A private company came to organize the entire American case-law system

Evidence

In the last quarter of the century, West Publishing Company, of St. Paul, Minnesota, began a profitable business, by promising to tame the dragons of case law. States tended to publish their high court decisions very slowly; West published them fast, and bound them into regional reports (Atlantic, Northeast, Northwest, Southern, Southeast, Southwest, and Pacific). The Northwest Reporter, which included Minnesota, was the first of these; it began to appear in 1879. West ultimately indexed the cases with a naive but effective “key-​number” system. Keyed headnotes told the reader what the case decided, and put it into its appropriate legal category. Very soon, the little pop-​art key of this private company became an indispensable tool for lawyers. The Century Edition of the American Digest, which West published, from 1897 on, gathered together every reported case (it claimed there were more than five hundred thousand of them) indexed them, classified them, and bound them into fifty volumes, from “Abandonment” through “Work and Labor.” — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2369