Advocate's Studio

Whew! Gone for a few days as I dug myself out from a pile of work (the paying kind). Perhaps if I had a software tool that combined my legal research efforts and results with a simple, effective sharing and composition tool, I could whip out those opinion letters and research projects faster and more efficiently. Wait – you say there is something like that out there? Have you heard of Tabulaw?

Tabulaw is a web-based service that combines all of the tasks of researching and communicating a point of law into a simple copy / drag / drop interface. Tabulaw is the glue for your other resources and tasks – it appears that it will work with Google, Westlaw, Lexis/Nexis, and perhaps other databases (here’s hoping for Fastcase), allow you to copy and save sections of research, along with their appropriate citations, which are then available to you to drag and drop into your final document. I really like the idea of aggregating from different sources into one, citable ”notebook” of content that can then be manipulated and shared. As far as the collaboration element, I am not sure how they intend to implement this – it would be uber cool to make these research folders open to multiple contributors, along with traditional social sharing or direct links to Scribd or Slideshare.

Tabulaw is in private beta and I don’t have an invite so I haven’t yet tested it myself. But you can bet that I signed up for the beta. If I get in, I will get back with more info on this promising tool. In the meantime, check out their promo video below.

Google Scholar made a big splash a few months back when it rolled out case law and law journals as an option within its Advanced Search function. People “buzzed” around the new service, wondering if it would be the big “Wexis” killer with its free format. While it has taken some pot-shots in the comparison tests, Scholar is still a more than viable means of securing legal information and is getting better by the day.

Google has taken another giant step closer to besting the big guys with its roll-out of free Alerts for Google Scholar results. Activating an Alert is as simple as running a search and following a few simple steps. After getting positive results, look for the envelope icon on the upper left corner of the page. Click the icon, select the number of entries you wish displayed and that is pretty much it. Alerts work for traditional Scholar results and, most importantly, legal cases and journals!

Alerts will bring you new material as it is entered into the database based on your search query and parameters. Advanced searching is available for Alerts to the same extent available in a regular search.  While you cannot limit your Alert to results from a smaller subset of sources, you can limit Alerts by author’s name or part of a name or from pre-built “collections” listed on the Advanced Search page.

While only available via email for now, Google likely won’t stop at that delivery source. As with traditional Google search alerts, I expect RSS feeds will be coming down the road.

I am unaware of how frequently Google updates its information or the length of the time span between information creation and entry into the Google Scholar system. One of the benefits of paid services is the quick turnaround time on data entry. Of course, speed is an issue with respect to discoverying new case law on a particular question. But, as a supplemental means of securing FREE notifications on legal searches as they happen on issues that do not require up-to-the-minute updates, it seems to me to be  impossible to beat Google’s combination of price and service!

Kudos, Google, to further tilting the legal research playing field in your direction!

Hat tip to Resource Shelf.

If you are looking for some writings on legal research and writing, hit the jump to the Cornell Law Library’s list of legal research and writing guides (link here). The categories break down as follows:

1. GENERAL WORKS ON LEGAL WRITING AND LEGAL STYLE
2. GENERAL STYLE MANUALS
3. CITATION GUIDES
4. WORKS ON BRIEF WRITING AND ORAL ADVOCACY
5. WORKS ON INSTRUMENT DRAFTING
6. WORKS ON LEGAL RESEARCH

The categories above are links to the actual sections. While it is a “selected” and not a “comprehensive” list, there is more than enough to fill your office bookshelf!

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Nada Khirdaji, a partner in the Research Department of Osler’s Toronto office, focuses her practice on legal research.  Sounds familiar to me. Ms. Khirdaji shares some of her suggestions for effective legal research in this article (link here) included in CCH’s January, 2010 Law Student Monthly column. She covers many excellent points - all focused on providing the researcher plumbing a new area of law with the world-view first and the finer points second. Her suggestions include: avoiding the case law databases as a first step and turning instead to general resources and texts; reading all cases cited in the notes; assuming application of a statute until proven otherwise, and performing a thorough review of the statute’s structure, location, table of contents and index; reviewing predecessor sections of statutes, related statutes from other jurisdictions and similar provisions in other statutes; avoiding journal articles for practical legal research; and, using firm-specific resources and consult ing colleagues.

