A company run by a Texas criminal lawyer has introduced a mobile app designed to enable attorneys to quickly access statutes and case law from the courtroom, the boardroom or wherever they may be. The app, PUSH Legal, enables lawyers to load up their mobile devices with a library of annotated deskbooks covering a range [...]
Legal research company Fastcase will announce a new utility tomorrow that enables one-click printing of any case from any source on the Web or in any Microsoft Word document. Called Fastcase Cloud Printing, the utility lets you print or save a nicely formatted, two-column version of any case. The utility works with Google Scholar, Westlaw, LexisNexis or anywhere there is a case online.
You can also use it to create and print a list of cases. Say you are reading a case or a brief that contains many citations. With a single click, Fastcase Cloud Printing will generate a list of all the cited cases within the document and let you select the ones you want to print.
The printing utility is installed as an add-on to Internet Explorer or Word. Versions for Google Chrome and Firefox will be released later. For now, the utility works with Web pages and Word documents. Later versions will also allow one-click printing from Outlook and PDF documents.
The utility works by recognizing citations within documents and then using that information to pull the matching case or cases from Fastcase. For example, if you use it to print a case you are reading in Google Scholar, it does not somehow pull the case from Scholar and reformat it. Instead, it finds the corresponding case in Fastcase and presents it for you to print.
One obvious benefit of such an app is simply to be able to print cleaner, better-formatted versions of Web cases. Another is to be able easily to bulk print a set of cited cases.
A less-obvious benefit of this app is that it may save a firm money. In concept, the app is similar to Westlaw Find & Print. But users of Find & Print pay for it by the transaction. Law Firm Bottom Line recently estimated that the cost of Find & Print has increased 144% over five years. The Fastcase utility can eliminate the need to use Find & Print — even from within Westlaw.
Initially, Fastcase will offer the application only to enterprise subscribers, who will receive it as part of their existing subscriptions at no extra charge. Later, the app will be offered to lawyers who have access to Fastcase through their state bar associations, although they may have to pay an added fee for it.
For screencaps of Fastcase Cloud Printing, see below.
The toolbar lets you select to print the case you are viewing, the cases cited within the case, or a citation you enter. It then takes a few seconds for Findcase to retrieve the cases.
When you choose to print all cited cases, the app lists the cases and lets you select the ones to print.
The formatted case can be printed or saved to your computer.
Bloomberg Law today released what it describes as “the next evolution” of its legal research platform. Changes include a redesigned interface, enhanced search capabilities, new practice centers and enhanced collaboration and workflow features. One thing that is not changing is Bloomberg Law’s flat-fee, all-inclusive pricing — something the company believes is key to differentiating it from the big-two legal research services, Westlaw and LexisNexis.
Bloomberg Law officially launched in December 2009. In a review I wrote about it soon after its launch, I gave the service credit for “getting into the game with swagger” by loading up on primary legal content, creating its own editorial enhancements, and developing its own citator to rival Shepard’s and KeyCite. But I also said that it was a “work in progress” and I likened it to a luxury yacht only partially contrusted. “It is seaworthy,” I said, “but still has a lengthy punch list.”
Last October, Bloomberg Law rearranged the deck chairs and brought aboard Lou Andreozzi, the former president and CEO of LexisNexis North American Legal Markets, to take the company’s helm as chairman. It also brought in Larry D. Thompson, former VP of business development, strategy and marketing for LexisNexis, as COO.
Today I spoke with Andreozzi about the changes to Bloomberg Law and was given a brief demonstration. I have not logged in and tested the upgraded version and will post more substantive comments after I am able to do that.
Flat Fee Pricing
One point Andreozzi emphasizes is that the flat-fee pricing model will not change. The price of a subscription remains what it was when the service launched — $450 per user per month. (Enterprise pricing is available to larger organizations.) That price is all-inclusive; there are no hidden or add-on charges for any of the service’s features. The only price increases customers will receive will be minor adjustments every other year based on the cost of living. “We’re committed to predictable, transparent pricing,” Andreozzi says.
For that, Andreozzi maintains, you get virtually everything that Westlaw and LexisNexis have — all federal and state primary law, a top-tier citator, national and international dockets, and in-depth news and business intelligence drawn from Bloomberg’s global network.
At this point in its development, Andreozzi believes, Bloomberg Law compares unfavorably to Westlaw and LexisNexis only in one respect: its lesser collection of secondary legal materials such as treatises and practice guides. The company continues to move towards the goal of developing secondary materials to cover all practice areas, but it is several years away from reaching that goal, Andreozzi says.
