My favorite insider trading cases and why Tom Smith

This is actually a post about my search engine, but the title is relevant, honest.  So, if you go to the Precydent engine and enter the search phrase “insider trading” (not inside quotation marks; just the two words), you get a bunch of obviously relevant and authoritative cases, Chirarella, yada yada.  Including our old friends Blue Chip Stamps, Santa Fe v. Green, and Ernst and Ernst.  They are certainly relevant to insider trading as they are about 10b-5.  Westlaw natural language search (which is stronger than Lexis’s) does not return them.  Why not?  Because the phrase “insider trading” or some variant thereof does not appear in any of those three cases.  So our engine is able to find highly relevant cases to a query even when the words of that query do not occur in the case.  That, boys and girls, is a very big deal.   Interestingly (to me at least) is that this technology is also a lot cheaper than what we reckon Westlaw must be doing to make their natural language search as good as it is (and to be fair, it is pretty darn good for NLP).  They must be spending millions disambiguating legal words, etc. etc., while our little engine lets real judges (and law clerks) do all the work deciding what to cite, and then not-quite-free rides off of those human decisions.

Yes, I know we do not turn up O’Hagan, a very important insider trading case.  That is because it is not in our database, which is not very good and missing a lot of cases at this point.