Meet the Absolute Heroes Behind CourtListener.com

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:58 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1152. I'm Thomas Smith. Got a really fun, fascinating Monday OA for you today. If you're someone who does any amount of casual legal research or maybe even serious legal research, you have probably stumbled across and used a lot the website CourtListener. It's the best. I am telling you, the show would probably not exist without it. It's such a great website. It is such a good resource. And it turns out there's a really cool story behind it. And the folks who bring us this very valuable and very free resource, they're called the Free Law Project. And Mike Lissner is the executive director. And it's just such a cool, inspiring story of, you know, not too many people, kind of a handful of people, maybe a baker's handful, I don't know, who are able to provide an unbelievable amount of legal documents and case law and case history and all this stuff. And thus broaden the access that everyone can have to the law. And they're only getting better and better. They're only doing more and more. And so Mike's here to tell us a little bit about the history, his history, and some of the other projects they're working on. Hey, if you are tired of being bummed out, this is a good one to listen to because this is just all upside. It's great people doing great work, expanding access to the Law to people who need it in so many ways. So we're really excited to talk to Mike and get to learn more about it. So that'll be after the usual break. And if you'd like to avoid the break and keep this show happening in these tumultuous times, please consider pledging at patreon.com/law. You get to lose the ads, you get some goodies and that warm, fuzzy feeling that, hey, maybe you need right now. And hey, the Pope's gone. I'm going to go ahead and say that donating to us frees you of like at least a sin or two, if you believe in that kind of thing. That's right. We're selling indulgences.

0:02:51 Thomas: All right. After this break, we're on with Mike Lissner. This episode's brought to you by Notion. Look, there's definitely no shortage of AI tools and AI -related things out there. But if you're like me, it's hard to even figure out where to start with that. I need AI to tell me about the AI, but then which AI do I ask? Not to mention, I've got my notes and things in so many different places. But that's where Notion comes in handy. Notion combines your notes, documents, and projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed. Notion is your one place to connect teams, tools, and knowledge so you're empowered to do your most meaningful work. All right, I've got the best reason to use Notion. It says here, teams that use Notion send less email, already great, cancel more meetings, bam, sold, done. There's nothing better than canceling meetings. I can't stand meetings. And save time searching for their work and reduce spending on tools, which helps keep everyone on the same page. You had me at hello. So try Notion for free when you go to notion .com slash opening. That's all All lowercase letters, Notion .com slash opening to try the powerful, easy to use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Notion dot com slash opening.

0:04:06 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:04:06 Thomas: And we're joined by Mike Lissner. How are you doing, Mike?

0:04:09 Mike: I'm doing great. How are you guys doing?

0:04:11 Thomas: Doing well.

0:04:11 Matt: Really happy to talk to you because we've been talking about so much bad news and things that I think are bringing people down. And I was excited to talk to somebody who's doing something good in the world that is really directly benefiting the law and lawyers. You are the director of the Free Law Project, and I'd like to know a little bit about how you got into that. Hmm. And what's your background as a professional?

0:04:25 Mike: Sure. Yeah. Well, I started Free Law Projects sort of out of a interest in like open society, actually. And I was interested in, you know, geeky things like Linux and Wikipedia and stuff like that. And I was like, why is the legal world so locked down? This is back in 2009. It's gotten a lot better since then. But there's still a lot of there's a lot of reasons that everyone uses Westlaw, everybody uses Lexis. A lot of that is because the data is so locked down well I've been doing this legal thing now for like I say you know 15 years or so but originally I'm more on the technology side I went to the school of information at berkeley so it's this nice like blend of you actually take law classes there you take policy classes and you take programming classes and so you end up with these weird sort of blended people yeah it's

0:05:07 Matt: Sounds really important. I never heard of anything like that.

0:05:09 Thomas: What does anyone else who gets that degree do? Because it sounds like it was made for you. Like it's our kind

0:05:14 Mike: Fun well it's really interesting so some folks go out and they do like standard projects so they're like what are the correct standards for privacy on the internet other people go and do user experience experience it takes a lot of different directions actually it's it's interesting and it came out of the library school so there's a whole like information organization piece to it information architecture it's very broad yeah yeah I've yet to meet somebody from the school of information that wasn't

0:05:36 Thomas: Of nerds. Nice.

0:05:35 Matt: For sure. For sure. So the Free Law Project includes Court Listener, Recap, and Juriscriper, and I use Court Listeners all the time.

0:05:46 Thomas: I was gonna say it's been so long since I could tell somebody I'm on your website all the

0:05:51 Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. But I wanted to ask you before we get into that about another fun project that I saw that you have called Judge Picks, which I'm sorry to say is not actually Judge Hot or Not. That's what I was hoping it would be.

