Justia Regulation Tracker

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of this year’s MacWorld Conference and Expo, which my wife and I got to attend, was not the announcement of the iPhone, but the lack of the phrase “And now, one more thing” which has been Steve Jobs’ catchphrase at his keynotes for quite some time now. Since Jobs didn’t use it this year, I’m going to shamelessly steal the phrase for the day and say “And Now, one more thing from Justia”. I mentioned previously, that I was already working on the next project after Dockets and that Justia would be announcing it soon. My boss announced it today on a legal mailing list, so now I can finally talk about Justia Regulation Tracker at RegulationTracker.com!

Ok, for those of you, who, like me, before I worked on this project, have no idea what the Federal Register is, the Federal Government passes a number of regulations every single day, and four times a year chunks of these regulations get imported into something called the “Code of Federal Regulations”, but in the meantime, they are published daily as the Federal Register.

The problem with the Federal Register is that while there is an online version, and you can search through past copies of the register, there are hundreds of distinct Agencies and Departments that put out regulations, and if you are interested in getting all new regulations in an agency of your choice, you are resigned to read the somewhat confusingly laid out federal register every day, and if there were no new regulations in the agency you are interested in, then you’ve wasted your time.

This is where Regulation Tracker comes in. If an Environmental Lawyer wants to stay ahead of the game when it comes to regulations from the EPA, with Justia’s new site, that lawyer can view a list of the most recent documents filed by the EPA, and if they aren’t interested in Notices, just Rules and Proposed Rules, they can view that list, and if they want to be sure they never miss an EPA filing again, they can subscribe to an RSS feed so they will be constantly updated.

What’s more, is not only have we downloaded and parsed the Confusing Federal Register Table of Contents and turned it into a Browseable and easily filtered Database, but we’ve also downloaded all of the individual documents since 2005, parsed them all, and added Full Text search capabilities, so that you can search for words in any document posted in the Federal Register.

To find out more about Justia Regulation Tracker, check out this post on Justia’s Legal Marketing Blog, or just visit RegulationTracker.com and check it out for yourself.

I’m once again really proud to have been able to be a part of such a great project and I’m looking forward to seeing how people review it. I’ve also been working hard on improving the Federal Dockets Project I previously mentioned. Now we fetch even more data then before and have found a more reliable source to update it more frequently. I enjoy going to the dockets page throughout the day just to see the number of dockets growing every single hour. We also now have more information then before, including the Cause of Action, and the Presiding and Referring Judge of the case, as well as if a jury was demanded on the case and if so, by whom. Now that this project has grown more stable, Justia has issued a press release to officially announce Justia Federal Court Filings & Dockets.