However, in March 2014, Carole co-spoke on a Crowdsourcing panel at the ABA TECHSHOW where she discussed the free legal research platform Casetext—a crowdsourcing site for case law that showed some potential in this area. Now, we've read about another possible solution to our hope for a better, free citator: the newly launched WeCite Project, a crowdsourcing project co-sponsored by Casetext and the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. Paul Lomio, library director and lecturer at law at Stanford Law School, lays out the details in his article at http://legalresearchplus.com/2014/03/19/wecite-projects-win-win-opportunities.

Lomio explains the project this way:

Along with the traditional crowdsourcing strategy of enabling a community of like-minded people to easily contribute, the WeCite Project is also giving law schools the unique opportunity to do their fair share in another win-win way: students learn about citators and citation analysis; the database grows. Already a number of advanced legal research classes have already participated and our class this spring will join the crowd… Importantly, any and all citator entries created under the WeCite Project (“wecites”) are public domain under a Creative Commons SA license. Casetext will also be creating an API to allow anyone to bulk download wecites. The beauty of crowdsourcing is that small contributions from individuals can aggregate into something magnificent. For those who are interesting in pitching in, instructions can be found here: https://casetext.com/wecite.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if Casemaker or Fastcase joined in this crowdsourced project to speed it along?

The post We’ve Been Hoping for a Free Citator Equal to the Fee-Based Shepard’s, BCite, and KeyCite: Has the Time Arrived? appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Fastcase has also posted the following video describing the service.

“Fastcase’s Authority Check feature is already a very powerful tool for identifying whether your case is still good law,” said Fastcase CEO Ed Walters in the same press release. “Authority Check includes data visualization tools to see the later history of cases, citation analytics and filterable lists of later-citing cases. The addition of Bad Law Bot, to help identify negative history, is a major step forward. This is the first of many additions to Authority Check that we’ll roll out over the next year.”

While Fastcase is the first to offer such a service for free to its users, Casemaker has been providing negative history through its Casecheck+ product for some time - albeit at an additional cost to its users.

In our recent white paper "Are All Citators Created Equal," we compared the citator services of Bloomberg Law, LexisNexis, WestLaw, Casemaker, Fastcase, and Google Scholar - looking for indications of how they displayed both negative and positive treatment of published and unpublished cases. In that side by side comparison,  we found that Casemaker, Fastcase, and Google Scholar's citators did not include unpublished cases so they did not let you know if a later published case had reversed or affirmed the unpublished case. While we found that "legal researchers can still use these databases [Casemaker, Fastcase, and Google Scholar] to learn if their cases are still good law by taking the extra step to run a search using the party names as keywords," we recommended "NOT relying entirely on any of [those three]." We concluded that the paid services offered by Bloomberg Law, LexisNexis, and Westlaw provided the most comprehensive coverage of this information.

Even in its press release announcing the new service, Fastcase seems to concede that point when the company says, "The new Bad Law Bot feature helps users identify negative treatment of the cases [sic] judicial opinions. However, because it only reports what cases say in citations, researchers should rely on Bad Law Bot as an aid to identifying negative history, not as a comprehensive guide."

We agree that Bad Law Bot is a step forward for free/low-cost case law research databases because rather than just listing all of the cases that cite the case you've searched for, Bad Law Bot points out the negative treatment so you can focus on reading those cases first.  It's important to note however, that Fastcase's Authority Check still does not provide information such as positive treatment of cases or whether an unpublished case has been affirmed by a later published case. We look forward to seeing where the journey leads.

The post Fastcase Launches Bad Law Bot to Flag Negative Treatment in Case Law appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

We also thought that our experiences updating this unpublished case would be a good opportunity to compare three of the most popular free and low-cost case law databases (Google Scholar, Fastcase, Casemaker) and their citator services, with the more expensive databases (LexisNexis, WestlawNext, and Bloomberg) and their citator services.Our white paper "Are all Citator Services Created Equal?" details the results of that comparison.

Complete the form below (or on our web site if not displayed in your e-mail) to download your free copy of this report.

The post Are All Caselaw Citators Created Equal? A comparison of Google Scholar, Fastcase, Casemaker, LexisNexis, WestlawNext, and Bloomberg appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.