This month, the Library Innovation Lab celebrated the full and unqualified release of the Caselaw Access Project data. We took the opportunity to gather and look to the future at Transform: Justice on March 8th. The event reminded us of what we already knew: the open legal data movement is alive and well.

In addition to hearing the story of CAP, librarians, vendors, and advocates had conversations about future paths for accessing the law. Noted open-access activist Carl Malamud made his pitch for a Full Faith and Credit Act.

As we see CAP move on to a new chapter, LIL will be bringing the same experimental mindset that allowed for such an ambitious project into other endeavors.

Here’s some of what’s coming up next at the Library Innovation Lab:

Facilitating open, equitable access to knowledge

COLD Cases: We’re excited to be collaborating with the Free Law Project on a couple of projects. First, we worked with FLP to create COLD Cases, a pipeline for standardizing and sharing bulk legal data.

Teraflop & CAP: It’s great to see work by the AI community in processing the CAP dataset for legal understanding, such as this work by Teraflop to generate text embeddings and search indexes for the data.

Future Collaborations: We see potential for Harvard to be a neutral platform for releasing data that helps the whole industry. We are having conversations with companies like Westlaw, LexisNexis, and vLex that see potential in this kind of partnership, and we hope to make more connections soon.

Empower everyone – AI, understanding, access to justice

Library Innovation Lab Artificial Intelligence Fund: LexisNexis is the first funder of our AI fund, which has been set up to support exploration at the edge of law, AI technology, libraries, and society.

Open Legal AI Workbench: Our recently released Open Legal AI Workbench is a simple, well-documented, and extensible framework for legal AI researchers to build services using tool-based retrieval augmented generation.

Keep your eyes peeled for more news about the Institutional Data Initiative, a plan to create a trusted conduit for legal data for AI. By pairing high-quality corpora and collection expertise with industry resources, it aims to scale the collaborations between knowledge institutions and industry partners that we discussed at Transform: Justice. The goal is to grow both knowledge and the public interest.