LawMoose

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LawMoose launched in September, 2000, is believed to have been the first U.S. regional legal search engine operating its own independent web crawler.

Initially LawMoose provided a searchable index drawn from Minnesota law and government sites. Later, it added a similar capability for Wisconsin law sites and select general legal reference starting point sites.

LawMoose has since evolved into a hybrid bi-level public and subscription legal knowledge environment, featuring a thesaurus-based topical map of legal and governmental web resources (which spans the U.S. and globe in a subscriber edition), a list of the largest one hundred Minnesota law firms, ranked by number of Minnesota lawyers, a densely interconnected words and phrases network, consisting of more than 50,000 legal, governmental, insurance, and popular terms, functioning as a legal brain booster and search assistant (in a subscriber edition), and the Minnesota Legal Periodical Index (in the public edition), listing and topically categorizing more than twenty-four thousand articles published by Minnesota legal publications from 1984 to the present.

The Minnesota Legal Periodical Index has been continuously maintained by the Minnesota State Law Library since 1984. Since 2002, it has appeared on LawMoose through a collaboration with LawMoose publisher, Pritchard Law Webs, Minneapolis, Minnesota.