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§ I Introduction Online research is no longer the exclusive domain of Westlaw, Lexis and other subscription services. Substantial numbers of resources are not or cannot be copyrighted. Thus many organizations provide access free of charge to what was once only available for a price. Every day more resources are accessible for free to anyone. These sources do however require a little more time to find what your need. If a reasonable search fails, you can always go to a subscription site. Anything published within the last 20 years is available somewhere online for a price. Being efficient with your time online, just like using the books, requires coordinating your search. First, start as narrow as you can. While search engines are a good place when you are not sure where else to start, they cast a wide net. Don't start with Google unless you have time to search through hundreds of irrelevant results or unless your search words are very specific and unusual. Instead, start with a legal search engine or directory and make it specific to an area of law if possible. Use a directory when you know the topic or jurisdiction to find a short list of possible resources. While not every source you may need can be found for free, there is certainly more available for free than you know. It is almost always worth the time to search free sources first. Almost every legal task you do on a daily basis has been done before by somebody. Many lawyers share their experience and work on their own websites and that body of work grows each day. Likewise governments are expanding their information on websites. The federal government prints less than 10 percent of what they did a decade ago. All that information is web accessible only. States and local governments are following suit. While most Mid-South courts have yet to make documents available on line, remember that in many other jurisdictions are already there. Use a directory to find court websites in every state. Each section below lists a few excellent resources. At the end of each section you will find links to larger, more comprehensive lists of that resource compiled by others. Speaking of which, The Virtual Chase is a larger, more comprehensive guide to internet legal research sponsored by Ballard, Spahr, Andrews and Ingersoll, LLP. § 2 Search Engines and Directories www.firstgov.com
www.findlaw.com
www.washlaw.edu Fellow law librarian Andrew Zimmerman's Research Guide is so useful Lexis hosts his site for free. The format is A-Z like a legal dictionary with explanations of terms, but also links to resources for those terms or jurisdictions. Larger Lists of Search
Engines and Directories: § 3 Primary Sources With few exceptions, every state and all federal codes, regulations and current appellate court opinions are available for free online. unfortunately Mississippi regulations is one of those exceptions. You won't find annotations which are copyrighted by the various publishers. The format of each resource varies as does the ability to do keyword searches. Tennessee's Rules and Regulations for example are in Acrobat® format only making any text searching impossible and generally quite cumbersome to use even if you have an exact site. Court Opinions while universally available now, rarely go back past the mid 1990's when most state courts began their websites. Older, prominent cases however are frequently found on academic sites. If you know the style of an older case you wish to fine try a general search engine such as Google or MSN Search. Older Supreme Court Opinions are the subject of several projects making most 20th Century and important older opinions, and some briefs, available. § 4 Practice Materials Traditional sources of
practice material such as hornbooks, treatises or looseleaf services are still
found only in print or subscription services. Every legal directory has a
subject area list, see
§ 2 above. While these are the largest single resources, no one directory
is close to being an exhaustive list in any area. Use search engines and use as
many search terms as applicable and make them as specific as possible. Many firms want to show
their expertise by providing the best website on specific subjects. Memphis
based
Siskind Susser's award winning immigration law site does just that.
