Interesting development on the Google beta scene announced today on the Official Google Blog:

"Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar".

Andrew Plumb-Larrick, writing on the Case Western Reserve University Law School blog Just in Case, has this to say about Google's latest offering:

"Google Scholar searching is citation based ... the focus on citations as search fodder in Google Scholar is narrower in focus and much more explicit. As a result, using Google Scholar for cases will differ in important ways from searching in other online, word-searchable, repositories of case law, where results are based primarily on the presence and placement of search words in the actual retrieved texts."

Nice to see that Google acknowledges the work of a number of "pioneers" including Daniel Poulin at LexUM the folks behind the CANLII database among other successsful Canadian case law resources.

It will be interesting to see what impact this will have on the legal resource landscape.