Assistant Director of Innovation, Research & Instruction
Former corporate bankruptcy partner, current law librarian
I practiced corporate bankruptcy for 10 years and now teach legal research and legal technology as a librarian. I’m also a huge advocate for open access to legal information and am on the board at Free Law Project, so enjoy exploring what's possible with open data. I'm fascinated by the Legal Quants project because I had *so many* of these little ideas when I was practicing, where I could never find quite the right piece of software.
A Firefox extension that finds the case discussed on a web page (a news article, blog post, opinion piece) and links you straight to it on CourtListener. Click the toolbar button — Claude identifies the case and the extension searches CourtListener for the match, usually in a few seconds. In beta, install instructions are in the README.
A spatial research tool for Title 11 of the U.S. Code. Pull sections, defined terms, and cross-references onto a canvas; arrange them, follow the trail, save your work.
Verify legal citations against CourtListener. Catches hallucinated case citations from AI tools by checking whether a citation actually exists and belongs to the case it claims to.
Ask natural language questions about any federal bankruptcy case — powered by documents freely available through the RECAP Archive and CourtListener API. Try the demo, install to add your own cases.
Women talkin’ ‘bout AI
In this episode of Women Talkin’ ’Bout AI, we sit down with Rebecca Fordon — law librarian, professor, and board member of the Free Law Project — to talk about how generative AI is transforming legal research, education, and the meaning of “expertise.” Rebecca helps us cut through the hype and ask harder questions: What problem are we really trying to solve with AI? Why are we using certain tools, and do we even know what data they’re built on?
ABA Journal
AI tools are genuinely useful for legal research, but we jumped to adoption before building the verification layer. Verification infrastructure should come standard.
Law librarians spend a lot of time testing and reviewing AI tools other people build. That's valuable, but we're leaving something on the table. Librarians understand the research process at a granular level, we understand organization and retrieval of information, and we know what's missing in the tools we use every day. This makes us uniquely positioned to build those tools, not just critique them.
So many of the tools I've built rely on CourtListener's open API. You'll see this across the legal tech infrastructure, particularly in vibe-coded projects. We're using open source software packages, open source data, sharing ideas, etc. When legal data is locked behind paywalls, innovation is limited to companies that can afford access. Open data lets anyone build, and the tools that come out of it serve people who can't afford $500/month subscriptions, but also serve people who are being served quickly enough by those $500/month behemoths.