Some seek out
directories, other like to be the lone wolf as it were. Consider multiple
strategies for finding these sites. § 5 Reference General dictionaries, writing guides and Thesauri are plentiful enough on the internet, but so are legal writing and citation guides. The most used internet citation guide appears to be Professor Peter Martin's Introduction to Basic Legal Citation (LII ed. 2003) on Cornell's Legal Information Institute site. Professor Eugene Volokh excerpts part of his book Academic Legal Writing with other help for Law Review and legal scholarly writing. Referral sites for law firms by specialty, experts and legal services are voluminous since they often pay to be listed. Look at any directory in § 2 supra, but Martindale - Hubble is still the über reference source, even online. A listing of local and state bar associations is found at the National Association of Bar Executive's site. § 6 Government Publications and Public Records The enormous cost saving of web publishing over printing has spurred an almost complete migration of government publications to the web. Printed slip opinions are as quaint as the buggy whip. Federal publications, both online and printed are coordinated through the Government Printing Office's gpoaccess.gov. Even if you need a rare, in-print-only document, find and order it through this site. Find any state's official website at www.state.xx.us replacing the "xx" with that state's two-letter postal abbreviation or use Washlaw's easy state directory. Public records on the 'net is still hit and miss. The University of Virginia has a large index of real and personal property search sites. Search Systems claims the largest index to all public records (22,611 databases), including criminal, UCC filings, licenses as well as property: real personal and intellectual. Most but not all of these databases are free. § 7 Forms Perhaps the most surprising resource for free on the internet are the large number of forms. Representing hour upon hour of nose to the grindstone lawyering by other professionals, their aggregate value might be equal to the cost of the whole internet. Still, a form is only as good as the lawyer who knows what to take from it and how best to apply it to a client's needs. Forms are fundamentally what their name implies, the format, not the substance of a document. An index to government agency, business organization filing, court documents at Washlaw. Business Contracts at lp.Findlaw.com plus a random collection of links to business documents, legal filings, will, real estate transactions and correspondence. Sample briefs, other court documents and exhibits at Virtual Chase. § 8 'Blogs and Blawgs Many bloggers are professionals, and specifically many are legal professionals who post useable information on a daily basis not found anywhere else. This sub-genre is often referred to as "blawgs" A good, short read that explains the utility of blawgs for lawyers entitled Four Purposes of Blawgs? by Bill Gratch is on his site blawg.org, a great site for searching blawgs. Another good site is www.Kinja.com which requires registration. Searching the world of blogs, or "blogosphere," use a specialized search engine. There are many and a good list of them is maintained at www.aripaparo.com/archive/000632.html. The real usefulness of blawgs is twofold: they are current and they can be used to elicit responses. While published material, even online legal material goes through a research, writing and editorial process that takes time and is geared to a larger readership. Blogs are often daily recitations of the author's experiences allowing you to search for information on developing issues affecting other lawyers. With the instantaneousness of other knowledge comes the ability to add your comments to the authors post. You can ask questions that gives the author or any other reader the opportunity to respond. Researching novel issues, judging public reaction to specific issues or solving specialized practice questions, especially technology related questions can be done through blogs where ready-made answers cannot be found in standard google-type searches. To give you an idea of what a blawg is, here's a random list of some popular and interesting blawgs:
The Volokh Conspiracy by Eugene Volokh, Law Professor at UCLA Most bloggers think of their readers as people who check their site on a regular basis. You may find some bloggers worth regular reading, especially if that author's credentials give credence to his or her opinion. To sift through the volume of articles and find ones worth your time, use a RSS reader to skim the headlines from a large number of blogs you choose. You can download and set up an RSS reader for free. Steve Cohen, a law librarian of course, explains it all in an article on llrx.com. § 9 When to Use Subscription Only Services You may be faced with the need to pay for access. If so, be sure the site has what you need first. Check Lexis or Westlaw's directory of databases before paying. While these publishers represent far more than half the legal titles in the US, and Tennessee as well, there are alternatives for material these two providers lack. Hein Online offers pre-1990 federal materials such as treaties, Federal Registers and AG Opinions, but their real attraction is the law journal collection. They have close to 100 titles each going back to the earliest published volume. Loislaw offers all of the basic legal resources: codes and cases, with easy to use searches. While not nearly as large as Westlaw or Lexis on the volume of secondary materials, their pricing structure aimed to be more attractive to the solo or small firm. CCH provide much of their tax and corporate publications online. BNA also provide dozens of their titles by web based subscriptions. Several area libraries have public access to these services for no charge to the public. The Shelby County Law Library in the Shelby County Courthouse provides access to Westlaw. The University of Memphis School of Law Library has Westlaw, Hein Online and Infotrac, an online index to legal periodical articles. § 10 Internet Searches for Books in Print A new development that finds not just titles but list the libraries holding that title has been incorporated in to Yahoo and Google searches. This information is taken from WorldCat, the all encompassing database used by virtually every medium to large library system in the U.S. as well as significant numbers internationally. For an explanation of how it works, go to Open WorldCat. All you need to do is conduct a search on Yahoo or Google and from the results choose the link "Find in a Library." You will be prompted to enter your zip code, et voila, a list of the closest holding libraries. For specific book information such as publisher or date of publication, the Library of Congress Catalog has the largest database. For local libraries, The University of Memphis's TomCat allows for searches restricted to each library in its consortium including the Law Library. The Shelby County Law Library catalog is accessible from their website. |