[This article was first published in NJLLA In Brief 12(3):16 (Spring 2000)]
During March and April 2000, I tracked the appearance of New Jersey Supreme Court and Appellate Division cases on seven full-text online sites and services.
The official Judiciary website, which carries only the current week's and previous week's decisions, generally posts the new opinions on the date of approval for publication (which is usually the date of decision). Of the 103 March- April cases, just five were posted more than one day later than the approval date, with lag times ranging from two to four business days, but two other cases were not posted on the Judiciary site at all.
The majority of opinions appear either on the approval date or within one or two days thereafter on the Rutgers-Camden site, Lexis, Westlaw, VersusLaw, and the New Jersey Law Journal site. (The NJLJ site maintains only the most recent couple months' worth of opinions.) Of these, Lexis and Rutgers-Camden were the most consistently current during the study period, except that one case from April 12 was still missing from Rutgers as of May 8. There were two Supreme Court cases that took unusually long times (thirteen days and nineteen days) to appear on Westlaw. As of May 8, VersusLaw was missing two cases from March-April, and the NJLJ site was missing eight.
Loislaw was by far the least current of the services tracked in this study. (The study did not include Jurisline, which does not purport to be current.) Loislaw was engaged in a catch-up operation during the study period. As of April 17, they were claiming currency to April 10, because their most recent cases were of that date, but they had not loaded forty-four earlier cases. As of May 10, Loislaw had all but three of the cases of March 1 through April 19, but none of the fourteen cases decided later in April.