They have to digitize, in part, because all of the states have exclusive publication&#x2F;etc agreements with westlaw or lexis or ....<p>So you can&#x27;t get a feed of cases from pretty much anywhere, and often, you aren&#x27;t allowed to bulk download, etc.<p>Plenty of folks have digitized all the data harvard is talking about here. They are not first. 
Carl malamud, for example, has scanned all the federal reporters and tons and tons of other cases.
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;radar.oreilly.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;08&#x2F;carl-malamud-takes-on-westlaw.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;radar.oreilly.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;08&#x2F;carl-malamud-takes-on-westl...</a><p>and<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bulk.resource.org&#x2F;courts.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bulk.resource.org&#x2F;courts.gov&#x2F;</a><p>(My experience here is from back in the early 2000&#x27;s  working on getting pacer&#x2F;states&#x2F;etc to open up all of this data, so we could get it into google scholar and elsewhere.  Often, they were willing to sell it to us, but they would not let us pay them pretty much any amount of money to make it just open and freely available, which is what we really wanted.  Things have not gotten better, sadly, and in fact, have gotten worse)