alt Hacker News> Only three entities in the United States have anything approaching complete coverage
> They sell the editorial infrastructure built on top: headnote taxonomies that organize millions of opinions into searchable categories, practice guides written by specialists over decades, and treatises that synthesize primary law into usable guidance.
> The Free Law Project’s CourtListener provides free access to millions of federal and state court opinions, oral arguments, and PACER documents.
I think issue of a data-moat is somewhat overstated, or at least it is not argued very well here. If secondary organization and interpretation of open data is their moat, and if it is mostly focused on guiding humans through the complex web of knowledge, then AI should make short-order of that.
But, as usual, the issue of structural and organizational barriers is definitely convincing. Sometimes existing players are too entrenched to change. A new kind of AI-oriented law-firm might need to emerge and show itself to be competitive to either make mainstream firms truly change or push them out of the market.
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There may also be a Bitter Lesson element here. Ultimately, if law is like other domains, we may be able to solve legal applications with more compute on the limited freely-available data.
That's a load-bearing "if", though, given the incohesiveness of legal systems compared to typical Bitter Lesson examples.
Precedent in law is like discovery in science. It advances the boundary of human understanding so a probabilistic regurgitator will have trouble applying it without treatise roadmaps.