Fastcase has announced a new product to give lawyers their first look at judicial opinions in e-book format — free and licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. Fastcase Advance Sheets are the first of five Fastcase e-book products planned for release this year, all aimed at disrupting the traditional market for law books. In the legal publishing business, free is tantamount to disruption.
The “advance sheet” concept is well known among lawyers and librarians. The term describes paper drafts of opinions mailed to legal professionals before they are cumulated and published in books. The subscription prices for advance sheets are also well known: not cheap.
