The appearance of New Jersey Supreme Court and Appellate Division opinions decided November 1, 2000 through April 27,2001 was monitored on a daily basis on the the Judiciary website, the Rutgers-Camden website, VersusLaw, LoisLaw, Westlaw, and Lexis. The method of monitoring did not allow for exact determination of the load dates, so the results of the study must be viewed as approximate. Cases decided December 26 through January 5 were omitted from the analysis because daily monitoring was not possible during that period. The total number of cases remaining for the study period was 274.
For at least 94% of the cases, the opinions appeared on the Judiciary website on the day of their approval for publication. However, there were three cases which did not appear at all on the Judiciary website, which displays only the current week's and previous week's cases.
Most of the cases appeared on all of the other sites either on the decision date or within one or two business days after it. The percentage of cases that took three or more business days to appear was about 6% to 7% on Lexis and Rutgers-Camden, and about 9% to 11% on VersusLaw, LoisLaw, and Westlaw. The percentage of cases taking one week or longer to appear was 3% to 4% on VersusLaw, Lexis, and Rutgers-Camden, 6% to 7% on Loislaw and Westlaw. Westlaw's relatively poor showing was due mostly to a one-time glitch that caused them to stop loading New Jersey cases entirely during the period January 6 to January 18.
The four sites that had missing cases as of the end of the study period were all notified of the particulars on May 4, 2001. Four cases identified as missing from the Rutgers-Camden site were still missing from that site as of November 10,2001.
The New Jersey cases on the Law.com/New Jersey site were also monitored, but only for the three-month period February to April 2001, and somewhat less frequently than the others. This site seemed to load the opinions in weekly batches, and during the study period was retaining the opinions only for a couple of weeks. About 7% of the opinions for this three-month period did not appear on this site.