With 7.4, you can now:

• Jump directly from your search results into the Outline View to learn which libraries are part of your current subscription
• Quickly see which cases have been overturned because they are now highlighted in red in the Interactive Timeline
• Home in on the best possible results because in 7.4 Fastcase overhauled its relevance algorithm to show the best results on the top of the results list

Fastcase has also added these new partners to offer subscribers more secondary content, such as:

• Expert witness profiles from JurisPro: Brief annotations about the experts are integrated right into your search results if you run an “Entire Database” search. Then, if you click an annotation from the results list, the full-text of the expert’s profile is shown (for free). You can also search JurisPro on its own or in combination with other databases on Fastcase. Another expert witness profile database, Courtroom Insight, is new to Fastcase, but you can’t get a free look at the expert’s full-text profile like you can with the expert witness profiles from JurisPro. You can only see the brief annotation unless you have a separate subscription to Courtroom Insight.
• American Bar Association Sections’ books and treatises are not online yet, but when they are the will be treated like the expert witness results above. You will see brief annotations integrated into your search results, but unlike the free access to the full text of Jurispro’s expert witnesses’ profiles, you will not be able to view the full-text of any book for free. You must have a separate annual subscription to an individual ABA book or a practice section library of online books in order to access the full-text. The ABA books will join a group of other book publishers already online at Fastcase, such as James Publishing, HeinOnline, the New York State Bar Association, and others.
• TransUnion TLOxp: This is an investigative research database used for due diligence and to find missing people, etc. We have an individual TLOxp subscription and wonder if there’s going to be a discount if we subscribe via Fastcase. We’re awaiting a call-back to clarify this detail.

If you want to search Fastcase’s secondary materials, such as the expert witness profiles or any books and treatises, you will learn that Fastcase does not make it that easy to find them, so here’s how to find them: To view secondary material that is not jurisdiction-specific, such as JurisPro, Courtroom Insight, and books and treatises that are not from a state bar publication department, click Outline from the homepage and then choose All-Federal or any state to view the available books and treatises. To view only state-specific secondary materials, such as books and treatises from the New York State Bar Association, click Outline from the homepage and then click New York.

The post Fastcase Introduces New Features in Version 7.4 (Codenamed ‘Venus’) appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Today, we have learned that LexisNexis has emailed contacts asking “Are You a Loislaw^® customer?”, with an offer to match your current Loislaw pricing for a new Lexis Advance subscription that matches the “equivalent information” of your Loislaw subscription.

In the message we saw, a Lexis Account Representative characterized Fastcase’s acquisition as “the pending Loislaw^® shutdown,” while touting “Exclusive access to Shepard’s Citations Service, the industry standard,” among other advantages of Lexis Advance. Restrictions apply.

The full-text of the message we saw is included below.

The post LexisNexis Offering to Match Loislaw Subscription Pricing for “Equivalent Information” appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Ambrogi also reported:

Subscribers will be migrated to the Fastcase service sometime before Nov. 30, when the current Loislaw site will be shut down. Existing subscriptions will be grandfathered at their current or better prices, Walters told [Ambrogi].

The post Fastcase Acquires Loislaw from Wolters Kluwer Blog Reports appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

In July 2014, at the American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting, I got a sneak preview of Fastcase 7 but was sworn to secrecy. Then, in August 2014, I visited Fastcase’s headquarters in Washington, DC where CEO Ed Walters demonstrated some additional new features…still sworn to secrecy. This was its first re-design since 2003. I had just written a new book for the ABA LP Division, Internet Legal Research on a Budget. It included a chapter on Fastcase, Version 6. My heart sank. Was my book already out of date? Then, there was nothing about Version 7…until April 2015 at the ABA TECHSHOW. Once again I was introduced to Version 7 and once again I was sworn to secrecy. Then, nothing again, until today when Walters gave me an official introduction to Version 7. Now in “private beta,” this demonstration did not include a secrecy pledge. With the cone of silence lifted, here are my highlights of Fastcase Version 7.

Fastcase users will have some time to get used to the new version. Version 7 is being rolled out to bar associations and enterprise law firms on an opt-in basis. Their individual users will be able to choose whether to use Version 6 or 7 by toggling a slider on the top right side of the log-in screen. The two versions will run side by side for a year and users can toggle between the versions on an ad hoc basis, even after they have logged in and began using one version or the other. (Existing Fastcase users can request an invitation to the private beta by sending an e-mail to support @fastcase.com.) Thank you, Fastcase 7 for waiting almost a year to launch and still calling it beta for one more year. My book lives on (https://www.netforlawyers.com/products)!

Walters calls Fastcase 7 “the Tesla of legal research databases.” He explains that “it’s not a poor man’s Lexis or Westlaw.” Instead it’s a powerful tool with improved features and some features that are new to legal research databases, such as the Tag Cloud. (Click any tag to see only results with that tag.) Walters explained that Fastcase 7’s goal is to be simple to use for the typical user but also powerful enough for the power user.

