This is the first alignment of independent legal publishers that I can recall.. As a consumer of  legal information, I appreciate the importance of small publishers in the legal information ecosphere. Past  publishing partnerships involved companies of wildly disproportionate size and market power. This partnership has delightful symmetry and counterpoint (Hein offers  deep archive of primary and secondary historical materials, Fastcase has a  primary law research system which offers futuristic visualization tools, search algorithms and the “bad law bot.”   I applaud this partnership of  two high quality niche publishers..

“Fastcase and HeinOnline are two of the largest independent legal publishers in America,” said Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase. “Integrating these two libraries is a home run for our members. Both services create unique values based on citation analysis and the information architecture of the law. Beyond the fantastic new libraries our users can access, we’re also making our tools smarter as they learn from these new citation relationships.”

Customers Win Concurrently, Hein will provide HeinOnline materials to Fastcase, allowing Fastcase users to search across content available in the Law Journal Library, Session Laws Library, State Attorney General Reports and Opinions, and State Statutes: A Historical Archive. The new libraries will be fully integrated into Fastcase’s search system, and Fastcase users will see Hein results and abstracts for free, with subscription options for the full articles. The Hein collection will include more than 1,800 law reviews back to their first volumes, and represents the first secondary material to be integrated into the Fastcase legal research service.

Last year, Fastcase began releasing jurisdictional  digital “advance sheets” which report judicial opinions as they are released.. They will now be publishing  topical slices of newly released federal opinions in a new suite of  advance sheets which are released as eBooks.