Howard Bashman relays the perspective of Ward Mundy, the former IT director for the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which includes these remarks about the history of dispersal of opinions on the Internet:

I worked pretty hard in the early days to persuade the court to let us encourage some law schools to provide free, public access to appellate court opinions. At that time, Cornell provided an indexed collection of Supreme Court cases, and that was all that was available. Within a few months, we persuaded Emory Law School and several other law schools to build and maintain indexed collections of federal appellate cases. Today Emory Law School still provides this service for the First, Fourth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits while Villanova hosts a similar service for the Third Circuit, the Touro Law Center supports the Second Circuit, and FindLaw handles the Ninth Circuit.

So the initial purpose of many of the circuits' web-based and BBS opinion collections was to serve as "feeders" to these institutional web sites and to legal publishers. Instead of coming to the counter at every circuit court each day to pick up all of the opinions of the day, legal publishers could simply download them from the circuits' web sites. As I indicated previously, there also was a battle brewing nationally as to whether courts should charge for electronic copies of opinions. Fortunately, with some strong arm-twisting by Eleventh Circuit judges and support from several of the other circuits, that issue now is behind us. The Judicial Conference of the United States ultimately determined that opinions should be provided at no cost to the public.