Universal Search

For me, the top improvement is universal search. Finally, users can conduct searches through all (or multiple) jurisdictions and types of materials by using the Advanced Search menu. No longer does a user have to first search cases, then statutes, etc., jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Users can also conduct a very precise search by restricting a search to a specific title name.

Single Page Result

Another improvement is the “Single Page Result,” which creates a faster search experience. After viewing the search results you used to have to click to various pages to view other related information and tools, but now you will see everything at a glance—segregated into panels in one single page. The panels (shown in the next image) include: the search results, the Interactive Timeline, an expanded Suggested Results (in addition to law reviews from HeinOnline, the Suggested Results now include Forecite Results (cases that relate to your search but don’t include all your key words), Educational Materials, Attorney General Opinions, Jury Instructions, and more), and two new features, the Tag Cloud noted above and a Facets/Filters feature to narrow your search to a particular jurisdiction, court level, or material type if you did a broad search and now want to narrow it.

If you use the Facets in the left-hand column (above) and choose Washington, for example, the Interactive Timeline will re-adjust and show only results for that state.

Also making your search experience faster is the “Bottomless Research” feature, which allows you to continuously scroll through all the results without clicking next, next, next...

HeinOnline

For those not familiar with HeinOnline, this is a database of all law review articles published in the U.S. (over 2,000 titles), from volume one to the present. (This represents more than two times the size of Westlaw and Lexis law review databases). However, HeinOnline is not available for free as part of your Fastcase account. You can subscribe by the day, month, or year. Fastcase will eventually be adding the rest of HeinOnline’s offerings (Attorney General Opinions and historical statutes). No bars subscribe to Hein for members.

Customize Your Results Page

If you experience sensory overload, you can easily customize the page to expand, contract, or even close one or more of the various panels of the page. You would do this by clicking orange arrows that are located in each panel of the page.

The next image displays how your screen will look when you click on one case result. Fastcase’s results layout was originally designed for a square computer monitor but now it’s designed for the widescreen monitors found on laptops and mobile devices, which makes it more readable. Also, the typeface was changed to improve readability.

Notice that the panel on the left remains even after you click to view the full text of a case. This way, the list of all results remains displayed if you want to quickly choose another result. Also the Interactive Timeline is displayed for the case you are currently viewing.

Authority Check Report and Full-text Case Now Side by Side

If you click the red flag at the top of the case above, the next image shows how the Authority Check Report panel pops up to the left of the full-text of the case instead of in a new screen. This allows you to scroll through the case or the report from the same page.

Expand the Authority Check and Interactive Timeline Panel

The next image shows what it looks like when you expand to the full Authority Check and Interactive Timeline. When you click one of the Interactive Timeline bubbles, a pop-up box will display the paragraph where your case is cited. New to this display are the jurisdictional boxes, which show the number of cites by jurisdiction and Bad Law Bot (negative treatment) cites.

Expanded Search History List

Fastcase 7 offers an expanded Search History so you can view not only your search terms, but also the jurisdictions where you ran your search and the date you ran your search. Also, you are no longer limited to viewing only your ten most-recent searches.

Name Your Print Jobs

An improvement to the Print feature allows you to name your print jobs when you place them into a queue, which makes it easier to recall which ones to print if you decide to print them at a later time. Some older improvements worth mentioning are the ability to manage multiple documents in your queue by saving them into (1) one long continuous document or (2) saving each as a separate document by selecting Zipped. There’s also a choice to print in single or dual column.

Fastcase App

For those of you not yet using the free Fastcase App (even free to non-subscribers), it is a lighter version of the web-based version of Fastcase, and therefore will not have all the new features of Fastcase 7. However, Fastcase is currently working on a new Version 4 of the App to be released in the near future. The Fastcase App is described in great detail in both of my books: The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet, 13th edition, 2015 and Internet Legal Research on a Budget, 2014 (https://www.netforlawyers.com/products).

My Wish List

I think Ed Walters, Phil Rosenthal (Fastcase president), and the entire Fastcase team have done a great job adding features and functions to Fastcase 7. I only have two wishes for Version 7.1 (whenever that becomes available) and they both relate to improving Authority Check: First, I’d like to see an Affirmed flag. After all, we are supposed to cite to an affirmed decision (if one exists) instead of citing to the lower court’s decision. Second on my wish list: I’d like to see the subsequent history of an unpublished decision included in Authority. As you know, “unpublished” decisions are sometimes “published” by Fastcase (and the other legal research database vendors), but Fastcase, Casemaker, and Google Scholar don’t include them in their citator databases (Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg do). Therefore, if an unpublished decision later is affirmed or reversed by a higher court AND that court orders publication of their decision, we won’t find out about it through Authority Check.

Final Words

About its cars, the Tesla website says: “Model S gets faster, smarter, and better as time passes….it actually improves while you sleep. When you wake up, added functionality, enhanced performance, and improved user experience make you feel like you are driving a new car. We want to improve cars in ways most people didn't imagine possible.” Like the Tesla Model S, Fastcase 7 is faster and smarter, but it’s even better than Tesla because you won’t have to search for a Supercharger to use Fastcase.

