusetts Bar Association is able to bring members the Casemaker Online Law Library through a partnership with the Lawriter Corporation. Lawriter is an electronic publishing company located in Cincinnati that is owned and operated by a trial attorney and member of the Ohio State Bar Association. Lawriter has been in the electronic legal publishing business since the mid 1980's when they were partnered with Anderson Publishing. In 1995, Anderson Publishing partnered with Lexis-Nexis and Lawriter was left with a huge library of Ohio case law and statutes. Lawriter's owner, Joe Shea, approached the Ohio State Bar Association (OSBA) about producing a legal research product using his data. The OSBA originally began to work with Lawriter in late 1995 on the Casemaker CD-ROM library, currently being used by law firms throughout Ohio.
In 1998, the OSBA and Lawriter observed the huge growth of the Internet and began to realize that, while attorneys enjoy CD-ROM, the future was on the Internet. After careful market and competitive analysis, in 1999 the OSBA and Lawriter began and completed the development of the Casemaker Online Law Library. Soon after the launch of Casemaker, traffic on the OSBA Web site increased from around 300,000 hits per month to today well over 3 million per month. This increased traffic is a direct result of the OSBA launching the Casemaker Online Law Library.
As a result of the huge success of Casemaker in Ohio, the OSBA entered into a partnership with Joe Shea to create an entity called Lawriter, LLC.
The concept is simple - offer to other states the creation of their state's electronic library and the opportunity to join with the lawyers of Ohio to create the Casemaker Consortium@. The consortium allows the lawyers of all subscribing states full access to any of those states' libraries and the Federal library, thereby sharing each other's cases and statutes.
In June 2000, Nebraska joined the consortium and has been online since February 2001; North Carolina went online June 2001; and Connecticut went online October 2001 and Massachusetts has been online since November 2002.
As each state joins, it pays a fee to have the library expanded to add that particular state's cases and statutes.
Each state is able to share the other states' libraries at no additional cost, enhancing the benefit to all member states. |
|
