LawMoose

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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, constantly evolving legal words, phrases, and concepts network, consisting of ninety thousand legal, governmental, business, insurance, and popular terms connected with a vocabulary of more than 130 relationship types that functions as a law practice knowledge framework and search assistant (in a subscriber edition), and the Minnesota Legal Periodical Index listing and topically categorizing more than twenty-six thousand articles published in Minnesota legal publications from 1984 to the present (in the public edition).

LawMoose's multi-dimensional legal words, phrases and concepts network increasingly functions as a navigable intellectual model of law and law practice. This approach to organizing legal knowledge and locating legal resources is a significant departure from traditional hierarchical, case law-specific legal taxonomies, such as the taxonomy utilized by the West American Digest System.

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.