Wired – [snipped] “As its creators [Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed] see it, Ravel’s visual search offers myriad improvements over the old columns of text results. It better lets you see how cases evolved over time, and potentially lets you see outliers that could be useful in crafting an argument–cases that would languish at the bottom of a more traditional search. The visualization, Reed insists, “tells a lot more of the story of law than the rank ordered list.” (That might be true. When they first showed their visual search to a veteran judge, he looked at the complex map of circles and responded: “This is how my brain works!”).

• Note – there is a free and a premium version for subscribers. See Robert Ambrogi’s profile of the company to understand more about this new generation of visualization and relational context for online legal research. Ravel’s footprint is still small in comparison to those of LexisNexis and Westlaw, but relevancy is based on deliverables.  The very scope of “searching” has transcended the linear into an often overwhelming realm of big data, analysis and visualizations that provides altogether different kinds of “results” to “queries.” These are indeed interesting times, and the legal community is the beneficiary of innovative, results driven technology solutions such as this one.