0:05:51 Mike: Awesome uh no it's not judge hot or not but you could make judge hot or not with it if you are so inclined yeah judge picks is a little project we have we've just collected about a thousand pictures of judges and we put a little api on that so if you know the id ID for the judge, you can go and get his or her picture and put it on your website generally. So if you wanted to make a hot or not, I'm not going to stop you. Is it a good idea? Probably not, but you could do it.

0:06:11 Thomas: Time oh yeah mark zuckerberg yeah pizzazz

0:06:27 Matt: Yeah. How'd you get that going? That's a great idea.

0:06:29 Mike: So that's actually a great question because it like touches on kind of what we do here. One of our main goals is to inspire innovation in the legal sector. And when we started in 2009, we were the first API for the law. So the first like way that you could build other systems on top of case law. And so like the judges, what we realized is like having information about a judge on a website is really kind of, I don't know, boring. It needs a little something and pizzazz, right? So like we collected all these photos and started putting them on our site and we're like, why would we limit it just to us? Let's make this into a tool that anybody can use to put judges onto their website. So like you can see the person that you're reading about, if it's like a description of the judge or a listing of their decisions or whatever it is, right but that's kind of our model right like we're gonna build something for us or build it into our system and we're going to make it open so that you can take that data or that technology or whatever and build it into your system as well

0:07:21 Matt: Awesome because you're filling a gap too. And in all of the products that we're working on, I don't know if you really call them products, but these projects, I guess, that you have. They're filling gaps that the government is either charging a lot for or making less accessible to regular people, or they just don't exist. Like this thing with pictures of judges. I mean, that is so important. And I think that all the time when I want to particularly praise or not a judge, it's just nice to know a little more about the person and where they came from and what they look like. And it's not necessarily something you expect the government to give you, but it's good to have. Now, speaking of things we expect the government to give us though, Recap takes on PACER essentially.

0:07:54 Matt: Can you tell us a little bit how this works? And PACER, of course, being the federal court system that you you have to pay for, $0 .10 a page, to get federal court records. So how did this get going and how does it work?

0:08:02 Mike: Yeah so um every day across federal courthouses across the nation there's something around 100 ,000 documents that are filed and if you want those uh each one costs about 10 cents per page with some limited exceptions right so So if you wanted them all in a given day, that would cost you around 100K.

0:08:14 Thomas: All of them I'm trying to collect them all it's taking a while well

0:08:21 Mike: So they don't mostly work on weekends. So probably about half a million dollars every week just to keep up with the latest stuff. Yeah. Right. So like literally nobody has the content. Even the biggest companies in the world look at that and they're like, no, I don't think we want to do that. We're not going to buy all of that. Nobody has a special deal with the government. Right. So what we have observed is that a lot of the content is not all that interesting. You know, it's like an attorney admission or a calendaring document or something. So, all right, nobody really wants that stuff. But a lot of it is super interesting, and some of it is historical. You can think of right now all the deportation cases that are happening. Those are all in our system, and all of those documents are going to go into our system and we're going to make them available to anyone for free.

0:08:28 Thomas: It's worth it wait they are hold on dumb question I thought the immigration court stuff was like a separate thingy. Oh, okay. Yeah, we can find one.

0:09:11 Matt: You're talking about the federal judiciary, right? No, that's correct.

0:09:13 Mike: This isn't the federal judiciary, but you're right, the immigration process is handled administratively. But when you appeal, that goes into the... As I understand, I'm not an immigration expert, but these cases are in our system, the ones that you're reading about in the news. And how do we do that is through the recap tool. So it's recap as Pacer spelled backwards, and you install it in your browser. Anything you buy from the government website from Pacer, you'll send us a copy. So about 30 ,000 people do that and have that installed and send us the documents they think are worth purchasing.

0:09:44 Thomas: Oh wow. I got to install that thing because I bought nearly a dozen documents in my day. You could add that to your collection,

0:09:45 Mike: So we don't have that 100 ,000 documents every day, but we have the ones that somebody thought was relevant, right? Which is almost better in a way. Every little bit helps we'll take your dozen but what's cool is if somebody else has bought the document as you use pacer we'll put a little link next to the like buy button so like before you hit buy you can click our link as you're using pacer and just get it for free so selfishly install it you'll save money yeah uh

0:09:58 Thomas: But they're probably redundant. Nice.

0:10:16 Matt: Has anybody ever called this Pacer Napster? Is that going back too far? I was going to ask.

0:10:21 Mike: People wonder is it legal what do the courts have to say about it we've been doing it now for over a decade never been sued for it there's no copyright for legal documents.

0:10:27 Thomas: A lot of small independent courts are like, hey, this is how we make our living.

0:10:34 Matt: Mom and Pop Courts, yeah.

0:10:35 Thomas: We can't sell that much merch, you know? Oh wow,

0:10:38 Mike: I mean, you're not wrong. Whenever there is a government shutdown, the courts have the last to shut down and the PACER money is part of the slush that allows them to keep going. They make $150 million with it every year.