The post Fastcase 7: Better Than a Tesla appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

State Bar Associations:

• South Carolina Bar Association
• State Bar of Montana

Ohio Metropolitan Bar Association Consortium:

• Akron Bar Association
• Columbus Bar Association
• Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association
• Dayton Bar Association
• Toledo Bar Association

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

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

The post More Bar Associations Provide Fastcase Case Law Research to Members 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.

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.

Alerts

The first was something new on the search results page—an Add Alert option.  When you click the Add Alert button, you are saving your search and asking Fastcase to alert you by email whenever new documents are added to Fastcase that match your search terms. To cancel your alert, go to Options | Manage Alerts.

Annotated Statues

Fastcase's annotated statutes project is now up to 37 states (plus the US Code).  They will continue to add annotations to other states' statutes.   
   
     

Copy with Citation

Another new feature at Fastcase is the  “copy with citation” option. When you select text in a case or statute, etc., a small menu pops up with the option to include the document’s citation when you copy the text.

Partnership with HeinOnline

On July 9, 2013, William S. Hein & Co. and Fastcase announced a new partnership. HeinOnline subscribers will soon be able to hyperlink to Fastcase’s federal and state case law anytime a case is mentioned in a publication hosted at HeinOnline (primarily law journals and historical state statutory materials). In addition, HeinOnline subscribers will be able to access Fastcase’s citation tool (Authority Check) and its new “Bad Law Bot” (which identifies negative citation history of published opinions; and we previously wrote about here)—all for free.

And, on the flip-side, Fastcase will integrate HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library (over 1,800 titles back to their first volumes), Session Laws Library, State Attorney General Reports and Opinions, and State Statutes: A Historical Archive and historical state statutory materials, into Fastcase search results. However, Fastcase users will only be able to view HeinOnline’s list of results and its abstracts for free. To access the full articles, Fastcase subscribers would also have to subscribe to HeinOnline. Bar associations will also have the option to add the Hein material to their member benefit.

The integrated libraries are supposed to be available on both services at the end of the summer.

The post Fastcase Offers New Features and Services appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

		"It's an honor to have been considered for the list and to be included with such an accomplished group," Levitt and Rosch said in a joint statement.
Carole Levitt JD, MLS 2013 Fastcase 50 Honoree	Mark Rosch 2013 Fastcase 50 Honoree

“This is a notable moment for legal tech and the impact these individuals are making on the shifting legal landscape,” said Phil Rosenthal, President of Fastcase in the company's press release. “Each year we take a moment to shine a well-deserved spotlight on some of the heroes, innovators, risk-takers, and individuals who dare to think big and take action on those interesting ideas. Along with the record number of nominees this year, we’re witnessing a rise in the boundary-pushers for big data, open government, and legal information.”

The awards are currently in their third year. The full list of this year's Fastcase 50 honorees is available below and at Fastcase.com.

About Carole Levitt and Mark Rosch
Carole Levitt (@CaroleLevitt) and Mark Rosch (@MarkRosch), principals of Internet For Lawyers, are internationally recognized CLE seminar speakers and best-selling ABA authors. They are experts on Internet investigative and legal research, social media research, social media ethics, and technology for lawyers. They have been presenting CLE seminars full-time since 1999. 

Together, Mark and Carole co-authored several ABA LPM books, including "Google Gmail and Calendar For Lawyers in One Hour" (2013), two editions of "The Lawyer’s Guide to Fact Finding on the Internet," "Google For Lawyers," and "Find Info Like a Pro," Volumes 1 and 2. They have also co-authored twelve editions of "The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet."

Previously, Carole was a California attorney, a law librarian in Chicago and Los Angeles, and a Legal Research and Writing Professor at Pepperdine University School of Law. She graduated with distinction from The John Marshall Law School in Chicago and was a member of the school’s law review. Carole has a Masters in Library Science and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Illinois.

Carole is active in the ABA LPM’s Section and serves on its Publications Board. She previously served on the section’s Executive Council. Recently, Carole was nominated as a Fellow to the College of Law Practice Management.

In addition to speaking and also writing books and articles, Mark blogs and tweets about legal technology issues. He developed the company’s website, blog, Facebook Business page, and its online Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) initiative.

Mark is a graduate of Tulane University. He is active in the ABA LPM Section, serving on its ABA TECHSHOW Planning Board and previously on its Education Committee. He has also served in various leadership positions within the Association of Continuing Legal Education (ACLEA).

About Fastcase
As the smarter alternative for legal research, Fastcase democratizes the law, making it more accessible to more people. Using patented software that combines the best of legal research with the best of Web search, Fastcase helps busy users sift through the clutter, ranking the best cases first and enabling the re-sorting of results to find answers fast. Founded in 1999, Fastcase has more than 500,000 subscribers from around the world. Fastcase is an American company based in Washington, D.C. For more information, follow Fastcase on Twitter at @Fastcase, or visit www.fastcase.com.

The post Carole Levitt and Mark Rosch Named to Fastcase 50 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.