Previously, USA.gov's Advanced Search page provided a "fill-in-the-box"-type interface (similar to Google's Advanced Search page) that allowed you to create sophisticated, targeted searches through the USA.gov index.

You can still perform more precise advanced-type searches at USA.gov if you use specific search syntax to give USA.gov instructions on how to target your search. For more tips on searching USA.gov/Bing, see this post.

The post USA.gov Loses Advanced Search appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Share this article:       
  

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.

USA.gov (http://www.usa.gov) is the federal government’s document search portal. USA.gov searches millions of Web pages from all levels of the United States government: federal, state, local, tribal, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories. (Although results occasionally bring back court opinions, this is not the right site to search for them. There are better, free options, such as Google Scholar and if your bar subscribes to them, Casemaker and Fastcase.)

In addition to offering keyword searching, USA.gov offers the ability to browse by selecting one of the five tabs listed below the search box on USA.gov’s home page: Services, Blog, Topics, Government Agencies, and Contact Government. Once you select one of these tabs, such as the Government Agencies tab, for example, a drop-down menu appears where more links are revealed.

Share this article:       
  

When you don't know an agency's URL, click A-Z List of Agencies beneath POPULAR TOPICS on the right-hand side of USA.gov's home page (http://www.usa.gov/). USA.gov’s internal search engine (the search box on USA.gov’s home page) is powered by Bing. You can use the search box to keyword or phrase search government documents. To learn how to search USA.gov with Boolean connectors, use this URL: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/ff808438.aspx. We will provide a brief Bing/USA.gov tutorial.

Just like Google, Bing/USA.gov uses Boolean connectors to link keywords and phrases and their default Boolean connector is AND. Leaving a space between words automatically connects your keywords/phrases with the AND Boolean connector so there is no need to type the word AND. And, just like Google, Bing/USA.gov offers phrase searching if you surround your phrase within quotation marks.

Bing/USA.gov treats the Boolean connector OR differently than Google in one instance only: when you are combining your OR search with other Boolean connectors in a search. For example, to search for the phrase "homeland security" and the keywords nevada OR oregon, Bing requires you to enclose your OR terms in parentheses (Google does not). Your search would look like this:

"homeland security" (nevada OR oregon)

If you are only searching the keywords nevada OR Oregon, your Bing/USA.gov search would be the same as a Google search and would look like this:

nevada OR oregon

The OR Boolean connector must be upper case at Bing/USA.gov and Google. If you are excluding a word at Bing/USA.gov, you would place a minus sign before the word without any space, just as you would at Google. One difference is that Bing/USA.gov also recognizes the Boolean connector NOT, but it must be in upper case. Google does not recognize NOT. So to search at Bing/USA.gov for the phrase "homeland security" and the keywords nevada NOT oregon, your search would look like either one of these examples:

"homeland security" nevada -oregon

"homeland security" nevada NOT oregon

The link to the Advanced Search was taken off the home page a number of years ago, much to our disappointment, and it is now only visible after you run your search and receive results or it can be reached directly at http://search.usa.gov/search/advanced. Once you reach the Advanced Search at Search.USA.gov, you will then be able to construct your search in the following ways:

• Enter keywords into the following search boxes:
  • All of these words
  • This exact phrase
  • Any of these words
  • None of these words
• Select the File Type drop-down menu to limit search results to the following formats:
  • PDF
  • Excel
  • PowerPoint
  • Word
  • Text

USA.gov's advanced search menu used to allow you to limit your search results to documents from a particular site (or sites) or exclude results from a particular site (or sites) but they removed that feature from the menu. However, you can still create that search by entering the site "instruction" into the simple search box along with your keywords. For instance, if you know that you are looking for a document from the National Highway Transportation & Safety Administration, you can limit your results to that particular government agency by entering site:nhtsa.dot.gov into the search box. You can add more than one URL by separating them by a space. Conversely, you can exclude a site or sites by entering -site:nhtsa.dot.gov into the search box.

Using Google to Search for Government Documents

You can also use Google to search for government documents by entering keywords and phrases into the search box on the home page or into Google’s advanced search menu to create a more sophisticated/targeted search (http://www.google.com/advanced_search). On the Advanced Search page, you can limit a search to a specific site by entering the URL into the "Search within a Site or Domain" and limit to a specific file type, just as you can at USA.gov described above.

Justia's Legal Web Search

To limit search results to law related websites, try Justia's Legal Web Search at http://www.justia.com. They offer an excellent search of law-related Web sites but it is not that easy to find from Justia’s home page. You can access it directly by visiting http://www.justia.com/search.py and click the "Legal Web" button at the top of the page before entering your keywords into the search box.

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.

The post Finding Government Documents on the Internet appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

USA.gov provides no search tips and we were unable to easily find any at Bing. However, on USA.gov’s Advanced Search page (which you can only find once you run a search), if you click the “You can also use advanced search operators to help limit and focus your searches” link, you will be taken to the “Advanced search keywords” page. But that page only explains how to use various instructions such as how to limit your search to a specific file type. The more useful help page, where you learn how to search with Boolean connectors, is found by clicking the “Advanced search options” link at the bottom of the “Advanced search keywords” page.

Let’s take a look at how searching Bing/USA.gov and Google is the same for some searches but very different for others.

Phrase Searching

There are no differences when phrase searching at Google and Bing/USA.gov. Phrases are surrounded within quotation marks.

Share this article:       
  

Connecting Keywords with the And Boolean Connector

There are no differences when connecting keywords and phrases with the And Boolean connector at Google and Bing/USA.gov. The default Boolean connector is AND. Leaving a space between words automatically connects your keywords/phrases with the AND Boolean connector so there is no need to type the word AND.

Connecting Keywords with the OR Boolean Connector

There are no differences if you are only searching your keywords using one Boolean connector, such as nevada OR oregon. Your Bing/USA.gov and Google search would look like this:

nevada OR oregon.

(Yes, the OR must be upper case at Google and Bing/USA.gov.)

However, there are differences between Bing/USA.gov and Google if you are combining your OR search with other Boolean connectors in a search. At Bing/USA.gov, you need to enclose your OR terms in parentheses, so your search would look like this:

"homeland security" (nevada OR oregon)

The same search at Google would look like this:

"homeland security" nevada OR oregon

Exclude a Keyword with the NOT (MINUS SIGN) Boolean Connector

If you are excluding a word at Google and Bing/USA.gov, you would place a minus sign before the word without any space. Your search would look like this:

"homeland security" nevada -oregon

However, there is one difference between Bing/USA.gov and Google when excluding words. Bing/USA.gov also recognizes the Boolean connector NOT, but it must be in upper case. Google does not recognize NOT. So to search at Bing/USA.gov for the phrase "homeland security" and the keywords nevada NOT oregon, your search would look like this:

"homeland security" nevada NOT oregon

Conclusion

As you can see, knowing how to search correctly makes all the difference in the world. You can’t assume that every search engine is the same. We have created a chart comparing some of the most useful, but little known, search features of the major search engines.

The post Searching Bing/USA.gov | Sometimes Very Different Than Searching Google appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.