0:10:49 Thomas: Holy crap.

0:10:49 Mike: So, you know, they don't love that we're undermining their fee revenue system. But what can they say? Like the P in PACER stands for public access to court electronic records. We are helping provide that access. We're helping them at their mission. So they've never tried to stop us.

0:10:58 Matt: Sure, sure. Presumably at the beginning of this project, you did have a lawyer vet this idea. I assume you talked to somebody. Oh, sure.

0:11:08 Mike: You know, we took this project over from a different group but um but yeah you know we're surrounded by lawyers yeah somebody thought about this

0:11:12 Thomas: But we assume they come. Look, I inherited this heroin facility from, I assume they vetted it.

0:11:21 Thomas: No, just kidding. But, yeah. But no, about your team, I'm really curious about this because it's such a cool, it's like a unique project. It strikes me as pro -social. It's the kind of thing that it seems niche, but also I'm amazed how many people are really into just doing good, cool stuff that society needs. It's really inspiring but tell us about your team like how many people and what kinds of folks do you have hmm

0:11:42 Mike: Yeah so we're about 12 people now and it's a variety everything from like software developers to user experience researchers we have this really big new project we're working on to work with courts and figure out what they need because like we have court listener which is our legal research platform and it'S great uh we've been building that for a long time but we've also also realized that like courts have kind of terrible software and they pay too much for it and so we're like can we help them have better software and at the same time the people that are trying to like you know interact with the courts aka like you and me and lawyers and the software that they have to use to like upload documents it's terrible like sometimes there's a tool for attorneys to upload a pdf but like individuals without attorneys pro se's have to walk the document and you know you can't afford an attorney and now you have to take time off of work to like walk your ass across town and hand them a document it's insane and they pay zillions of dollars for it so we're gonna build something better yeah yep um and fun fact the ninth and second circuits recently got so tired of the old system they built a new one and they had the opportunity right then and there to make it look pretty and they were like nah

0:12:37 Matt: As someone who uses the UCF system fairly regularly, it also looks like it's from like 1999. So I could use a facelift if nothing else, if you're going to be working on that.

0:12:57 Mike: And it looks they they purposefully made it look identical to the old systems so that it didn't like disrupt anybody or surprise anybody.

0:13:03 Matt: I can appreciate the nostalgia in a way. I mean, I've been dreading the day when it actually does look like a modern site because it is nice to go back to something that looks like 1999.

0:13:04 Thomas: How it goes so

0:13:04 Mike: So it's interesting, right?

0:13:11 Matt: But just wondering about that. Obviously, the actual efficiency and use of the system is more important, but I get hung up on aesthetics sometimes.

0:13:13 Mike: You can't see on a podcast, but I'm like burying my face in my hands.

0:13:21 Thomas: Does it play some like mid -90s rock when you sign in like your myspace

0:13:25 Matt: It's a Limp Bizkit, actually. That's a weird little quirk. Never understood that. So how many people did it take to get this going, and how did they get it going? You mentioned the people before you. Because one of the things that fascinates me about these kinds of projects is, honestly, it just takes a few people who really want to do it. And that's something that I want listeners to really absorb, because there's so many few people out there that can do things like this.

0:13:27 Thomas: Account yeah does

0:13:47 Mike: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, at this point, you know, we're about a dozen and it's a lot to maintain, right. Like we have, we have a database of case law and we have the database of pacer data, the judge pictures, judge profiles, and it'S a lot, but you know for the first seven years it was pretty much me. Right. But I did have the privilege to be able to take risks for years. I was able to do that and make very little money for quite a while while my partner supported me in the project and things like that. So I wouldn't say it's something that anybody can do like the way we did it, but legal technology is hot right now. Earlier today, I talked to a couple of students, they're undergrads and they're like doing a legal tech startup. Like, okay, like you can, because like the work that we're doing to make that possible is in place now, right? There's that foundational layer of case law and AI makes a lot of things possible that weren't possible before right so yeah I would encourage people get out there like if you feel like there's a tool you wish existed it's probably not outlandish to think you could create it

0:14:41 Thomas: It feel weird though if it's a startup trying to make money on the thing you're doing

0:14:43 Mike: No we love it our whole model is like we're gonna get that data put it out there in the world we're going to make it available to all these organizations they're going to take the data they're gonna compete they're to make cool tools and it's gonna make things more accessible better cheaper we're like creating a competitive market where one didn't exist

0:15:03 Matt: Know I'm not the only person who feels this way, but I think that Pacers should should be free. I don't think that it's a public service that you should be able to log in as a citizen and see what's going on in your own federal courts. Do you know how much that would cost the government if it were free?

