ABSTRACT
Prior to the Internet’s World Wide Web there were many online legal information systems and numerous legal information products distributed on CD-ROM, but there was no significant provision of free access to legal information anywhere in the world. Both government and private sector online legal publishers charged for access. This pre-Internet history from the late 1950s is summarised by Bing (2010) who points out that ‘though lawyers are not known for being technological avant gardists, text retrieval was actually developed by lawyers and for lawyers, due to the need to consult the authentic text for legal interpretation’. The pre-web years, at least up to the rise of CD-ROMs and the PC in the late 1980s, are seen by Bing as the pursuit of a vision of ‘one, integrated, national [legal] information service’ (at least in Europe). It is a vision which he now sees as having since receded in some respects, but perhaps being revived in other respects by the growth of free access to legal information (Bing 2010, 44).
