Washington State Court Decisions

[James Love <love@essential.org>]

Taxpayer Assets Project
Crown Jewels Campaign - JURIS
December 6, 1993 


     The following article describes the ongoing efforts of Ed
Hiskes to persuade the State of Washington to publish its
judicial decisions on CD-ROM.  According to this report, West
Publishing provides a discounted version of WESTLAW to the
Washington Supreme Court in return for special access to the
State judicial opinions.  jamie


     STATE LAW REPORTS HIT GLITCH CONVERTING TO COMPUTER AGE
                        by Eric Smith
           Tri-Cities Herald, September 12, 1993
          (reprinted on TAP-INFO with permission)

     Even if you really wanted to blow $5,000 on a complete set
of Washington Reports, First and Second Series, you'd have to
clear a mighty large amount of bookshelf space.

     At last count, the full set of State Supreme Court decisions
ran more than 200 volumes.

     To the dismay of armchair lawyers and insomniacs everywhere,
there won't be a cheap substitute anytime soon.  You could put
the same information on a single CD-ROM computer disc (which
looks and works like a standard compact disc) and sell it for
maybe $99.95.  But court officials are digging in their heels,
and Ed Hiskes thinks he knows the reason.

     The Richland patent attorney has dug up a contract that
makes for some of the lightest reading you'll ever find in a
legal document.  The agreement between the West Publishing Co.
and the state Office of the Administrator of the Courts has nine
pages of legalese.  Four-and-a-half pages of official white space
also are included.  A few lonely sentences make occasional
intrusions, but one thing you won't find is the amount the state
pays for legal research.

     The West Publishing Co. operates Westlaw, one of two huge
and expensive legal databases that demonstrate America's
superiority over Japan in the lawyering industry.  Legal research
without a computer has become as unthinkable as a garage without
a BMW.  It costs at least $185 an hour, but somebody else pays
the bill, right?

     The state's court system gets a discount.  Exactly how much,
we'll never know; West insisted that its rates are a competitive
secret.  But, Mary McQueen, the state court administrator, says
the state saves something like $250,000 over a certain period of
time.  In return, the state sends the latest Supreme Court
rulings to Westlaw in electronic form. 

     Starting to get the picture?

     Not much point in a discount if the courts give out the same
stuff for free.

     By the way, West sells  a CD-ROM disc of state lawbooks,
too.  Only costs $2,600.

     Hiskes, in the even-handed fashion you expect from a lawyer,
says West "handed out sort of a bribe to the court not to
cooperate.  Why else would West want to provide such a good deal
to the state of Washington?"

     OK, let's forget that the contract was awarded through a
bidding process, and there's not a lot of point if the winning
bid is a secret.  That's being picky.  Hiskes is talking
revolution here.  The law now belongs to the lawyers, who have
near-exclusive access to the law.  Hiskes says he wants to give
it to the people, or at least those with personal computers. 

     "This thing hurts poor people, the most defenseless groups
in society," Hiskes says.  "Rich people have access to the law.
It's the poor people who can't afford it."

     Two years age the Commission on Supreme Court Reports
produced a computer tape containing the full 104 years of court
decisions.  It was required by modern publishing techniques. 
Upon urging from Hiskes and the state Bar Association, the
commission was on the verge of releasing the tape in the spring. 
Then Chief Justice James Anderson stepped in. 

     Says Anderson, "The problem in giving out the tape is that
you might be making a gift of state property to somebody." 

     That's prohibited by the state Constitution -- and the tape
did cost $68,000 to produce.  Consultants from the National
Center for State Courts come to Olympia this month to help set a
licensing fee.  There's no conspiracy, says McQueen: "In this
environment, everybody's saying to government, 'You have to
charge for you services.'"

     Of course, taxpayers did pay for the thing already.

     Hiskes says he just wants to give it back.  He's been
pushing the concept for six years, and when you ask court
officials about him, they usually take a deep breath first. 
Already he's won access to the Revised Code of Washington,
available on a Bar Association computer bulletin board.  Hiskes
has debated Anderson in the state Bar News; a letter to the state
attorney general compared Anderson with the authoritarian Louis
XVI.  Hiskes says he faxed that one by accident: "I couldn't
remember whether it was Louis the 15th or Louis the 16th," he
explains.

     Why doesn't Hiskes scan the lawbooks in to the computer
himself?  He says he probably couldn't do it any cheaper.  (A
Seattle company, CD-Law, has done just that.  It charges $1,495,
much of it to defray the data entry costs.)

     Could he win in court?  Sure, if it gets that far, he says. 
The handicapped have trouble getting to law libraries, and that
runs afoul of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

     Hiskes can't answer this one, though. If he win, is anyone
going to buy those law books anymore?
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