Caselaw
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Last year, to review the current state of citator services, we wrote a white paper comparing the citator services of Google Scholar, Fastcase, Casemaker, LexisNexis, WestlawNext, and Bloomberg. As much as we like our free access to Casemaker and Fastcase, we’ve always hoped that Casemaker and Fastcase would add a more robust, free citator (equal to Shepard’s, BCite, and KeyCite). But...
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California Lawyers and Paralegals can earn two hours of self-study MCLE credit online after reading this article and completing the quiz found at this link. FindLaw and Google Scholar offer free California state and Ninth Circuit federal case law databases (in addition to free case law databases to all other states, circuits, and the U.S. Supreme Court). For California-only free case law...
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On a recent visit to Fastcase, I noticed a number of new features and services available for users. Alerts The first was something new on the search results page—an Add Alert option. When you click the Add Alert button, you are saving your search and asking Fastcase to alert you by email whenever new documents are added to Fastcase that match your search terms. To cancel your...
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Today Fastcase announced a free enhancement to their case law identification algorithm that identifies overturned or reversed cases in its Authority Check system. Called "Bad Law Bot," the system uses "new algorithms to identify court cases that are cited with negative treatment and to alert researchers of a case’s negative citation history," according to the company's press release...
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During our live continuing legal education seminars we discuss how to use the information found in social media profiles for evidence and how to get profiles admitted into evidence. If a profile owner assumes a pseudonym, authenticating the owner of the profile has proven to be a challenge. Some courts admit the profile into evidence and some do not. For that reason, we’ve been following...
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Google appears to be testing out a redesign to its Google Scholar interface that integrates the service’s Advanced Search page into a drop-down menu to the right of the search box. Google labels it “our new modern look,” while we label it a major hindrance to those using Google Scholar to conduct case law research. It’s a hindrance for two reasons: it’s hidden (see...
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UPDATED 4/3/12 LexisNexis' Decade-Long Free Case Law Research Experiment Comes to an End Free, current case law research has disappeared from LexisNexis Communities. All links and access to the database formerly known as lexisONE have been removed. The deep link that previously led to a functional free case law search form on the LexisNexis Communities pages now displays only a message...
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Free, current case law research has disappeared form LexisNexis Communities. LexisONE, originally launched in July 2000 as a free legal portal by Lexis, was re-launched in December 2008 as LexisONE Community, and relaunched again in September 2011 as LexisNexis (LN) Communities (http://www.lexisnexis.com/community/portal). According to Lexis, “LexisNexis Communities have replaced the...
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On March 8, 2012, Google announced a change to the way it presented case law citations in its Google Scholar case law database. "Today, we are changing how we present citations to legal opinions. Now, instead of sorting the citing documents by their prominence, we sort them by the extent of discussion of the cited case. Opinions that discuss the cited case in detail are presented before...
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On August 30, the developer Michael Poulshock announced the release of version 4.0 of his Jureeka Web browser extension for Firefox. Version 4.0 for Chrome will be released in the near future. Jureeka is a free add-on application that you can download and install in your Web browser that automatically recognizes legal citations in Web pages you are reading and...