0:15:04 Mike: Before it depends I'm going to get into the weeds for a second here but pacer doesn't actually exist pacer is the login system for the public to use cm ecf and cm ecff is the case management electronic court system so pacer it's just a login system and so what you're really asking is what would it cost to replace cm ec f

0:15:35 Thomas: Well if not replace hold on if not replaced it's just like the thing you're doing is making these uploads available without paying for them right so it's really like what's the cost that the government incurs in that if I understand maybe I'm misunderstanding matt your question but strikes me that like that can't be that high of a cost I mean there's some amount of it but it can't it can be that much so they're just handling like a document upload right didn't charge for it yeah well I guess you

0:16:01 Mike: So like what would happen if the government just stopped swiping credit cards and they're like look it's free now just log in and you're all good to go

0:16:04 Thomas: Told us they make 150 million a year so I suppose that's the number that would change but like I guess it's how you look at it business -wise like how much much is that really costing them versus it's just this revenue stream they have.

0:16:11 Mike: Right right yeah and where is that line of like this is the system and this is just networking that the courthouse needs anyway to have the internet right there is a lawsuit a class action lawsuit so if you're a pacer user you'rea member of that lawsuit and you'll be getting some money one of these days and they actually argued about this question like okay you make 150 how much of that goes is overage because the lawsuit was saying like pacer charges is too much and people should get the money back they ended up on 100 million a year is how much it costs to run I would have I was kind of upset about that I'm like obviously a website doesn't cost 100 million dollars to run

0:16:47 Thomas: Hey, I'll do it for 90. I'll figure it out.

0:16:49 Mike: Right exactly if if they were doing it right it's not a complicated website has a lot of features sure but at the end of the day it's pretty basic stuff pdfs uh web forms some scheduling stuff 100 million you get used to these big numbers but but do the math, right? How many salaries is that? Even if you say an expensive person costs $200 ,000 a year, a million dollars gets you five of those people, a hundred million dollars gets you 500 of those People. Does it take 500 people to run this website? Right.

0:17:17 Thomas: Just working on PDFs. What?

0:17:20 Matt: Mean,

0:17:20 Mike: It does not take 500 People to run This website. I'm sorry. Something is wrong with that number.

0:17:24 Matt: F -22 is at least $100 million, I think. So I'm not saying anybody cares about that, I guess. But the F - 22 fighter jet. Yeah. Just thinking of things the government spends money on already.

0:17:30 Mike: Yeah. Well, we always just forget, like we get so used to these numbers, you know, you're like a hundred million federal government. Sure. Whatever. And they're like, no, it's a website, man. Like, what are we doing website technology like the hardware of that is almost free you don't need 500 people to run it so what's happening

0:17:30 Thomas: Oh, there's a lot of PDFs in that bad boy.

0:17:35 Matt: Yeah, right. How is that possible? Sure, yeah.

0:17:49 Matt: Maybe this is getting further into the weeds. But at some point, there was a separate pacer in ema ecf login and they merged I don't do anything about that it's

0:17:56 Mike: They called that the next generation when they merged that um they did it uh yeah I don't know uh I didn't I wasn't dealing with both sides of that so I didn'T it was sort of just annoying because they did IT

0:17:59 Matt: Pretty annoying actually it's good now but uh sure sure uh yeah

0:18:08 Mike: One court at a time um and it took years and you're like it's taking you years to do like a you know a username tweak

0:18:14 Matt: Right to integrate the the read system and the write system basically uh and I just remember it was annoying because somehow there was like multiple multiple steps as an attorney to merge your two accounts but it was you know pretty typical federal government website type stuff

0:18:17 Mike: Week right yeah uh -huh yeah no it was totally

0:18:31 Thomas: Today's show is brought to you by 1 -800 -Flowers. Moms deserve the absolute best, especially on Mother's Day. And when it comes to flowers, there is only one place I trust to get it right every time. That's 1 - 800 -FlowERS .com. And I really love their variety and their selection. This year, I went on 1 -800 -Flowers. Lydia shouldn't hear this because even if she does have time to listen to OA, she's going to hear the patron version because, you know, she's a VIP. So don't tell her. But anyway, went on to 1 - 800 -FlowERS .com website and there were so many choices. And I let Phoebe pick because that's always the most fun. And I have got those flowers, which are beautiful, by the way, already scheduled for Mother's Day. I'm way ahead this time. That is not normal for me. And it is all because of 1 -800 -Flowers. You can schedule it out that far in advance, probably further in advance. I don't even know. I haven't tested the limits yet, but I'm going to. And right now, when you order one dozen roses, they'll double it to two dozen for free. And the roses from 1 - 800 -FlowERS are picked at their peak, cared for every step of the way, and shipped fresh to ensure high quality and long lasting beauty. So to claim your double your roses offer, go to 1 -8000 -FlowER .com slash opening. Opening. That's 1 -800 -Flowers .com slash opening. Be like me. Do it right now. Get it all done way in advance. It's fantastic. This is the greatest feeling. I've never done this before. Do it. 1 - 800 -FlowERS .com opening.