Really, all very good advice. However, the suggestions seemed penned by an attorney from the 20th Century. Here in the 21st Century, there is another, important means for achieving a broad, world-view that Ms. Khirdaji omits. Consider looking at all available on-line resources as well, including the newly-fortified Google search, book searches, semantic search engines, and other curated legal databases and resources. Consider crafting your own custom search engines of pertinent governmental agency websites using Google Custom Search. Use the deep web search engines to find unconventional web documents. You never know what you may find.

Last week I mentioned it, this week I review it. I have downloaded and have been playing with Fastcase’s new, FREE, iPhone application that offers a portal to a database of caselaw and statutes at your iPhone-bearing fingertips. New to Fastcase? From their site:

Fastcase is a next-generation, Web-based legal research service, that puts the complete national law library on your desktop anywhere you have Internet access.  Fastcase’s smarter searching, sorting, and visualization tools help you find the best answers fast – and help you find documents you might have otherwise missed.

Fastcase reaches back to volume 1, page 1 of the major federal reporters and also includes primary caselaw from the 50 states and statutes as well as other materials  via its Web interface. Fastcase had already positioned itself as the affordable, legal research option, free to many via bar memberships. Fastcase is sure to blow that particular part of the field wide open with its free legal research iPhone application, the first of its kind to hit the App Store.

The iPhone application uses the same process as Fastcase’s web-based application – a natural language and relevancy weighted search function. But Boolean search works too. What’s more, there is a citation analysis tool integrated into the search results. No need for an existing Fastcase account: I quickly filled out a form within the app, providing my name, company, job title, and log-in information and achieved full access immediately. In their welcoming email, they include an offer for a free trial of their web product (aaahhh, THERE’s the marketing hook.)

Fastcase lists the features of its app as follows:

• Free, searchable library of American cases and statutes
• Keyword (Boolean), natural language, and citation search
• Browse or search statutes
• Most relevant results first
• Customizable search results that you can sort five different ways
• Search results automatically display number of citing cases
• Jump right to most relevant paragraph of any case or statute
• Integrated research history
• Save favorite documents for use later
• Case law is updated regularly

Not bad for a free application.

Of course, I have opened and closed the doors and hood, kicked the tires a couple of times and have run a few searches. In a word, it delivers.

I entered my search query:

set my jurisdiction and date parameters,

and let it run. Thirty seconds later, my results showed up.

The relevancy-weighted algorithm assigns a relevance score to the case from 1 (not relevant) to 100 (right on point). Authority check shows via an orange button indicating how many times the case has been cited overall and how many times it has been cited by other cases in the search results. You get more details on the citing cases when you press the button.

When you click on a particular case, it brings up the header with both the official and West Reporter citations (cool!), docket number, court, parties and officiating judges. There are arrow buttons to scroll through the results list, a save button to save a particular case (which you can also copy, paste and email to yourself if you want to print ) and a “most relevant” button which brings you to your search terms. The case text is easy to read and it hypertext-links you to other cases cited within the text.  Footnotes are displayed at the end of the case.

A burning question in my mind is how quickly Fastcase gets decisions loaded into its database. I haven’t queried Fastcase themselves and my research did not disclose a clear answer.

Another potential drawback for frequent users of the Big Two premium legal research products is the lack of the editorial treatment in these cases – no headnotes, keynumbers of introductory paragraph summarizing the case posture and holding. This editorial treatment is the value-add the Big Two lean heavily upon in keeping their prices at the top of the range. The lack of these features in Fastcase and, consequently, their app, may dissuade some from using this tool for more than the occasional quick look-up while on the go. But I do have to commend Fastcase’s relevancy algorithm – in an area of law that I am VERY familiar with, Fastcase quickly showed some of the key cases right at the top of the results list. Impressive showing for the first, free, legal research app for a mobile platform.

I give Fastcase’s app a hearty two-thumbs up for both effective implementation and the surefire “kick-in-the-pants” this free tool will bring to this somewhat archaic, top-heavy industry.

Run. Don’t walk.

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