This blog has always had a bit of this and a bit of that. I noticed recently renewed interest in a some blog posts on Canadian legal research apps, one a decade old, one about 4 years out. Out of my unending curiosity, I decided to take a look at legal research apps again. This time, in light of my change in circumstances, I thought I’d also take the opportunity to look forward, at US legal research apps too.

I was a little reluctant to re-survey the app environment, because I’m not big believer in them for legal research. Like ebooks, they have their particular niche to fill. They can localize functionality in a way that a web site can’t. They may do that, however, by sacrificing user experience. And since most legal research requires online resources (like a database), one aspect of an app – portability – is largely lost. I mean, you can carry it with you but you can also just use a web browser, a standard app that works with lots of legal research resources.

So to be clear, this is narrowly focused at legal research and not at legal information (for example, forms) or other apps. The future of legal information apps is in those that are diversionary, not those that are strictly informational. The ones that will have an impact will bake the law into the app, eliminating the need for legal know how by the user or through the hiring of a legal professional.

If you’re not interested in a largely Canadian retrospective, skip ahead.

Change Since 2012

The list of Canadian legal research apps from 2012 show some of that early experimentation – “there’s an app for that” – when the ability to create an app perhaps overwhelmed the need for an app:

  • Gary Wise’s WiseLII app provided an interface to CanLII, the lawyer-funded public access Canadian case law web site. But CanLII has had a mobile-friendly, light web interface for many years. It’s a great example of where an app would have to add functionality to be worth developing.
  • Despite huge investments in their web sites, both LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters continue to develop apps for their legal research databases. Both apps have 1 star ratings, which I don’t find surprising. And both publishers have a variety of other apps (LexisNexis | Thomson Reuters) where they are dabbling in a variety of law practice technology that show a lack of strategy. Why, for example, is there a standalone TR law dictionary outside of the Proview content platform (two different apps)?
App entries from the Apple app store for Thomson Reuters Westlaw and LexisNexis, showing a sample review and their 1 star ratings

Even the digital Ontario Reports now have a … responsive web interface. So although LexisNexis Canada has a Digital ORs app, you … mostly … don’t need it. I would just say that, after testing the web version on 2 browsers, if you resize it down to a responsive, single page view, it is broken. You can only page forward 3 pages before it starts to recycle the same 3 pages. The top right corner Table of Contents will not take you to the case law either in this view. The image below looks like it’s looping, but it’s just because the responsive view is returning to the first page as I click on the forward navigation button on the right side.

An E-Book Tangent

E-book apps aren’t really legal research apps. Except when legal publishers make their content only accessible via proprietary tools. This is increasingly rare, thankfully.

The e-book options are all over the place. Emond Montgomery sells and rents its e-books. But to read them, you’ll need their proprietary e-reader on your PC or portable device. Irwin Law’s e-books use both a proprietary delivery platform and the Adobe DRM app. If you’ve used Overdrive on your PC, this app will be familiar, but you may not have used it on your phone or tablet other than for an Irwin book. And Thomson Reuters has Proview.

The Proview app makes some sense. As I noted recently, the emerging Proview online platform actually seems to be fine for mobile. In a captured environment, where a law library can deliver to a single, known individual (law firm, corporate counsel, faculty), it has tools that the individual can use to annotate and save personal research notes. It’s the sort of functionality that can help to justify creating an app, but it could also be embedded into the web version, as Australia’s Barnet Jade site does. But if the app is only to enforce DRM, then you’re creating unnecessarily research silos, and friction, that limit the use case for law libraries.

Frankly, Fastcase’s Full Court Press ebooks and LexisNexis seem to have the best approach to e-books. Take LexisNexis, whose titles come in two file formats (.epub and Amazon’s .mobi) so you can read them with your preferred e-book app. They also deliver your purchased e-books via their Overdrive LexisNexis Digital Library offering, so you can read it in a web browser if you don’t want to read it on a portable device. Fastcase is perhaps less sophisticated, with its ebook shop list including some print-only texts, but offering PDF in addition to .epub and .mobi formats. As I posted recently, non-linear texts accessed via a responsive web browser seem like the future of legal research e-books to me.

Apps in 2018

My 2018 update found a slightly wider range. But many of those have now disappeared, including the CLEO e-books and Alberta’s public focused Legalave. Our library’s app brought together our discovery service and digital repository in a hosted Boopsie Demco Solus app. We’ve had a steady but small user base for this cookie-cutter approach. The ability to bring multiple resources together, different from our web properties, is useful. But with our recent recentering on our discovery tool, which is responsive, the app is likely to remain a niche tool.