0:19:53 Ad: [Ad break 2 — ad music]

0:19:53 Matt: So you also are running a great service that just provides bots, basically, that will keep people updated on cases, which is incredibly useful when we're following things like you're talking about these fast -moving deportation cases.

0:19:56 Mike: Inelegant yeah so these are on blue sky and x basically you can follow the account and it'll post updates about depends on which follow account you follow we actually have about a dozen of them so the main one is the big cases bot if you've ever seen that on social media and it tweets about the bigcases the ones that are in the news any new filing it'll Post about it I think it's done about 20 ,000 posts in the last year or two so it posts a lot. Unfortunately, I should add, I wish there were fewer legal cases in the news. But you know, I think we're around 200 lawsuits since Trump took office just against Trump that are in the news, right? So it's insane right now. But we have little topic based ones too. So like we have an LGBTQ bot, right, that only posts about that topic. We have a bunch of others. We have one that's run by Lawfare that's focused on just Trump litigation. That one has a lot of followers. So there's little topic -based ones. There's one about AI, right. AI lawsuits and and copyright things like that so yeah they're they're fun they're easy they're sort of like where we put our new developers to get them you know show them the ropes and they're where we play with our own apis and our own tools to make sure everything works well for us but yeah they've you know I think we've got about 50 000 followers something like that you

0:21:05 Matt: Yeah, it's useful stuff. I mean, like all of these tools, they're also directly useful for practicing attorneys, for journalists, for anybody who just wants to pay attention to what's going on in our courts. And certainly now more than ever, we need to be doing that, as you said, with the growing number of Trump -related administration cases. And just, you know, I don't know how the courts are doing it right now. It seems like nobody's sleeping on the weekends anymore I've never seen anything like it yeah court listener basically mirrors the pacer system just kind of scrapes and puts it into a similar looking yeah yeah

0:21:23 Mike: Know there seems to be a lot more weekend work happening than I've seen in the past yeah it's wild you know

0:21:33 Thomas: Just looks way better, way easier. At what point could they just eminent domain your website? You're like, this is better. Let's just take it. Yeah I guess now would be the time a lot of the red tape maybe is not as present as it maybe used to be oh

0:21:44 Mike: We've talked about that and I don't think we're actually done it but occasionally you can make these offers and say hey please just take it you're gonna have it you know but yeah maybe that's true but you know we shouldn't minimize what pacer is right like it does scheduling and all this other internal you know in -office stuff that most people never see so there's a zillion little features there and they need to replace it it's been hacked three times by um by foreign countries but panic

0:22:14 Thomas: Wow what happens when it's hacked like what are they getting access to that is important how much private stuff is in there is it just public stuff anyway oh yeah

0:22:22 Mike: Yeah. I mean, kind of a lot, right? Like I'll give you an example from it. It's almost harmless in a sense, but you'll recall the whole Uber, was it Uber v Google or Google v Uber? I forget. About like self -driving technology, right. And I think Google claimed that Uber stole their technology. Cool. That's fine. And in that case, there's a bunch of sealed trade secrets, sealed stuff. So like, you know, if you're a certain country and you want to do self -driving cars. Heck yeah. Go and get those trade secrets. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's confidential informants, their names. There was a story in the Wall Street Journal maybe, I don't know, eight years ago, nine years ago about criminals using Pacer to find CIs so they can go get them, right?

0:22:45 Thomas: Oh sealed stuff Oh, wow. Oh, man. The wire called that.

0:23:10 Mike: It's ugly. It's stuff. Those criminals are using the stuff that was not sealed that should have been sealed. But obviously there's a whole lot more that is sealed. So the courts were panicking when this happened. I talked to one clerk that was like working through the night trying to deal with it. Yeah. I mean, Pacer needs to be replaced. You could just stop swiping the credit cards like we were talking about earlier but you still have this horribly insecure totally outdated system and like we deserve better it's a national security problem

0:23:34 Matt: Hadn't thought about that one

0:23:35 Thomas: Didn't even think about that. Yeah. So how much of the court does this give folks access to? I think I think the three of us seasoned, you know, legal researchers know. But just just to step back a little bit in basic terms, in lay people's terms, what things what courts are in your system? What ones aren't? What are the challenges there?

0:23:47 Mike: Yeah well on the pacer side we have all of the district courts and the bankruptcy courts circuit courts they all use some version of pacer so we have them in there but like I say before you know we're not getting all 100 000 documents every day but it is a huge resource right it's 400 million records that we have in there on the case law side we Have an effort to collect every piece of case law every day in real time and all historical records going back to about 1650 uh

0:24:16 Thomas: I don't think we 1650. I don't, yeah.

0:24:20 Mike: -huh there was no pacer back then in fact there was not an america back then but there is relevant case law back then so we've got it and you can go in there and start digging through some really old stuff some of it's from england but it's relevant to us because we build on their legacy

0:24:34 Thomas: Wow, so is that a question of like digitizing, like how are you getting, how's the, how you, what's that process?

