The NLRB Research Database Is Now Available to the Public
Looking for financial support from unions, law firms, and individuals to keep this resource free.
Over the last year, I constructed a self-updating comprehensive database for researching legal questions related to the National Labor Relations Act. For the last six months, over 100 testers — including academics, labor lawyers, union representatives, and rank-and-file workers — have been using the database and providing feedback about how to make it better. Over that period, the database has successfully updated itself every day without failure.
I am making the database available to the public for free at NLRBResearch.com.
A brief explanation of the database can be found here. Instructions for how to search the database can be found here and in the video below.
About The Database
The NLRB Research database is a collection of all of the legal documents released by the NLRB on its website. It contains thirteen different types of documents, including:
The database stays up to date by automatically downloading any new documents released on the NLRB website. At present, the database has over 90,000 documents in it, with that number increasing every week.
Users can find specific documents by searching for dates, names, case numbers, and legal citations. They can also do a text search that will locate all of the documents that contain certain words or phrases. The search engine handles complex query logic and is lightning fast, with most searches completing in less than 0.1 seconds.
A user looking for guidance on a specific topic might find that their search matches a Supreme Court decision, a dozen NLRB decisions, a couple of advice memos, and the NLRB casehandling manual – all from a single query. The database contains the full text of each document as well as an AI-generated summary of each document.
When it comes to labor law, NLRB Research should be of value to legal professionals and academics as well as rank-and-file workers and union representatives. The latter group, union representatives, should find it especially useful as their job often requires them to confront legal issues without having access to any legal research resources.
Please Financially Support the Project
For ideological and practical reasons, I would like to ensure that this database remains free for anyone to use, especially ordinary workers and union representatives.
Although I want to keep it free to use, the database is not free to produce, maintain, or host. Thus, I am hoping to convince unions, union-side law firms, and individuals to chip in to the project. In an ideal world, major labor unions like SEIU, IBT, UFCW, UAW, IBEW LIUNA, CWA, and IAM, as well as large union locals, would each contribute a few hundred dollars a month, not just for solidaristic reasons, but also because the database should be a valuable resource for their legal departments and union representatives.
Individuals who would like to modestly support the project can do so by signing up to donate $5, $10, $15, or $20 per month.
I am open to any idea to help finance the project, including philanthropic support and advertising. I am also willing to do trainings, especially for sponsoring organizations. Email me at matt@nlrbedge.com for any inquiries.
Wow! This is an amazing resource!
Thank you for taking the time to put this together. This looks like an enormous amount of work, but this will be an invaluable resource moving forward for many of us.