Even so, Andreozzi asserts that such secondary materials account for no more than 10 percent of all legal research. Ninety percent of research involves the three areas where Bloomberg Law is strong: primary law, citations and business intelligence. In fact, Andreozzi believes, lawyers at the highest levels of their practice areas are most likely to focus on that latter category of business intelligence research, including business news, corporate and company information, and docket information.
Many larger law firms maintain subscriptions to both Westlaw and LexisNexis, Andreozzi notes. With Bloomberg Law covering 90 percent or more of what lawyers need in a research product on a flat-fee basis, he suggests, they can now drop at least one of those subscriptions.
As I say, the interview and demonstration were brief. I’ll provide more information as I have it.
In close to 20 years of writing about legal technology and the Web, one article of mine stands head and shoulders above all others for the impassioned feedback I received. That article was my head-to-head review of Casemaker vs. Fastcase, the two legal research services that market themselves to bar associations to offer as a benefit to their members. To this day, e-mails responding to that review still trickle in. Some chastize me. Some pat me on the back.
The irony is that I called the competition between the two services as more or less of a tie in many respects. “Both are worthwhile services with many similarities,” I wrote. With respect to their coverage of primary legal materials and the strength of their search tools, “neither stands out as significantly superior to the other,” I said.
In just one respect, I gave Fastcase “the clear edge”: intuitiveness and ease of use. Granted, these are important. Even so, by that simple judgment call, I quickly learned that both services have legions of fiercely loyal users.
That is a long-winded way of getting to the point of this post: Coming soon to Casemaker is a significant upgrade to its interface that promises to significantly enhance its intuitiveness and ease of use while also enhancing the product’s core functionality. To be called “CasemakerElite,” this new version takes a cue from WestlawNext, which has an interface that I once described as ”Zen-like in its sparsity — or, I should say, Google-like.” The folks at Casemaker looked at what West did and said to themselves, “We can do that.”
Steve Newsom, managing director of Casemaker, gave me a demonstration of Elite by web conference yesterday. I have not yet tried the product directly. I hope to do that sometime in May and write a more detailed review then. Based on the demonstration, here are some initial impressions.
A Single, Universal Search
WestlawNext and Lexis Advance both took their lead from Google, incorporating a single search box that searches universally across libraries. CasemakerElite does the same. You can enter a simple search, a phrase, a more complex syntax search or a citation. Casemaker will deliver the most relevant results from across all its libraries of primary law — cases, statutes, court rules and other materials. From there, you can easily drill down through or narrow the results. Choose to see just cases or just statutes. Search within search results. By default, results are sorted by relevance, but they can also be sorted by date decided or frequency of citation. As you narrow your search, you retain a “breadcrumb trail” of your search path.
CasemakerElite uses a single, universal search box.
Elite will add various other new features to Casemaker. Among them is the ability to add notes to cases and to save cases and notes in custom folders. When you sign in to Elite, it will remember you and highlight your most frequently used libraries and your most recently viewed documents. A second-phase roll-out will include the ability to save searches and to set up email alerts when there are updates to your saved searches.
Casemaker Elite will be rolled out to current Casemaker subscribers late in May or early in June. This will be the first phase of a five-phase update, with additional enhancements to be rolled out later in June and continuing thereafter.
New Ownership for Casemaker
The impetus for this major redesign was Casemaker’s acquisition in 2009 by SSN Holdings, the parent company of the legal research service JuriSearch. Daniel Shapiro, the California lawyer who is CEO of JuriSearch, said a first priority after the acquisition was to enhance Casemaker’s interface.
In 2002, JuriSearch bought the National Law Library and BriefReporter, and with those services came David Harriman, the former CEO and editor-in-chief of The Michie Company, along with several other former Michie editors.
Now, Harriman is part of the team working to enhance Casemaker. He has a team of legal editors in the United States and India who produce the CasemakerDigest, a service that provides summaries of federal and state cases. He has also helped create CaseCheck and CaseCheck +, Casemaker’s version of a Shepard’s-like citation checker.
As I say, I hope to have an opportunity to try out CasemakerElite in the near future. When I do, I will report back here in more detail.
A newly launched website, The Free Law Reporter, provides free access to a searchable index of recent federal and state court opinions. Developed by the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), the site describes itself as an “electronic case reporter” that makes the opinions searchable and also provides them as ebook collections.
FLR uses the feed of cases provided through the Report of Current Opinions, or RECOP. A cooperative project among Public.Resource.Org, Fastcase and others, RECOP provides a weekly bulk feed of HTML versions of all slip and final opinions of all federal and state appellate and supreme courts. The feed is available for use by anyone with the goal of spurring innovation in case law research.
(I wrote about RECOP in two posts: Public Domain Group to Begin Weekly Release of all Federal and State Appellate Cases and More Details on RECOP from Fastcase’s Ed Walters.)