0:24:40 Mike: A lot of that came from harvard they went through their entire law library and digitized everything and so we We took that content in and we're making that searchable and available. But we're also, we have 200 scrapers we run every day. We're starting a book scanning project later this year. So yeah, the case law is a big deal. It's really hard, but it's really important. Another sort of funny example of the work we do is in American Samoa. They have been neglected by the major publishers. Westlaw doesn't work there because Westlaw doesn't have their case law.

0:25:12 Mike: It's like kind of hard to believe, but they just don't have solutions there. So they email each other pdfs and that's how they do legal research so we're hoping to do something with them and we'll go back and digitize the old books they've got and you know we'll build up we'll build up the first american samoa legal research platform make that available to them and to everybody so there's like things like that right it's

0:25:24 Thomas: Oh that's really cool,

0:25:25 Matt: Yeah it's really important

0:25:31 Thomas: That's awesome, yeah, really interesting work that you get to do, that's so cool,

0:25:37 Mike: Fun yeah and this is even touching on the work we do with journalists like we we help journalists build stories um there's a lot we do there

0:25:41 Thomas: Like actively or just your tools that you're building?

0:25:46 Mike: Too we stay out of the like editorial side of it but we provide like the data and the the tools and you know give them advice if they need it right whatever sometimes we'll do particular data sets that they want or need yep

0:25:55 Thomas: I've just been all over Court Listener because we're covering the Blake Lively thing. And it's so useful. It's great. And it's cool to see in the stuff that's got that like high level of interest. It'S funny to see how fast that link comes up, you know, versus the other stuff where it's like, Pacer, buy it, buy it on Pacer. But then the stuff that all the eyeballs are on, it's really cool to see how it comes up.

0:26:19 Mike: Well with the 30 ,000 people using the extension I've heard on good authority that we are the fastest source

0:26:24 Matt: Nice and the free law project is a 501c3 right

0:26:25 Thomas: That's awesome.

0:26:28 Mike: That's right yep all of this is under our non -profit

0:26:31 Matt: Great how are you funded

0:26:31 Mike: Umbrella it's a constellation of different things we have you know major donors that support us um we do grants and we also like if folks need technology or they need data we'll license that to them. And we also have just like a lot of small donors. Kind of those four different pillars support our work and allow us to expand in different directions. Like the work I've been talking about with Quartz, you'll notice I did not mention that as a funding source. We've been investing in that for a year and we have one major donor that supported that. That donor has moved on and they're doing, you know, funding other things. And so we're supporting that out of other money that we get from other places, right? Some of the stuff we do is hard and people don't want to pay for it but it's important so we do it yeah wealthy people if you are listening mike at free .law please send me an

0:27:10 Matt: It's so vital yeah yeah I'll come up

0:27:11 Thomas: You just need one wealthy person to get mad enough at the current technology, I've been doing a thing where I've been realizing it's one of those embarrassing realizations that I'm an adult who has some amount of money and then I'll realize oh the things that I like and use I should just give money to like the other I think like it's actually been probably 10 years by now but I realize like oh Wikipedia is the greatest thing and I use it like every single day how about I just donate to Wikipedia and similarly I'm going to hop on and make sure I hit that donate button on the Free Law Project because the court listener is so useful. And it's cool to donate to something that's useful for everybody and is helping, you know, it's not like a profit -driven thing.

0:27:41 Mike: Email yeah thank you I love it

0:27:59 Thomas: It's a really, really great resource.

0:27:59 Matt: And that is a free dot law for everybody listening. But do you mind if I ask, what is your total budget? I'm just curious at all this enormous public service you're providing.

0:28:04 Mike: Yep we're around a million dollars right now per year yep no no

0:28:11 Matt: Not 100 million somehow. Yeah.

0:28:13 Thomas: Relative to the amount of documents and crap you're doing, I mean, it'S shoestring budget, right?

0:28:16 Mike: It is it's always been a shoestring I mean last year we sent I think 2 .3 million emails to our users we have 100 000 people on the website every day now it's insane yeah I have uh folks constantly asking you know like why don't you just put ads on the the website and even the advertising companies have figured out how big we

0:28:25 Thomas: That's a lot. No. Fine. I'll donate a little more. God, just don't do it. Yeah. This

0:28:35 Mike: Are right right and I'm like no uh we're trying to do something good here we're not gonna cover it with ads but yeah they flash the advertising countries are like you can make 40 000 a month and like nope don't want that

0:28:52 Thomas: Show is brought to you by HIMSS. All right, men, Men, dudes, dude bros, guys, HIMS is changing men's health care by providing you with access to affordable sexual health treatments from the comfort of your couch. Which, that's the best place for it, I'll be honest with you. Trying to go in and talk to someone about this in person can be not the most fun thing to do. So forget that and try HIMS. The process is 100 % online, so there's no need for uncomfortable doctor's visits. Just fill out an intake form on their site and a medical provider will determine the right treatment option. If prescribed, your medication ships directly to you for free. No insurance needed, and one low price covers everything from treatments to ongoing care. With hundreds of thousands of trusted subscribers, HIMS can help you find the ED option that works for you. So start your free online visit today at HIMS .com slash opening. That's H -I -M -S dot com slash opening for your personalized ED treatment options. HIMS dotcom slash open. The featured products include compounded products, which are not approved nor verified for safety, effectiveness, or quality by the FDA. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions, and important safety information. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. HIMS .com slash opening.

