Until Google provides an option to turn off conversations, I'll still just forward all gmail to another account so I can make sure I don't miss something. I suppose with this new option old conversations will get pulled up to the top if you tell Google that the topic or person is important, but I can't say that most important e-mails can be identified beforehand like Google hopes.

It is a good thing to give the public access to these materials. Your average citizen is not going to sign up for Lexis or Westlaw just to do some heavy legal reading. I know that depending on the size of the firm we are easily talking about five figures PER MONTH for those services.

But when I looked at the website it is obvious that this is not user friendly at all. From what I could tell, the files are either image pdf files or compressed in a tar.bz2 file. I doubt if more than 5% (I am being real generous here) of lawyers have any idea how to unpack that. (windows BZip2 for those who want a graphic interface)

I presume that somebody will OCR it and load it onto a Google-searchable website so the content can be found. Otherwise, this is just an exercise.