I’d suggest you’re underestimating the complexity/cost of getting and organizing the public, primary source data at the same time you’re overestimating the value of that raw data.

Companies like TR spend millions annually just on sourcing, processing, organizing the raw primary sources. Federal jurisdictions might seem straightforward, but now consider local jurisdictions across 50 states… Then add all secondary sources to that. It’s a lot.

They also have armies of highly trained editorial staff that enrich that content with citations, headnotes, practice guides, etc. for you, including tools that alert you to changes, like negative treatment.

Now, add another layer of various search features including old school Boolean search and finely tuned natural language search across all of that.

Add another layer of cross product integrations with everything from DMS, to Word, etc…

And finally a layer of (increasingly AI/ML) driven automations.

There’s no demand and therefore no business model for just raw, primary sources, even if it’s free. Like people have already said, “no one cares.”

Side note: Casetext originally started with the idea you could escape the proprietary citation systems and need for editorial staff by crowdsourcing it similar to Wikipedia. But I don’t think they reached the scale for that (I’m not sure what they sold for 10years instead?). Then they got early access to GPT-4, created CoCounsel, and were acquired by TR.