An app creates a silo. To that extent, if you’re using it to delivery legal information, you want that information to be as comprehensive as possible. Our library app brings 2 resources together. But the more apps you need, you start to run into the same interface and experience issues you have with multiple legal research web platforms.

The other app area that appears to have maintained its place serves those looking for criminal law. That’s both a very select part of the bar and of the public. Both BadgeCanada and PocketLaw continue to offer apps in those areas. PocketLaw, a Ghana-based developer, has not updated the Canadian app since February 2020 and it appears to be a skinned version of a government legal site. BadgeCanada had an update in 2022 but its web site is gone.

Apps in 2022

Just a reminder: I’m focusing on legal research. While there have been a lot of law practice, legal profession useful apps, they’re both beyond my scope and going through many of the same fluctuations (e.g., CaseMap Cloud, the replacement for Textmap etc.). There are also many emerging legal publishing options, like Codify (2015), vLex’s primary and secondary text offerings (2017), and Fastcase’s Full Court Press (2019). Some of them have developed apps but many appear to remain focused on device and software agnostic content.

I’m in Canada for a bit longer and tied to the Google Play Canadian store. But if you log out of your Google account, you can see all the apps, even those that aren’t designed for your market. Once I did that, I had a whole slew of new, but not necessarily usable, apps listed.

I’ll start with the Fastcase app, since that’s a good one for any North American researcher. It’s ancient, last updated in 2013. US legal professionals who are members of their state bar have free Fastcase access as a member benefit, and so may want to just use the web interface. But for public researchers and others, this is a nice free way to do case law research.

I checked some of the cases against what’s in Google Scholar and they’re current. It makes me wonder if, like me, people who see the app avoid it because the app is out of date, even though the content it surfaces is current.

Thomson Reuters offers a bunch of apps but the Android Westlaw app hasn’t been updated since 2016. The terms and conditions link 404s. I didn’t bother to install it as there are enough reviews to get a feel for what it does. Unfortunately, there are recent reviews showing people trying to use it without realizing that no-one may be listening.

Google Play Store entry for Thomson Reuters Westlaw app for Android, showing last updated October 13, 2016

This highlights an ongoing concern of mine related to delivery. The Apple iOS Westlaw app was updated in 2022, as was the LexisNexis app. But Android users are left with pretty old apps that may or may not have the improved functionality. Fastcase is at least mostly equivalent, with the iOS app version updated last in 2015. If I had to guess, it may be because of data like the ABA 2021 Legal Technology Survey, showing 80% of the legal profession responding to the survey adopting iOS devices.

LexisNexis, not to be outdone by Thomson Reuters, also offers a slew of apps, under a variety of corporate names. Confusingly, you can get LexRead, a quasi-Proview entry to enable quick purchase of e-books. It’s meant for the individual who is not going to have a shared law library through LexisNexis Digital Library and the related app, I suppose. It makes me wonder why there isn’t a corporate implementation of the Digital Library that, like a large public library, could serve all of the solo researchers (legal professionals or otherwise). Also, because LexisNexis provides .epub and Amazon .mobi formats, you don’t really need a LexisNexis-branded app to get e-book markup functionality.

Some US and Canadian jurisdictions are big enough that they have dedicated content. California, New York, Texas, and Ontario are good examples. Similar to the PocketLaw app mentioned above, there are code-oriented apps from LawBox for Federal, California, Texas and other large jurisdictions. These LawBox apps and downloadable content haven’t been updated since 2013 except for Texas.

Wither Apps

Anddddddd …. that’s about it. I’m sure I missed some although you would think that a legal research app would surface in the store using a search for “legal research,” as both the Google Play and Apple stores are closed gardens. “Legal research” returned 250 Google Play hits without quotes and 55 with It seems as though, to the extent any legal research apps were blooming in those gardens, they’ve now withered.

That would make complete sense to me. An app requires maintenance and continuous development as devices age out. Legal information delivery has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, with encrypted browsers and responsive design and accessibility concerns becoming standard. If I was a commercial legal publisher or someone who wanted to crack that market, I would not put resources into an app. I’d put it into the content and a browser-based delivery point.

As I head back to the States, it’s good to see that the legal research market hasn’t changed dramatically. Sure, every publisher is now talking about their AI or whatever. But, substantively, the delivery model hasn’t changed that much in the time I’ve been away.