More than 40 years ago, Mead Data Central introduced Lexis, offering digitized legal research through electronic copies of Ohio and New York legal codes and cases. That action pushed legal research from the world of leather-bound books to clumsy computer terminals, then to CD-ROMs, and now to the Internet.

The next wave in legal research may already be here: Google Scholar went beta in 2004, making hundreds of millions of cases, research articles and filings easily searchable and free.