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With cost-conscious clients scrutinizing legal bills, lawyers cannot afford to depend on fee-based resources the way they used to, especially if reliable free resources are available. That said, sometimes it makes sense to pay for data—especially if the pay databases have something the free ones are lacking (content or functionality) or when using the pay databases can save you time and money.

This article will highlight some of the most reliable free (or low-cost) online resources and give you some tips on how to use them. However, we don’t have the space to go into as great as detail as we’d like, so you’ll need to attend ABA TECHSHOW 2014 to hear us speak and ask us your questions or read our upcoming ABA LP book, Internet Legal Research On a Budget.

To begin with, every legal researcher should bookmark a few free legal portals. A good portal includes links arranged by topics and jurisdictions so you can quickly get to a useful site. But, a good portal should go a step further and provide “added value,” such as a full-text keyword searchable database of court cases or subject-specific articles about an area of law.

The most useful general legal portals are: Justia and FindLaw. [Note: FindLaw is undergoing some database changes and is not functioning as it should. We presume proper functioning will resume.]

For government portals, we’d choose a newer site that you might not be familiar with: the Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDsys), which provides free online access to official publications from all three branches of the federal government. Another choice would be USA.gov, not only useful for retrieving federal governmental agency documents, but also state, local, territorial, and tribal government documents.

Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII) is a portal that has some unique databases such as Wex, a free legal dictionary/encyclopedia sponsored and hosted by the LII, and its version of the U.S. Code, which provides links to the rules and regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) that relate to the U.S. Code section being viewed. This feature, which saves you from having to run a separate search at the CFR, is activated by clicking on the “Authorities (CFR)” tab.

The last legal portal you should bookmark is one that will assist you with your state and local research needs. Look at each of your state’s law school law library’s portals and decide which one suits that need.

Case law research is probably what most legal researchers do more than any other kind of research. One of the most overlooked “free” places for conducting case law research is your state bar association. Forty-seven state bar associations (plus some local bars and other legal professional associations) subscribe to legal research databases on behalf of their members. In turn, they provide their members with free access as a “member benefit.” These “member benefit to lawyers” legal research databases offer more sophisticated search options and broader date coverage than most other free case law databases, including Google Scholar. Typically, these “member benefit to lawyers” legal research databases include all federal and state (and D.C.) cases, codes and regulations. And, for some jurisdictions, you might find law reviews, attorney general opinions, and more. The state bar associations of California, Delaware, and Montana do not yet offer this member benefit.  Of the 47 state bar associations that do offer this member benefit, 46 subscribe either to Casemaker or Fastcase. The other state bar association, the Pennsylvania Bar Association (PBA), offers access to InCite, a customized LexisNexis database created for the PBA. Be sure to visit your bar association’s website and look for a link to one of these databases.

Turning away from “traditional” websites, let’s take a look at other places where lawyers are finding useful legal research, such as blogs/blawgs, Twitter accounts, and apps.

Following the “right” blawgger or tweeter can help you keep up with your area of law without expending much of your own research time. To find a blawgger in your practice area, you can visit Justia’s BlawgSearch site, scan the list of categories, and choose one that fits your practice area or enter keywords into the search box at the top. After you review the list of blawgger results, subscribe to a few and then take some time to decide which ones are worthwhile. Another source for locating useful blawgs is The ABA Journal’s Blawg Directory, arranged by topic, author type (e.g., consultant, judge…), region (by court, state, or country), and law school.

To figure out the best people to follow on Twitter who write about your practice area, visit http://twitter.com/#!/search-home. You can conduct searches there even if you don’t have a Twitter account. Enter keywords describing your practice area (e.g., ski accidents) into the search box to locate millions of individual tweets—from (roughly) the last two weeks. You can also use Twitter’s Advanced Search page to create more sophisticated searches.

