We track new developments like these to insure that our in-person CLE seminars on Internet investigative and legal research are as up to date as they can be. We have compiled the new features we include in this white paper based on our own usage of Casemaker for legal research. This white paper is designed to explain the new additions we've identified - including original screen shots to illustrate many of those features.

Due to the material's length and complexity, we are offering the white paper as a free download.

Complete the form below to download your free copy of this report.

The post The Unofficial User Guide to New Casemaker Features appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Subsequent Case History Feature Introduced For Texas Cases Only…But Coming Soon for Others

A subsequent case history feature has been introduced for Texas cases. When viewing a Texas Court of Appeals case, a click of the “Subsequent Case History” button brings the user links to any subsequent history. This refers only to whether petitions or writs for review were granted or denied. Casemaker will be extending this feature to other jurisdictions.

Copy and Paste Feature Now Includes the Case and Statute Citation and the Case Pin Citation

When you highlight a portion of a case or statute’s text because you plan to copy it and then paste it into another document, be sure to right click to take advantage of the Copy pop‐up menu. This menu now offers you the choice to automatically insert the full Citation or the Pin Citation to the end of your highlighted text selection when you paste it into a document. For example, if you highlight the paragraph from 224 P.3d 437 (shown in the next screen shot) and then right click the highlighted paragraph, you can choose Copy with pin citation.

This will paste the highlighted paragraph into your Word document, with the Pin Citation 224 P.3d at 442 appended at the end of your pasted selection (see next screen shot).

If you right-clicked the highlighted paragraph and instead chose Copy with citation, then the full citation (which includes the case title, reporter name/volume/beginning page number, court, and date) would be appended to your pasted selection like this: 

Burbach v. Canwest Investments, LLC, 224 P.3d 437 (Colo.App.Div. 5 2009)

The post The Unofficial User Guide to New Casemaker Features appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Recently, the New York City Bar Association added access to Casemaker's premium services as a free benefit for their members.

The Casemaker Federal Library contains items such as the United States Supreme, Circuit, District and Bankruptcy court opinions; Federal Court Rules; United States Code; Code of Federal Regulations; Federal Rules Decisions, and Constitution. Its State material libraries (for all 50 states and the District of Columbia) include, at a minimum, Case law, Statutes, Court Rules, and State Constitution. The New York library on Casemaker includes:

• Appellate and Trial Court Opinions
• New York Statutes
• New York Administrative Code
• New York Court Rules
• New York Attorney General Opinions
• New York Legislative Acts
• New York Constitution
• New York City Administrative Code
• New York City Charter
• New York City Local Laws

And as a bonus, the New York City Bar is providing ALL of Casemaker’s premium services to its members for free, such as:

• CaseCheck+ – A negative citator system that informs you if the case you're reading is still good law.
• CasemakerDigest – daily e-mail summaries of state and federal appellate decisions (within 12-24 hours of publication), listed by practice area.
• CiteCheck – Upload a brief and in minutes Casemaker will automatically check your citations to be sure they are still good law.

Internet Legal Research on a Budget’s Chapter 8 provides detailed instructions on how to use Casemaker and also explains some of the features and limitations of CaseCheck+ and CiteCheck…and provides you with a work-around.

To purchase Internet Legal Research on a Budget, see https://www.netforlawyers.com/page/internet-legal-research-budget-free-low-cost-resources.

The post New York City Bar Association Adds Access to Casemaker Legal Research Resources as a Member Benefit appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

With this new agreement with Fastcase, Texas attorneys are the first to receive access to both Fastcase and Casemaker as a free benefit of their membership in the Bar.

The State Bar of Texas had previously offered its members free access to Casemaker. Texas attorneys will continue to receive free access to the Casemaker legal research service, along with expanded premium Casemaker services at no cost.

Carole Levitt's new book, Internet Legal Research on a Budget, contains chapters detailing how to use Casemaker and Fastcase most effectively.

“We are thrilled to offer this free research tool as an additional benefit to Texas attorneys alongside our popular Casemaker service,” Trey Apffel, 2014-15 State Bar of Texas president said in a press release announcing the agreement. “Part of our mission at the State Bar of Texas is to provide superior online resources and benefits to members which help them better serve their clients. We believe this agreement helps us achieve that.”

Lawyers in 48 states and the District of Columbia have access to free caselaw research as a member benefit via either Casemaker or Fastcase. Only California and Delaware do not offer such access.

The post State Bar of Texas Offers Members More Access to Free Legal Research appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

But, beginning August 1, 2014, PBA will shift its alliances to Casemaker, which provides increased content, such as federal cases and codes, as well as cases and codes for all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Casemaker also includes access to other legal research materials, increased dates of coverage, and other services such as the ability to to save your searches in folders not available via InCite.

And as a huge bonus, PBA is providing ALL of Casemaker’s premium services to its members for free, such as:

• CaseCheck+ – A negative citator system that informs you if the case you're reading is still good law.
• CasemakerDigest – daily e-mail summaries of state and federal appellate decisions (within 12-24 hours of publication), listed by practice area.
• CiteCheck – Upload a brief and in minutes Casemaker will automatically check your citations to be sure they are still good law.

Internet Legal Research on a Budget’s Chapter 8 provides detailed instructions on how to use Casemaker and also explains some of the features and limitations of CaseCheck+ and CiteCheck…and provides you with a work-around.

To purchase Internet Legal Research on a Budget, see https://www.netforlawyers.com/page/internet-legal-research-budget-free-low-cost-resources.

The post As Pennsylvania Bar Association Shifts from InCite to Casemaker, Members Will Discover the Benefits appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

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.