Debevoise & Plimpton LLP has been representing Harvard University in connection with its “Free the Law” project, by which the Harvard Law School library will be digitizing its virtually unrivaled collection of volumes of reported United States state and federal case law. The digitized cases will be made available for free to scholars, practitioners and the general public. This project, now publicly announced in The New York Times, included negotiating a comprehensive agreement with Ravel Law, which is contributing millions of dollars in exchange for exclusive access, for a period of several years, to the digitized cases for commercial purposes, including through its novel legal search, analytics, and visualization platform. The project, which involves the scanning of approximately 40 million pages of text, is approximately one-fourth completed. Partners Jeffrey P. Cunard, Sarah A.W. Fitts and Michael J. Gillespie along with associates Maxine Sharavsky and Robert A. Williams, Jr. represent Harvard on this project.

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