Who Pays For This

How the LII is Funded

20% of our funding is contributed by generous people like you who believe that law should be freely available to everyone. All of your donations go directly toward supporting the LII itself. Please donate to LII.

20% of our funding is provided through online sponsorships, online advertising, and projects with partner organizations (like our Lawyer Directory and eBooks) that help generate funds for the LII. We also obtain grants from government and non-governmental organizations, but these funds go directly to support the research goals and technology needs affiliated with the specific grant.

60% of our funding comes as direct support from Cornell Law School, which also provides us with some administrative apparatus and office space in the Jane Foster Tower at Myron Taylor Hall.

How we use funds

The main expense in running a website is not technology, even on a site that offers nearly 500,000 pages to 15 million unique visitors every year. Instead, more than 80% of our budget goes to salaries for our small staff, and to stipends for the law and computer science students who work with us. Almost all the remainder is spent on computing facilities, which we tailor to demand using cloud-computing technology. Less than 5% goes to administrative overhead.

Because our core staff is small and our activity level is high, it is hard to tell you precisely how this money is spent. How much of the time that Dan Nagy spent working on a server should be allocated to the WEX legal encyclopedia? To the collection of Supreme Court decisions? How often do Dave Shetland's code libraries get used for the Code of Federal Regulations, and how often for the US Code? How many red pencils did Sara Frug use up editing the Federal Rules? These are hard questions to answer, and maybe not so important so long as you understand that nearly all of your money buys talent. We try to apply that talent as effectively and efficiently as we can.