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Five Tips for Smarter Legal Research

By Barbara Straczynski posted 06-27-2014 02:21 PM

  

 

The New Jersey State Bar Association has been offering Fastcase access to its members as a freely-available member benefit since 2009. The service has improved and grown every year since then. Whether you’re a power researcher or simply use the service once in a blue moon to pull a few cases, here are some tips to help you work smarter with the Fastcase service:

1. Annotations
There is no faster way to get up to date annotations than through the Fastcase service. As soon as a case is added to the Fastcase database, computer-driven algorithms identify statute citations and, when found, append the case to the end of the statute. Because Fastcase is able to do this with computers, no competitor can match its speed in updating annotations. 

2. Batch Printing
Pulling up individual cases can be a hassle, even when you have the citations readily available. Fastcase lets you pull up multiple cases at once, just by separating them with a comma. You can save them all to your print queue for later, print them individually, print the entire text of all the cases as one document, or simply print a list of the cases. Simply click the printer icon in the search results to begin adding cases to your search queue. Fastcase recently increased the number of cases or statutes you can print at one time from 50 to 500. The cases can even be saved in a single zip file with filenames reflecting the party names.

3. Case Summaries
Beginning in 2011, Fastcase began including case summaries of judicial opinions in all state supreme courts, the U.S. Supreme Court, and federal court summaries from Fastcase.

4. Bad Law Bot
Need to know how courts are treating the case you’re reading? Fastcase recently added the Bad Law Bot, which reads through all those cases for you, and then alerts you whenever it detects courts are treating your case negatively. Bad Law Bot empowers you to make the call about whether your case is still good law for the proposition you want to cite it for, by pointing you right to the spot in the case it thinks you should examine. 

5. Case Alerts
Every lawyer fears showing up to court without realizing that between the time he did his initial research and showed up for court, a new, directly-relevant case was published. With Fastcase Alerts, you can have some piece of mind. Simply run a search on your legal issue, click “Add Alert,” and every morning Fastcase will see if any new cases are added to your search, and will send you an email listing the additions if they have. 

Fastcase has grown and added a plethora of useful tools and features since the New Jersey State Bar Association first introduced it as a member benefit. 

You can access this free legal research tool anytime by visiting njsba.com and clicking on the Fastcase logo. For more information about these and more Fastcase features, visit www.fastcase.com/support for a schedule of free webinars, training videos, and user guides. You can also reach Fastcase toll free at 1-866-77-FASTCASE.


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