In addition to covering signfican developments in California Employment law, there are two other projects that I am dedicating some of my energies to, and I hope this website will serve as the main center for.
First, “cradle to grave” law tracking. For example, let’s say the California Supreme Court reverses Torrey Pines. I would expect that would generate a bill in the legislature. That bill has to go through the Sacramento Labyrinth, and one day maybe codified. Then, as you know, it may bounce around in the Courts. One day, it may be repealed or voided.
Though blogging and the Internet in general have radically improved practitioners’ ability to do this, the abilities of current technology far exceed what’s offered. Most of us rely on expensive on-line services to provide us with public records, most of which are linked to each other through explicit citation. Google and a few algorithmic tweaks could put Shepards and KeyCite to shame, if only those records were better organized, but I’ll get to that later.
What is already publicly available is not, to my mind, sufficiently organized for efficient use by practitioners. The tracking widget you see on the left side of the blog is the nascent stage of software I am writing that will do that. I’m somewhat afraid of making “vaporware” promises, but I hope to have an automated system that will interface with the publicly available legislative and court records to update the status on employment law matters. With a few tweaks, practitioners in other fields could easily adapt that software for their purpose. Analyzing these trends lets you play weatherman a little bit. Just for example, when you settle a case may be important depending on your forecast of an upcoming case that could radically change the dynamics. A few years back, I worked on a case that would have been completely different if Hillside and Torrey Pines had been settled by the Supreme Court. I’d like to have some coefficient to factor these in in the future.
Part of that means recording Justices’ and Legislators’ (and Governors’) tendencies. That is included in the data model I’m developing. I’ll update you as I progress. Right now, the software is not yet code-complete, but the data model is.
Second, the Internet has redefined “public record.” For the most part, for a nominal fee, you can see almost everything filed in a federal court case, at least within the last few years. Some of our counties let you do the same. Unfortunately, you can’t search for a “decision re: Labor Code 226.7,” if for no other reason that none of these records, as far as I’m aware, are OCRed.
Google’s mission statement is, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” To that end, they have organized and made useful map information, yellow-page style information, and even patent filings. But, at least as far as I know, they haven’t made any push to organize and make universally accessible the petabytes of data out there that are ostensibly public records.
It is certainly beyond the scope of this site, or even one person, to do that. But in my field, I believe I am most hampered by, and my clients are most encumbered by, the delays and expenses related to acquiring information.
Though I have no specific plans yet, I would like to call on other legal bloggers, and other legal practitioners to work on creating repositories for public records so that they can be accessed in a manner consistent with what Google wants. I hope this doesn’t create a wave of briefing plagiarism; rather, I hope it creates a more consistent feel for what’s going on throughout the state in the field, and more consistent application of the law throughout.
To the extent it will function that way, my software will enable you to do something like a Shepards search, but only on laws created beginning in 2008. I have neither the resources nor the ability to go backwards. It will also link to whatever information is on the Internet, including blog postings.
Please continue to share your feedback and thoughts with me–as I told one reader, it is that interactivity that makes blogging powerful and useful. I’m hoping to carry that exponentially further.