Finding Legal Information

Managing your online information can be a challenge, particularly if you use a service like social media where you may not control the delivery of the information.  allmytweets may be able to help if you are looking for Twitter messages to archive, whether yours or someone else’s.

When you send a Twitter message, it appears on your profile and is stored on Twitter’s servers.  You can use an external tool to create an archive (like Backupify) but it can be difficult to generate an archive of all your messages within Twitter’s site.  When you go to allmytweets.net, the only question is the username for whom you want to retrieve all tweets.

It certainly appears to be all.  I retrieved my own account and saw what appear to be all 1,300 odd messages that I have sent to date.  Airtight Interactive, which created allmytweets, says it taps the public Twitter API, but I have to say it’s the most complete retrieval I’ve ever seen on a public tool.  The results are available in real-time, which I tested by deleting a couple of non-informational tweets and then resubmitting my username.  All three messages were gone.

If you are trying to freeze your own – or someone else’s profile for, say, litigation purposes – in time, allmytweets may be a great way to store an archive.

Hat tip to @EJWalters (Ed Walters, Fastcase) and NY Times’ columnist David @Pogue

The second edition of the book, Finding and Managing Legal Information on the Internet, is now available!  I started the revision last summer and completed it in September.  And submitted revisions in November.  And made some more changes during the proofing in January!  Writing about anything related to research on the Web is a moving target and the world seems to have been particularly turbulent in the last 6 months.  Any changes or updates that didn’t make it into the text will be appearing on the blog!

I received some excellent feedback about the first edition and that led me to remove some of the geekier content (like building your own CanLII accelerator, which CanLII has now done!).  Instead, you’ll find more tips that will extend your research expertise, whether or not you are already an expert researcher or not.  The content was significantly rewritten – IE9 wasn’t available during the first edition, let alone the rapid-fire release of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox – due to the significant changes in the available Web browser add ons, tools for managing and storing your research, and the increasing similarity between Web browsers.  It was much easier this time because the big three – IE, Firefox, and Chrome – often worked the same way or had more similar functionality.

Hopefully those of you who found the first edition useful will get even more out of the second edition.  If you have stumbled upon this blog because of a particular research need, you will find the book goes into far greater detail – with screenshots, keyboard shortcuts, and other practical information – than I’m able to achieve on the blog.

Thanks for stopping by and best of luck with your research.

LexisNexis has dropped the free case law resource – formerly known as LexisOne – and is now funnelling users to paid options only. When I saw the announcement on Twitter, it was a disappointment. As far as U.S. case law goes, LexisOne was unique in enabling some of the segments – search by counsel, by judge’s name – that you could get within the paid database.

#bbpBox_187530248722726912 a { text-decoration:none; color:#992222; }#bbpBox_187530248722726912 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }RT @johnpmayer: RT @MarkRosch We've updated our post on the demise of lexisONE http://t.co/g44Dnccl ... free case law RIPApril 4, 2012 9:21 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite@davidpwhelanDavid Whelan

This was not that surprising, since they had recently shifted the free case law from a relatively easy to reach location on Lexisone.com to a new community site.  Since that lasted for only 2 months, this elimination of access was probably planned.  It may also mean that LexisOne as a case law service wasn’t that popular, although it may also just be the next shift away from any flexibility in access beyond a subscription.

It seems a relatively feeble decision.  Free U.S. case law is abundantly available.  State and Federal appellate courts have a substantial amount of recent, free law on their own sites.  Google Scholar maintains a database of US case law that is getting regular improvements (citation relationships, pagination).  Despite the continuing lack of information about where the data comes from, it appears to be entirely reliable.

There is also the venerable Public Library of Law, which, like LexisOne did, relies on a fee-based service.  Fastcase.com powers the PLOL and content you retrieve in your searches comes from the same database.

Access to Google, the Public Library of Law, and the courts are more than enough of an option to the departed LexisOne.  Free case law needs to be easy to access – not behind marketing sign-ins and other functionality – so the disappearance of LexisNexis’ free content was probably inevitable.

HeinOnline has released an updated mobile app for iPhone and iPad users who access their fee-based law journal and legal commentary databases.  Many law libraries are providing access to HeinOnline for free if you’re in their space.  The Massachusetts trial libraries have a great post on how to set up to use their subscription.  If you’ve got your own access or remote access through your library – like members of the Law Society of Upper Canada or the Social Law Library or lawyers in British Columbia – you can use the app to login remotely for access to journals from your tablet or phone as well as from your PC.

HeinOnline 2012 Mobile iPhone and iPad app screenshot

When Barnet announced their mobile-enabled Jade Touch site, I was not surprised.  These guys continue to push new methods of delivering Australian case law.  The mobile theme that enables access to their Jade database is sleek and uses standard interface choices for anyone accustomed to Apple iPhone or iPod products.  This isn’t an app, though, so it should work on any mobile device.

