Home » post » Legal Link Rot

Our mission

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Legal Link Rot

The good folks at perma.cc recently conducted a “quick review” of the links in court filings made in the last five years by three of the largest law firms in the U.S.

They found that over 80% had at least one broken link and that, on average, these briefs contained around six broken links each.

When they examined links that were not broken (that is, the link resolved to some page, not to an error message), they found that nearly 30% of those no longer displayed the material referenced in the brief. (This is known as ‘reference rot’ or ‘content drift.’)

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Archives