Rakoff: LexisNexis, Westlaw Providing Legal Briefs For Research ‘Transformative’

LexisNexis and Westlaw can provide legal briefs to subscribers without running afoul of copyright law, Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York ruled. An Oklahoma IP attorney registered his briefs with the patent office and then sued the legal digital publishers for infringement in 2012, and Rakoff granted a summary judgment in favor of the publishers in 2013, but it took more than a year for the full opinion to be issued. In it, Rakoff found that, unlike fiction, the legal briefs were “functional presentations of fact and law,” and that Lexis and Westlaw’s use of the briefs for interactive legal research was transformative. Some of the court’s conclusions, such as asserting that adding hyperlinks was “adding something new,” may be questionable, Foley Hoag attorney David Kluft writes, but overall the decision was “not the most surprising of outcomes.”