Useful legal apps range in price from free (e.g., Nolo's Plain English Law Dictionary for iOS is free but the Droid version is $16.19) to $54.99 (e.g., Black's Law Dictionary). To locate legal apps, review ones recommended in:

• UCLA Law Library’s free Mobile Applications for Law Students and Lawyers: This is an alphabetical-by-title, annotated list of law apps. You can scan the list or better yet, keyword search the list with your Find function (control F for P.C.s or command F for Apple devices) and enter your keywords (e.g., court rules) into the Find search box.
• Tom Mighell’s book, iPad Apps in One Hour for Lawyers (ABA LPD, 2012). Visit http://linkon.in/ipadappslaw for the print version and http://linkon.in/ipadappslawebook for the e-book.
• Daniel J. Siegel’s book, Android Apps in One Hour for Lawyers (ABA LPD, 2013). ). Visit http://linkon.in/androidappdan  for the print version and http://linkon.in/androidappebook for the e-book.

By taking the time to read this article, you have made a great start at learning about some of the best free and low-cost legal research sources available on the Internet. To learn about many other sites and how to become a sophisticated researcher of those sites, look for our upcoming book, Internet Legal Research on a Budget. Our book will provide you with a high level of control over your searching and lead to better and quicker results.

This article was adapted from the book, “Internet Legal Research on a Budget” by Carole Levitt and Judy Davis (ABA LPD 2014). Reprinted with permission of the American Bar Association. All rights reserved. It also originally appeared on the ABA LP Division Law Practice Today Webzine.

The post Internet Legal Research on a Budget appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Cornell's Legal Information Institute (LII) and the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) have teamed up to create free eBook versions of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the Federal Rules of Evidence. The ebooks are published in the .epub format, making them compatible with iPads, iPhones, Nooks, and numerous other e-reader programs. However, these ebooks are not compatible with Amazon's Kindle. CALI and LII promise that "Kindle support is coming soon."

Federal Rules of Evidence ebook on the iPhone iBook shelf.

A sample page from the Federal Rules of Evidence ebook.

References to specific rules in the Federal Rules of Evidence ebook's Table of Contents link directly to the rules within the book.

The federal rules ebooks include:

• The complete rules as of December 1, 2010.
• All notes of the Advisory Committee immediately following each rule.
• Internal links to rules referenced from the Table of Contents.
• Internal links to rules referenced within the rules.
• External links to the LII website's version of the US Code.

On its Web site, LII describes itself as, "a not-for-profit group that believes everyone should be able to read and understand the laws that govern them, without cost."

CALI describes itself as, "a nonprofit consortium that welcomes membership from law schools, paralegal programs, law firms, individuals, or any organization that wishes to learn or teach the law."

The post Free Federal Rules eBooks Available | Includes Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, and Evidence appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

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 turns them into clickable links to those resources wherever they may be found on the Internet. With Jureeka installed, users can easily locate many of the cases, codes, regulations, and other law-related materials they see referenced in a Web article from a free source on the Internet. Jureeka recognizes numerous citation formats, including:

• U.S. Supreme Court
• Federal Reporter
• Regional Reporter
• State Reporter
• Federal Rules of Procedures (including, Evidence, Civil, Criminal, and Appellate)
• U.S. Code
• Public Laws
• Code of Federal Regulations
• Federal Register
• National Labor Relations Board cases
• Bureau of Indian Affairs cases
• U.S. Patents

Jureeka references to the Federal Rules of Evidence are just plain text.
After Jureeka those references to Federal Rules of Evidence are clickable links (noted by the double green underline).

With the announcement of version 4.0 for Firefox, also came news that Jureeka would now be powered by Cornell's Legal Information Institute (LII). "The LII now hosts Jureeka's legal citation redirection service and has assumed primary responsibility for the development and maintenance of the Firefox add-on. This allows Jureeka to reach a wider audience, to have long-term institutional support, and to integrate tightly with the LII's existing web services," according to Poulshock's blog post. According to the blog post, some of the changes in version 4.0 include, "redirection to specific subsections of the U.S. Code and to specific sections of the Code of Federal Regulations, which is quite helpful. Version 4 also includes an improved toolbar, a number of minor bug fixes, improved citation recognition, and fewer 'false positive' linkifications."

The Jureeka extension was first launched in late 2007.

Article first published as Jureeka Browser Plug-in Creates Links to Case Law Citations in Web Pages on Technorati.

The post Jureeka Browser Plug-in Creates Links to Case Law Citations, Rules, Decision, and Statutes in Web Pages appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.