by Paul Axel-Lute
March 1998
During January and February 1998, I tracked the appearance of New Jersey Supreme Court and Appellate Division opinions on Westlaw, Lexis, Versuslaw, Counsel Connect, and the Rutgers-Camden Law School Library's Court Opinions website. I found that Rutgers- Camden, Counsel Connect, and Versuslaw loaded most opinions on the same day that they were decided; that Westlaw loaded most opinions by the day after decision, but for a significant percentage of cases had a delay of a week or more; and that Lexis loaded most cases by the third day after decision. The data are presented more fully below.
It would be interesting (to me at least) to have comparative data on other jurisdictions. For anyone willing to undertake such tracking, I offer a few methodological notes: It is not necessary to log onto Westlaw every day, because you can search on the added-date field. However, you must ascertain the added date of an opinion on Westlaw within a few weeks after it is added, because when the opinion is re-loaded in advance sheet form it is treated as a new document and has a new added-date. Since Westlaw will not accept a search consisting only of date and added-date fields, you need to add a dummy term to the search, for example: co(high low) & da(3/1998) & ad(3/20/1998).
It is also not necessary to log onto Versuslaw every day, because it displays the load-dates. (The same is true of Counsel Connect and of the Rutgers-Camden site for the New Jersey opinions, and may be true of the local site for your state.) However, caution is advised with regard to the load-dates on Versuslaw, because for cases retrospectively loaded Versuslaw displays the decision date instead of the load-date, and I noticed erroneous dates on four cases during this study. The Versuslaw citations, which are in the form year.jurisdiction.opinion-number, do presumably reflect the sequence in which the opinions were loaded, and can thus be used to verify doubtful load-dates.
If anyone knows of a way to determine Lexis load-dates without a daily sign-on and search, I would appreciate hearing of it. Note that the Lexis citations, in the form year/jurisdiction/court-level/opinion-number, also apparently reflect the sequence in which cases were loaded, within each level of court.
I did influence the results slightly by alerting Westlaw to a few of the cases they hadn't yet loaded and telling Counsel Connect about one case they were missing.
(lag time in business days)
Rutgers-Camden: 76 same-day; 8 next-day; 5 two days; 1 three days; 1 seven days. Total: 91. Median: same-day. Mean: 0.3 day
Counsel Connect, N.J.Daily Decision Alert (squib only): 84 same- day; 6 next-day; 1 four days. Total: 91. Median: same-day. Mean: 0.1 day.
Counsel Connect, N.J.State Decisions (full text): 63 same-day; 25 next-day; 1 two days; 1 four days; 1 twenty-three days. Total: 91. Median: same-day. Mean: 0.6 day.
Versuslaw: 50 same-day; 29 next-day; 9 two days; 1 three days; 2 five days or over. Total: 91. Median: same-day. Mean:greater than 0.6 day.
Westlaw: 19 same-day; 40 next-day; 10 two days; 2 three days; 3 four days; 1 five days; 1 six days; 4 seven days; 5 nine days; 3 ten days; 1 thirteen days; 1 fourteen days; 1 fifteen days. Total: 91. Median: next-day. Mean: 2.6 days. 18 percent over 5 days.
Lexis: 4 next-day; 30 two days; 19 three days; 21 four days; 9 five-days; 1 over 5 days; 1 six days; 2 over 10 days. Total:88 (not including three cases decided Feb.27, after which I stopped tracking). Median: 3 days. Mean: greater than 3.0 days.