Jade Touch mobile interface for Barnet Jade Australian case law on an Android Gingerbread device

Or desktop.  It’s a clean way to access recent decisions from Australian courts.  If you visit on a desktop, you can select settings at the bottom left corner of the screen and switch to the desktop version.  Great new way to get at free case law and use the many other enhancements that Barnet is providing.

You can search social media sites like Twitter or Facebook using a variety of tools, both their internal search tools as well as external ones like Topsy.com or FBsearch.us.  Another external search tool I recently came across is Social Mention.  Social Mention distinguishes itself by allowing you to focus your search narrowly on types of social content: comments, social bookmarks, or blogs, for example.

Which Way the Wind Blows

It is also different because it attempts to provide sentiment analysis.  Your search results return like any typical search engine, date ranked, listed in the center of the page.  On the left-hand side, you see the difference.

First, you can immediately see how many contributors are talking about your search query and when the last mention was made.  You can also see whether the trend of discussion is positive, neutral, or negative.  This doesn’t seem to be entirely accurate, so consider it the same way you consider the warning flags in your favorite online legal research citator.   You can click on the word negative to focus your search on just those type of results.

Save Your Search

Social Mention has the relatively unusual ability to save your search results as a downloadable spreadsheet.  Once you have run a search – and applied a filter, like source filtering or sentiment filtering to show only positive results – you can select one of the comma-separated value (CSV) links on the right hand side.  The spreadsheet contains a dozen rows, including title, description, and source.  This may be an easier way of handling your search results – you can sort by the author, for example – than paging through results on the Web site.

Social search remains somewhat limited.  While social media generates a huge amount of content, if you are looking for specific authors or individuals, you may not find them using social tools.  Social Mention does not appear to index any Facebook content, which is one of the best locations for litigators to find information.  But it can be an invaluable source for lawyers and librarians who are involved in business development efforts and current awareness on firm clients.

Researchers should be concerned that their prior research is filtering out relevant information from their future research.  Google’s recent announcement about Search plus Your World is the next step in their personalized search. You can tweak your search – using the pws=0& text inserted in the search results URL – to turn off personalization.

If you have a Google account, you can also toggle personalization on and off with the new search results.  Compare the two pictures below.  The one on the left is personalized, the one on the right isn’t.  The results are slightly different, although it is mostly a matter of ranking.  On the right hand side, at the top of the search results, are two grey icons.  Click the globe to turn personalization OFF; click the body to turn it ON.

Modern Web browsers are powerful tools but they all can be improved and enhanced with add-ons or extensions.  These small software applications live inside the Web browser to provide extra features that the browser itself may be missing.  One issue with adding many extensions to your browser is that it can slow down your browser’s operation.  Another is that they become unwieldy to keep track of what is running and what is disabled.  Ghacks has an interesting post on the Context extension for Google Chrome.  It enables you to create groups of extensions so that you can turn on and off a grouping all at once.  This can be useful if you have a number of extensions for one purpose – say multimedia extensions that manage sound and video files – and you are doing some other sort of research.  Turn off extensions you aren’t using to speed up your browser, and save yourself from having to uninstall and reinstall extensions.

CTRL-F is one of the most useful keyboard shortcuts when trying to find information in a document.  It works in your word processor, spreadsheets, and on Web pages and PDFs.  If you use Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, you can grab the Findlist browser extension to make your find function work harder.  Lifehacker has a great review of how it works:  you get a drop-down menu of up to 50 recent terms you’ve looked for with CTRL-F.  The extension will be useful if you use CTRL-F on one page, then flip to another and have to rerun the search.  Skip retyping and select from your list.

One high volume and high maintenance information area is social media.  Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ all generate huge streams of information that have the potential for containing useful nuggets.  What do you do if you want to dig out these valuable pieces without participating in social media?

You will need to create an account but can immediately lock it against followers or friends. Try a Twitter account first because it has fewest potential missteps in securing your account.  One you have your Twitter account in hand, create another account at Hootsuite.com.  Hootsuite provides a different way of looking at activity on Twitter and other social networks.  More importantly, it has some nice features for monitoring content by keyword or Twitter username.  You can use Hootsuite to monitor content on LinkedIn, WordPress.com blogs, and Facebook, among others, but you need your own account for each of those services.

Once in Hootsuite, you have a number of options for managing your information.  It assumes you want to be social, so your Twitter feeds will automatically be displayed, even though they are empty.  You can delete each of these to clear your window, ready for having searches there instead.  You want to add a stream and the following screen will appear:

Adding a search stream in Hootsuite for Twitter messages with "premises liability" in them

Hootsuite recently purchased Twapperkeeper (named with a nod towards Mead’s Trapper Keeper), a service that archived Twitter messages.  You can archive a stream based on a single keyword in Hootsuite now, or you can use the original three keyword search.  As you create each new stream, it will appear in the window.

