Remember what they told you in law school? "All research begins with the black letter law." The more things change. the more they stay the same. This tutorial teaches you how to:
1. Find all of the opinions citing your statute in one mouse click.
2. How to filter your results on an individualized basis such that - in a mouseclick - you see all of the opinions construing your statute for the reason(s) you specify.
Remember, you are searching a complete index of judicial opinions. Not browsing a partial index that annotations, headnotes and key number represent. For this teaching example, we use the Florida murder statute 782.04. But, you can replicate this process in your state. We call this a statute driven search.
1. Open TheLaw.net Equalizer
2. Enter murder.
3. Check the box for the Florida State Database.
4. Click Search. We receive more than 10,000 hits. Go back. (BACK BUTTON)
5. Delete murder. Replace it with the statute number. 782.04. Yes. Just the number.
6. Click Search. 997 hits. This is your database of Florida murder cases. All 997 of them. Everyone of them expressly cites your statute. Good times! Go back. Want to know the most cited murder case in Florida? Click "Citetrak Entire Database." It is: State v. Dixon, 283 So.2d 1 (Fla., 1973).
7. Using the statutory text as your guide - no word guessing - filter on a relevant term, such as sexual battery. Your search should look like this: 782.04 & "sexual battery" (Screen capture)
8. Click Search. 145 hits. Better still. This is your database of Florida murder opinions involving allegations of sexual battery. Results are sortable by search term frequency (Relevance), first party name (Case), recency (Decision Date) and citation frequency (Citetrak Entire Database). Opposing counsel is not going to find a case you don't have. They are all here. Go back.
9. Go back. You can keep refining. Is the murder weapon a knife? 782.04 & "sexual battery" & knife. 22 hits. Amazing! Most cited: Henyard v. State, 689 So.2d 239 (Fla. 1996)
10. Pick your poison: 782.04 & "double jeopardy" finds opinions construing your statute in the context of a double jeopardy claim.
Notes: (a) Phrases get quotation marks, (b) and/& are one in the same, (c) West's 782.04 Annotated represents a partial index of the relevant opinions. It is a 500 page, 180,000 word document, (d) Annotations do not provide individualized results. They represent a mass customized approach to legal research. Browsing annotations on a computer is book research on a computer. The best we could do in the days of books. Those days are done. (e) Using the statutory text as your guide and your detailed knowledge of the facts and circumstances surrounding the controversy at hand, together with advanced Boolean logic, we ask for what we want, resolve our search to "yes" or "no" in a couple of mouse clicks (without word guessing) and we're done. (f) Of course, with TheLaw.net Equalizer 7.0, when you have an odd set of facts and your best argument is persuasive, in one mouseclick you can go national. (g) West charges approximately $10,000 a year for a subscription containing the same judicial opinions as TheLaw.net Equalizer 7.0!
