Face Off: CourtWire v. Courthouse News
by Kristine Lloyd
Walking through Nordstrom is a heavenly experience. Gliding from architecturally aligned rack to rack, you feel as though you are in a museum. There are items that you should not touch. Items that famous people wear. You may be accosted by security for touching these items without permission if you are not carrying a Birkin bag. Sweaters are folded as soon as they’re touched and hangars are realigned after being pulled out, examined and rehung asymmetrically. A tour through Macy’s (at least some of the stores) is like walking down an alleyway. Clothes often litter the floor, hangars jut out like elbows, the mannequins look like they’ve had a rough night, and everything is 25% off. Macy’s carries many of the same designers as Nordstrom, that is, if you can find them.
What exactly am I getting at here? Well, such is the difference between two court docket alert services: Westlaw’s CourtWire and Courthouse News Service. CourtWire is, as my grandma would say, real purdy, but it does a lot of the same things that Courthouse News does, which is basically to give you access to complaints before anyone else can, by what I imagine are people who wait like the post-Thanksgiving sales shoppers to get into the courts first thing in the morning.
Having just seen a demo of CourtWire, there are definitely bells and whistles that make the product attractive, the most impressive being that you can search across all available jurisdictions at once, that is, if they are included in your plan. CourtWire covers 136 courts, and they do visit some of the busier courts more than once a day. I would not venture to guess how many Courthouse News covers, clearly more than 136, but coverage for some courts is weekly, rather than daily. Courthouse News recently started offering bankruptcy court coverage in some jurisdictions, plus some Canadian court coverage, where CourtWire does not. Both CourtWire and Courthouse News allow you to search by party name, judge, attorney / law firm and keyword, with CourtWire also offering a nature of suit search option. One of the cool things about CourtWire is that they provide a brief summary of allegations for each case which allows you to run term searches and create customized alerts. You can run RSS daily or continuous feeds of new cases through your intranet, but that also means you could have multiple attorneys pulling the same complaint—and you get charged for each retrieval. Get your piggy bank out, because the multiple downloads and the continuous feeds will cost you a pretty penny.
One distinct advantage of Courthouse News is its’ Darkroom (see the top tabs on the homepage), and who doesn’t want a quaint little online art gallery accompanying their court delivery service? I can see it now: with every 5 complaints downloaded, you get 1 framed photograph for FREE!
Ok, so the Times New Roman font on Courthouse News is so 80s, but it still gets the job done. The bottom line is we’re talking about who gets to the court first—who is in line for that Thanksgiving sale first. And who wants the $1,000 designer dress or the $300 knock-off? No one will know unless you tell them.
Themocracy
One advantage to Courthouse News is that now many of the complaints are available free, at least in King County.