The goal here is to rely on the search mechanism rather than the networking connections to capture information as it flows by.  Since networking requires you to make or receive connections from others, search allows you to monitor without interacting with others.  For example, if you were monitoring a particular company or topic, you can set up a search to focus on it without becoming a Facebook friend or Twitter follower of that company and explicitly showing your interest.

Once you have created a number of streams, you may find that they extend off the screen.  Hootsuite supports tabbed pages, so you can aggregate streams on a given topic (practice area specific, for example, or a corporation or industry) so that you can quickly see what is going on in any given stream without scrolling too far left or right.

Lurking on Twitter or Facebook in this way may seem rather anti-social networking but social media remains a challenge for legal professionals.  Using search to mine the information allows you to consume information that is being shared openly without having to worry about confidentiality, privacy, or disclosure of representation breaches.

I came across NWD Publishing and their Rolls Reports recently when one of the parties mentioned in their case law summaries was none other than David Whelan.  Not me!  While NWD is a subscription-based service for the daily and weekly case law summaries, you can follow their case updates for free.  Their site uses WordPress to protect its premium content, which means you can follow their RSS feed at the typical WordPress location.

The second edition is almost here!  I have rewritten and expanded the original text – about 20% longer as well as significantly updated to reflect changes since the first edition came out in 2010 –  and have been reviewing the final galley proofs as we move towards publishing in February.  As we get closer to releasing the new edition, look for updates here.

Sites like this one often extol the virtues of the many free case law sites on the Web.  But the reality is that the free case law sites are just like their paid peers and no site has a comprehensive collection of every opinion.  Whether they are omitted because of age, failure of the courts to make them available, or editorial decision, not all opinions make it into legal research databases.

What do you do if you can’t find it?  The first thing is to make sure you have simplified your research as much as possible.  If you are using a free site like CanLII or LexisNexis’s free case law, review your search query.  Law librarians can probably all remember a time when a lawyer asked for a case and the party name was incorrectly spelled, or it was in the wrong court.

Before you bail out on the free sites, confirm party names or use just one part of the name (“Dominion”) rather than the entire name (“Dominion Coffee Beans, LTD”).  Just because there is a corporate name doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been abbreviated in some way.  A quick search on CanLII for Dominion Bridge returned 21 cases.  But if you search for Dom’n you get 2 additional cases that do not appear in the original 21.

Some cases de-identify cases, so Smith v. Smith becomes S. v. S.  Your case may be there but just not using the term you are looking for.  The same thing goes for legislation.  Statutes and regulations may have popular names that do not actually appear in the language of the law, and so a search using those will fail.  For example, the USA PATRIOT Act is often called the Patriot Act in Canada, but USA is part of the acronym, not a country identifier.  Focus on the content of the law and see if you can find it by using specific keywords rather than popular names.

The same goes for specific key words in cases and legislation.  If you find that you are searching for a phrase and not getting results, try starting with a single word or two.  Then slowly expand your query to fine tune your results.  This is particularly true when you are using a legal term of art, like “time is of the essence”.  There are good chances that the phrase are used just as expected, but opinions are written by individuals and they may not always use the term in the same way.

One of my favorite examples is marijuana, also known as mary jane, or spelled as marihuana.  If you are looking for cases based on a word that might have multiple spellings, see if your search site allows for wildcards to replace part of the word.  For example, if you search on CanLII for mari*uana, with an asterisk replacing the j or h, you will retrieve cases with both spellings.

If you still can’t find the case, call a law librarian and see if they can help you.  Many Canadian provinces and U.S. states have law libraries that serve the local or provincial bars.  Academic law libraries take calls from alumni.  See if someone can confirm that the case isn’t available for free, and perhaps direct you to an alternative site with the case or provide the case to you directly.

One of the better free U.S. case law sites has, for years, been LexisOne, a site powered by LexisNexis case law right down to the ability to search by document segment (counsel, court, etc.).  It didn’t match the paid subscription version of LexisNexis but it was an excellent starting point.  That site is now gone, and the resources have been shifted laterally into LexisNexis’ social community site.

The good news is you can still create an account (or use your old one) and search case law for free.  The benefits of using LexisOne continue in the new site.  The requirement to access it through the LexisNexis community portal is not at all surprising, if looked at it from LexisNexis’ perspective.  I’ve spent little time in there and this will likely make me use it more often.  There are elements that can be customized, mostly related to news and current awareness.  There are quick links to professional and practice area sub-sites, although some of them are outside the community portal and accessible without a log-in.

Hat tip to @catherinereach at the Chicago Bar Association.

I’m honored that this blog was nominated for a 2011 Canadian Law Blog award (Clawbie) and was selected as a finalist in the Legal Research category.  Thank you for your support and hopefully 2012 will provide something valuable that you can use in your law practice or to meet your research needs.