CALI’s goal in creating FLR, the website says, is “to create a body of court opinions that is accessible to anyone including educators, librarians, students, lawyers and the public.” Besides providing searchable access to the cases, FLR also produces weekly ebook compilations of cases by state or federal jurisdiction. These are in the “.epub” format that can be read by a range of ebook readers on computers, mobile phones, tablets and e-readers.
Because it uses the RECOP feed, FLR’s collection covers only cases issued since Jan. 1, 2011.
CALI says it plans to use FLR as a platform for other projects. For anyone interested in keeping tabs on its development, it has set up a mailing list. You can get on the list by sending a blank e-mail to flr-list+subscribe@cali.org.
I wrote here in October about the launch of Lexis Advance for Solos, the LexisNexis flat-rate legal research platform for one- and two-lawyer firms. This week, Lexis rolled out a new app that allows lawyers who subscribe to Advance to use it from their iPhones.
The app lets you search by text or citation “instantly,” meaning that you do not have to select a specific content type or jurisdiction. If you prefer, you can first narrow a search by content type, jurisdiction or topic.
The app can also be used to Shepardize cases and statutes to determine whether they are still good law and to find other authorities that cite them.
The app includes Work Folders to save documents, searches, citations and Shepard’s results.
The app is free but you will need to be an Advance subscriber to use it.
When I first wrote last year about the fact that Google Scholar had added case law research, I acknowledged it was still rough around the edges. Even so, I described it as “more than just a good start,” adding, “I expect there will be further refinements and enhancements to come.”
A notable enhancement launched this week: Google Scholar added the ability to search court opinions and law journals by jurisdiction. Simply go to the advanced search page and, under “Collections” at the bottom of the page, pick your jurisdiction.
The default choices are to search all courts within a federal circuit or within a state. But click the link that says, “Select specific courts to search,” and you open a menu that lets you pick individual courts. In fact, you can even “mix and match” specific courts from across multiple jurisdictions.
Thus, you could, if you wanted, conduct a single search of just the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts and the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, or any other combination.
Needless to say, this enhances the ability to use Google Scholar for more targeted research.
Read more about this at the Google Scholar Blog.
A busy schedule has kept me from reviewing Lexis Advance for Solos, the new LexisNexis legal research platform for one- and two-lawyer firms that LexisNexis released earlier this week. Today, I finally had a chance to sit down (in the virtual sense) with Lexis executives for a tour.
There have already been several thoughtful reviews. I recommend that you read the reviews written by Sean Doherty, Greg Lambert, Joe Hodnicki and Little Richard. The common thread running through these is that the reviewers generally give it thumbs-up.
Add my thumbs to the list. Three features make this a product worth the consideration of any solo:
Let me go into a bit more detail about these features. Let me add the caveat that I was given a demonstration via Microsoft Live Meeting but did not get in and take a test drive on my own.
Intuitive Search
Lexis Advance home page (click to view larger)
Dominating the Lexis Advance home page is “the big red box,” as Marty Kilmer, the LexisNexis “product champion” who gave me the demonstration of Advance, called it, although he added that he prefers to describe it as “an invitation to search.”
It is a Google-like search bar and functions in much the same way. A single search covers all libraries. Search using natural language or Boolean phrases. Click “search options” to bring up a pop-up menu that will help you construct a Boolean search.
To assist you as you enter a search, a drop-down list of words and phrases appears as you type your query, so you can select from the list. The same happens for names of well-known cases, so if you start to type “roe,” the case Roe v. Wade will appear in the suggestion list.
Case law search results (click to view larger)
If you would rather not search across all libraries, you can prefilter search results by content type (e.g., cases, statutes, etc.), jurisdiction or practice area.
Once you’ve run a search, results appear in a window with tabs across the top for content type. Thus, you can click on the tabs to see results within cases, statutes, analytical materials, briefs and pleadings, jury instructions, etc.
A panel on the left side of the results screen enables furthering filtering along a number of parameters, including by jurisdiction and court. A timeline histogram not only allows filtering by date but also illustrates historical activity related to the search query.
Web search results (click to view larger)
When you conduct a search, Advance also searches the open Web and includes those results under a separate tab. These are websites selected by Lexis editors as those most useful to legal professionals. That means you are not searching all of the Web, but sites more likely to contain relevant information.
Users can create up to 500 folders or subfolders to keep track of their research. Store full documents here or select and annotate snippets. The folders are saved for as long as you remain a subscriber. Advance also retains your search history so you can easily retrace your steps.
Advance uses tabbed browsing so that search windows remain open as you view results and individual documents in new tabs.
Advance includes a beta search feature called Legal Issue Trail (for which Lexis has applied for a patent). Turn it on, and it highlights segments of text that represent discrete points of law. Click on any of the highlighted segments to run a search on that specific point of law.
