Practice Blawg » Legal Research

Fastcase: There’s a User Guide for That

Andrea Hable — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:35:24 +0000

Fastcase. Not only is there an app for that, but now two new user guides. We’re sharing them here in case you need help with your free legal research. (That’s right. I said free. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read up here.)

Click on the links below to view or download the PDF guides.

Fastcase Quick Reference Guide 2010

One page. Ten questions answered.

Fastcase User Guide, 2010 Edition

Find help with

Getting started
Keyword, Boolean, and natural language searches
Navigation
Customizing search results and other features
Printing and downloading
Authority checking
Interactive timeline
Lots of other little quick tips that I didn’t know about, so maybe you don’t either.

For more tips on Fastcase, check out some of our prior posts.

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Fastcase Adds New ‘Forecite’ Search Function

Gregory Luce — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:04:32 +0000

Fastcase, the online legal research service that is free for Minnesota State Bar Association members, just released a new service it calls “Forecite” to assist users in getting additional relevant research results. Here’s how Fastcase marketed the development in its recent blog post announcing the service:

When you perform a keyword search on Fastcase, Forecite goes the extra mile and identifies seminal cases that can easily be missed by ordinary keyword searches.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you were researching the Miranda Doctrine under the Fifth Amendment. Can you imagine concluding your research without reading the Supreme Court’s seminal decision, Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966)? We can’t either. The trouble is, if you search for “Miranda doctrine” using most legal research engines, the Miranda decision will not be in your search results, because those words do not appear anywhere in the decision.

This is where Forecite comes in. Run the same search on Fastcase, and Forecite has you covered.

I tried it out on a search I usually do to show members how to use the service, typing in “covenants and habitability and landlord and tenant” (you can tell I’m a former landlord tenant attorney). It returned the usual suspects but also recognized and let me know that two of my results cited a decision from another jurisdiction. Pretty slick, particularly as it allowed me to trace more easily the origins of what later became an important legal precedent in Minnesota.

I then tried a different search involving the latent discovery of a construction defect and the impact on a statutory home warranty claim (a complicated field, I might add), and got three additional suggested cases that were not returned by my search terms. What was cool about it was that the cases generally involved entirely different areas of law (one was medmal, the other legal malpractice) but they did give me fuel to consider when determining how the discovery rule affects the statute of limitations for certain claims. Not bad. If you start using this service in Fastcase (it appears automatically in keyword searches), let us know how it’s working for you.

© Gregory Luce for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Fastcase, Forecite

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Thoughts on the Fastcase-Casemaker Skirmish

Nancy Hupp — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:29:09 +0000

If you’ve enjoyed the recent mudslinging, epithet tossing, and name calling surrounding health care, but have wearied of the topic, don’t despair. You may now enjoy the same between legal research services.

Casemaker recently accused its competitor Fastcase of missing hundreds of case citations. Fastcase countered; Casemaker responded. Pull up your chair, the match has begun.

Hard to tell at this point if this is a Coke v. Pepsi debate – both quench your thirst – or will morph into a story about true important shortcomings in one service over another. Casemaker has refused to make the alleged complete list of missing citations public (concentrating on the “top 50″ in each jurisdiction), pointing out that doing so would enable Fastcase to correct its database. Right now, the water is muddy at best. Both services are also facing a challenge from the recent availability of legal opinions and journals in Google Scholar (which, as we noted, has its own issues).

If Casemaker’s allegations are true, Fastcase will surely scramble to fix any problems. A legal research service couldn’t rest on the slogan that Avis used to combat Hertz. “We try harder” would not hold sway with attorneys or with bar associations that spend a pretty penny to provide these services to member attorneys.

We are watching the “skirmish” between both services closely. Both services offer a tremendous value to bar members, especially in light of the reports of WestLawNext’s pricing model. Ouch. The MSBA has asked Fastcase to address the issue of missing citations. Fastcase so far responded that it is an issue for all online legal research services — big and small– but also assured us that the company is “at the end” of a multi-million dollar process to upgrade its database. That’s good news, and we’ll provide updates as we learn more.

The exchanges between Casemaker and Fastcase are interesting. Casemaker described a history of service upgrades, noting that Fastcase upgrades followed closely thereafter as the two services battle for the bar association dollar. What struck me was not that Fastcase upgrades came later, but that the competition between them has greatly benefited us, the consumer. So, for now, I am content to sit back and let the fight continue.

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Jureeka: Useful and Cool, But Limited

Gregory Luce — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:00:57 +0000

There’s been a bit of geek-world excitement recently about Jureeka, a Firefox add-on that automatically catches legal citations in web pages, enabling you to click on the citation and get the case from one of the public online caselaw repositories. I must admit, it’s pretty nifty. But for Minnesota lawyers, it’s currently limited to Minnesota caselaw after 1996. Basically, that’s what is available online through the Minnesota judiciary’s website or through Minnesota’s state law library.

Limitations aside, Jureeka is a useful add-on to have for Firefox, just to have it working inconspicuously in the background. If it happens to spot a citation it recognizes, you’ll be better for it, as the case will be a quick click away. But if you think it’s going to be a nifty cite-checker for your briefs (so long as you get them online, which is not hard to do), it’s got a long way to go, specifically in adding content to its federal district court, state court and state rules databases. For instance, it will recognize the U.S Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision of Board of Regents of University of Minnesota v. Shalala, 53 F.3d 940 (8th Cir. Minn., 1995) but not the U.S District Court case of Board of Regents of University of Minnesota v. Glaxo Wellcome, 58 F.Supp.2d 1036 (D. Minn., 1999) or the state court case of Board of Regents of University of Minnesota v. Reid, 522 N.W.2d 344 (Minn. Ct. App., 1994). If you have Jureeka installed, you’ll see what I mean by hovering over the citations with your mouse.

Don’t get me wrong. Jureeka is free, so who can complain. It also packs a real “cool” factor and likely signals more impressive things to come. But that time is not yet here.

© Gregory Luce for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Browsers, Citations

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