0:30:08 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:30:08 Thomas: Hey, so you mentioned AI earlier. That has got to be, at the very least, affecting and changing what you're doing, if not, you know, maybe revolutionizing certain things. What's your view on it? You know, we've got ranges of skepticism to this is the greatest thing in the world and it's going to solve all these problems. When it comes to law, I mean, I'll admit I've used it quite a bit. I'm obviously not a lawyer, so it might be a little more helpful to me, but it's also a little bit more dangerous because I don't know when it's just lying to me. But yeah, what's your experience with AI? How are you possibly utilizing it? What's your outlook on that?

0:30:12 Mike: Money yeah I'm pretty big on it and I have to say like you know the places where you hear about ai being such a problem and like hallucinating cases for example you know what would yeah well Michael Cohen did this, right? I think Giuliani even. It's like, why are these people not hiring good lawyers? I don't know. That's been a continual sort of national embarrassment, I feel like.

0:30:49 Thomas: Like Michael Cohen?

0:30:50 Matt: And paying

0:30:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:59 Mike: High profile, top of the administration has these terrible lawyers, like what is happening? But anyway, like these hallucinations, you know, you could prevent them if you had a complete and open database of case law like we're creating, right. If you know what all the citations are in the known universe, you can check if something is a hallucination.

0:31:17 Thomas: I didn't even think about that as being a problem. So the AI probably like sees a citation like, well, it's not on Court Listener yet, so I'm I'm just going to make it up. Oh, really?

0:31:27 Mike: Kind of yeah so if it makes up us you ask the ai to build you a brief or whatever it's going to put some citations in there you could very easily ask court listener in fact we have a tool for it you can say court listener are these citations any good and we're going to give you sort of a red light yellow light green light greenlight yeah we have it red light no we don't yellow light we have it but it might be ambiguous right because citations are not unique and that's great but the red light means we don t have it and that could be that it doesn t exist or it could be that we just don't have it yet. And so there's a whole concept called neutral citations that some folks will know. I don't think we probably have time to get into it. But the problem is that citations come from publishers, right? And the publishers don't just like put those out there and give them to us, right.

0:32:11 Mike: So we have to go scan books in order to get citations and have them all. So anyway, we're working on that. But big picture, I think AI is super important to the legal space. We all have to get a little smarter about it. Don't ask chat GPT for like a brief, right, it's going to do some funky stuff. You're gonna regret it you're going to be in the newspapers especially if you're michael cohen like don't do that but if you speak spanish if you have a lower reading level or even if you are in a rush even if have a normal one

0:32:36 Thomas: Even if you have a normal reading level, but the crap is written so terribly.

0:32:41 Mike: Right yes right you can take any case you like and you can say give me a summary give me summary in spanish give me the summary with eighth grade leave reading level and you've got it in a few seconds it might not be perfect but it's pretty damn good and for somebody who might be in a rush, whatever that's cool and that's useful that moves you forward so we look at that. We're working on building a citator, the first open citator. So you can look at a case and say, okay, that was overruled or overturned or whatever, right? AI will make that possible. Prior to now, the only way to do that was an army of lawyers reading every decision as it came out from the courts each day and paying for Westlaw, right.

0:33:15 Matt: For Westlaw to shepherds it for you. Right, right. No, that's amazing. Because we were just talking about this last week about the dangers to art, right? Of having a giant pool of stuff that AI draws from so that it can write a new chapter of Moby Dick or make another Beatles album or whatever. But this actually seems like the best use I've heard of that kind of pool, a gigantic pool of publicly available case law just in one place that AI can draw from. Yeah, really, I hadn't thought about the implications and how useful that really could be.

0:33:41 Mike: Do we have time for a funny concept that I think people should do? So, you know, there's always like moot courts. We have one of the databases we have not talked about, which is oral argument audio. We have 3 million minutes of it from the circuit courts. And you could take that and you could basically build a moot court generator where you're talking to the judge and they are responding in their voice, saying the things they are likely to say. A lot of that is enabled by AI. That's the kind of thing that would not have been possible before. And it's cool, right? You can sit down for an hour and talk, you know, make your case to the judge before going in the next day or the week before next week, right. Right.

0:33:44 Matt: Please. Wow. Wow, that is incredible. I am actually stunned by that. That is so cool.

