Funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant since August 2020, SCALES-OKN is led by a team of computer and data scientists, legal scholars, journalists, and policy experts, who strive to develop a suite of tools to enable access to court records and analytics. Six working groups are currently focused on exploring issues in criminal justice, complex litigation, environmental law and policy, intellectual property, journalism and public policy, and judicial administration. Considering the team roster, there is little question that they will succeed on all fronts.

The positive experience I had testing the SCALES-OKN court records portal, and the clear utility of such a legal research tool on the open web, convinced me that more people, in particular law librarians, need to know about this nascent platform, track and potentially contribute to its development, and promote it as a valuable resource to our communities.