Flat-Rate Pricing
As I said above, Advance is offered at the flat-rate subscription price of $175 a month. A second lawyer is $140 a month. At this point, no lawyers beyond two are allowed — Advance for Solos is only for solos and duos. However, if you have paralegals, they can get passwords under your subscription for no extra cost.
A contract is required of at least a year. As an introductory offer for new users, Lexis is including access to its 24 most popular treatises for the term of the initial contract, up to three years. If you sign up for a one-year contract, you get the extra treatises for just a year.
The price includes 24/7 telephone support at no extra cost. Lexis believes that Advance is so easy to use that it will reduce the overall volume of support calls, even with free round-the-clock support.
What it Includes
For that flat monthly fee, you get access to a generous array of LexisNexis materials. They include:
Those analytical materials and treatises I mentioned above include Moore’s Federal Practice, Nimmer on Copyright, Milgrim on Trade Secrets, Corbin on Contracts, Bender’s Federal Practice Forms and more.
Click here for a PDF brochure with a complete list of materials included in Lexis Advance: Lexis Advance for Solos Content Summary.
What’s Missing from Advance
Having only seen a demonstration, it is difficult to say much about shortcomings or glitches in Lexis Advance. One important aspect to note is that the walls around the content library are made of brick. By that I mean that you cannot access LexisNexis libraries outside your subscription even if you want to. This is one price and one set of resources.
One relatively minor issue is that you can print from Advance only via your browser’s print function. There is no capacity to print directly to a word processing document. Similarly, there is no ability to e-mail a document from within Advance, other than by sending a page via your browser. (You can toggle full-page mode as you view a document, which eliminates the sidebar panels.)
Another shortcoming right now is that you cannot share folders. As I said above, you can create up to 500 folders and use them to store research, clips, documents and whatever. But only the subscriber can access these folders.
Lexis says sharing, printing and e-mailing are all on the to-do list and will all be made available at some point down the road. Exactly when, they would not say.
Also on the to-do list is to add more content to Advance. Again, however, the company is not saying what content or when, only that it’s working “full-steam ahead on future enhancements.”
A Glimpse of the Future
Lexis Advance for Solos is an advance look at a line of products Lexis will be rolling out for various user groups. While they may not all look exactly alike or share precisely the same features, they will all be built on the same basic platform.
Clemens Ceipek, the LexisNexis vice president who is directing the company’s “New Lexis” initiative, said that the development of Advance is the single-biggest investment the company has ever made. Everything about it is new technology, designed from scratch. Extensive efforts were made to get input and feedback from users, he said, including 30,000 interactions with customers.
Notably, new iterations of Advance will be tailored to user type, not firm type, Ceipek said. They will all be alike in that they will all share the ability to search across libraries with a single search. But they will differ depending on whether they are targeted to law librarians, transactional lawyers, litigators, or what have you.
The Bottom Line
As I said at the outset, based on my guided tour of Lexis Advance for Solos, I give it two thumbs up. It offers a comprehensive library of resources and materials from a leading legal publisher, all wrapped in an intuitive search and display environment, and delivered for a reasonable and predictable monthly price.
Last February, Law.com published my review of Bloomberg Law, in which I wrote, “Bloomberg’s biggest challenge may lie in convincing the legal market that it needs another high-end research service.” That is essentially the same conclusion reached by Wall Street Journal reporter Russell Adams, who writes about the service today in a piece titled, Bloomberg Hangs New Shingle.
Free trials Bloomberg gave to several prominent law firms expire this summer, Adams says, “and Bloomberg is busy trying to convert users into paying clients.”
Promising a comprehensive legal research tool at an affordable price, a new legal research site, eLaw, launched yesterday. Although the service provides access to case law and statutes for all 50 states, it is available only to attorneys in New York and New Jersey.
My guess is that the geographic limitation is because eLaw uses the Casemaker database. Casemaker is marketed primarily as a member benefit for state and local bar associations. That means a lawyer can subscribe to it only through a bar association affinity program.
As it happens, the two states in which eLaw is offering access to Casemaker are two states whose bars do not. New Jersey offers its members Fastcase and New York offers Loislaw. Thus, eLaw provides lawyers in those states a “back door” into Casemaker.
I have not tried eLaw yet. Subscriptions start at $25 a month, according to the site. Subscriptions can be bundled with eLaw’s other products, Dates & Dockets, a docket-monitoring and e-filing service for New York and New Jersey, and Bench & Bar, an online version of Lawyers Diary and Manual.
eLaw includes federal and state cases, as well as statutes, court rules, attorney general opinions, state administrative rules and select municipal codes.