0:34:20 Thomas: So Circuit Courts. Can I talk to Sotomayor somehow? Did she do any time on the circuit? I don't remember. Oh, yes. Okay.

0:34:25 Mike: Oh, we have Supreme Court in there too. So yes. So go for it.

0:34:30 Thomas: Is she doing it? Is she busy? Could I talk her now? Sotomaior bot. Bot descent bot basically that's really

0:34:33 Mike: Yeah, you could make a Sotomayor bot. Do it. Yes. Yes,

0:34:39 Matt: Yeah, and also just for law students, let alone for lawyers, but just to have the experience of, you know, I'm going to argue in front of the first circuit, here's my issues. It's incredible.

0:34:45 Mike: That's my $100 million idea. Someone's going to run with it one of these days.

0:34:50 Matt: That has to happen. Because there's so many ways that I've been concerned that AI is going to make the law worse, but that's actually something that can sharpen us up.

0:34:56 Mike: Yes. In fact, that is a deep fake for good, weirdly enough.

0:34:58 Thomas: Cool but talk about how else you're using

0:35:04 Mike: Yes We are using it for a lot of stuff. Some of it is kind of mundane, but it's the kind of thing that would be very hard to do otherwise. I've mentioned the scanning project. The old OCR engines are pretty bad. The AI OCR is incredible. It has blown my mind. You take a picture of a book sitting on a table and ask it for the headings from the book and it's like, here you go. It's kind of incredible stuff. So we'll be using that in our scanning project. We already are using AI to convert all those audio files to text, right? So in our oral argument dataset, you can go and search for anything somebody said in a circuit court or Supreme Court, full text search on that. We're doing semantic search. So some people don't love it, but I think it's really useful for people who don't know legal jargon. You can roll up and say like, my landlord kicked me out. What the heck? It'll be like, okay, here's some interesting cases about evictions, right? Because it knows the intent and the meaning of landlord kicked me out.

0:35:21 Thomas: AI right

0:35:54 Mike: That's an eviction. We talked about summarizing. We're going to do some categorization stuff.

0:35:58 Thomas: It is really nice to be able to search. That's a great thing just AI in general because like I feel like I still have this like Ask Jeeves type format like when you think of uh searching things I'm always like all right put in the important like keywords with no syntax of any kind just like this this this, this. And now with AI, like you can type a human sentence and it's going to find you maybe even better, like the better keywords to use. And that's one thing in just everyday life. But in law stuff, especially for a non -lawyer, that's like revolutionary for me personally. Yeah.

0:36:29 Mike: Yeah, we're really trying to move fast on that project just from an access to justice perspective. Like just making that available to non-lawyers that need to represent themselves.

0:36:37 Thomas: I'm not going to be like, okay, I need to search latches. I don't know what that is. It's going to be some other generic term that has nothing to do with the legal terms, but then it gets translated over. It's super useful. When is that? Do you have that now? Can I have it? Can I have a pre-print on that?

0:36:43 Mike: Yeah, it's very cool. Yeah, yeah. We were talking about that donation earlier, right?

0:36:54 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I got the box still open.

0:36:56 Matt: There you go.

0:36:57 Mike: That one's almost done. It's just a question of the many projects we have going. So more resources, things come faster.

0:37:04 Thomas: Well, Mike Lissner, thanks so much for coming on. Really fascinating, great work you're doing. People can go to free.law. Where else should they go to support you or to check out more of these projects?

0:37:14 Mike: Yeah, start at free.law, check out courtlistener.com. The bots stuff we talked about, that's on bots.law. Big cases bought on major social media platforms. If you're out there following legal stuff, you'll probably see our courtlistener links. And now you know the story behind it.

0:37:28 Matt: Use it all the time. Thank you so much.

0:37:31 Mike: Total pleasure

0:37:49 Thomas: Yeah, who's typing? Okay, wait, you said

0:37:51 Mike: Oh, it's probably me you can hear this that

0:37:54 Thomas: You're on a headset, right? Yeah, it's incredibly loud. I'm almost wondering if we're picking up the onboard mic or something.

0:38:00 Mike: Could be system default microphone is what we're using Let's go see what my system default is set up to Ah, it's using the uh the laptop mic how's this how's the uh how's the typing

0:38:14 Thomas: Well, definitely better on the typing it's got that more headset sound I know I'm gonna regret this Matt what do you think what did you like yeah

0:38:18 Mike: Now high note low Note I mean if we can get rid of the typing it's probably a good thing because I usually type notes as I talk. Okay.

0:38:26 Thomas: That's terrible. Okay, yeah. If that's the case. Then and then this will save a lot of me saying things that'll be that'll get. Let's just go with this. We'll go. We'll do this. All right. Appreciate it. I have the hardest time when a decision is really 50-50. I'm like that's so arbitrary how do I All right.

0:38:37 Mike: I think it's the right call. I support this decision. I know.