Welcome to Legal Research Best Practices! My relationship with personal computing began in 1984, when I purchased an IBM XT with 10 MB of memory. For $6,000 one could type and print a document and project mortgage payments. Good times.But, it was the summer of 1995, when serial entrepreneur Jim Barksdale and University of Illinois student programmer Marc Andreessen, released Netscape v. 1, forever transforming the human exchange of information. In my opinion, the release of Netscape represents human history's single most empowering event for the individual.
I was a 35 year-old ace legal researcher and writer, earning a fine living primarily in high stakes Federal criminal litigation. I even developed my own set of best practices for finding opinions no one else could find.
I conducted the research, analysis and documentation that lead to a $400,000 malpractice judgment against F. Lee Bailey. I was the first to identify, research and document the jurisdiction problem that resulted in the reversal and dismissal of an $8,769,740 million judgment in Lyndonville Savings Bank v. Lussier, 211 F.3d 697 (2nd Cir. 2000). My research and writing lead to the announcement of a new rule of law pursuant to the 1984 Bail Reform Act, when a unanimous panel of the United States Court Of Appeals for the First Circuit declared that Federal criminal defendants may not be detained in prison pending resentencing de novo.
When Netscape was released I took a year off, spending some 80 hours a week in front of the computer. At the end of that year, I co-founded Advanced Internet Research Strategies (AIRS), a company that predates Google and is still in business today. I spent six months writing and honing the curriculum. Thereafter, I spent two years teaching corporate America how to force true results from public search engines like Alta Vista, HotBot and Yahoo.
Back then, when Microsoft, Netscape and IBM, wanted to know how to use the Internet as a competitive intelligence tool, I am the guy they called. For $10,000 I would spend a single business day with 20 researchers or less.
In addition to corporate training, I conducted public seminars in Marriott meeting rooms from coast-to-coast. Different city every day. $1,000 a seat for eight hours, generating upwards of $75,000 a day in speaking fees. Ultimately, 55,000 corporate researchers would participate in this curriculum.
The first body of information to migrate online was porn. The next was legal information, as Federal and state governmental instrumentalities began uploading cases, statutes, rules, regs, forms, executive agency and legislative information.
The public web is a great reference resource. In fact, during the weeks and months to come I will be sure to post several Google tutorials so you can find just what you want and only what you want in one mouse click.
That said, the public web will never be a tool for conducting real legal research because the case law posted here is not comprehensive, verifiable, accountable, citable, sortable or checkable.
On January 1, 1999, I began working full-time on the project that would evolve into TheLaw.net Corporation. TheLaw.net was then and is now, a boutique infomediary that delivers all American primary law - proprietary, searchable, sortable, citable and checkable - to your desktop for less than $50 a month.
On August 1, 2000, TheLaw.net started booking subscriptions. The company has been cash positive ever since. Now in our 11th year, our flagship application, TheLaw.net Equalizer 7.0, is considered America's No. 1 legal research value.
Like Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer, Equalizer is a tool that has forever changed the lives of the local practitioner in today's online law office. Game-changing in that the playing field has been forever leveled in terms of access to primary resources with a national scope. Game-changing in that Equalizer is the superior case law search engine on the market today.
The opportunity for small-medium research environments is that large institutional users are - well - too institutionalized to change the way they do business. Morover, what they've been doing all these years has worked for them. They cannot imagine they're missing anything. To them, the notion that they are somehow lagging behind and missing cases by performing book-like research on a computer screen is laughable.
Tens of thousands of attorneys from coast-to-coast have come to TheLaw.net from Westlaw and Lexis. They know how to find all of the opinions Westlaw users are missing browsing headnotes, annotations and key numbers. They know how to do this in a couple of mouse clicks.
The information on this blog is used as an interactive support tool for subscribers to TheLaw.net. However, the advanced search strategies, processes, and other information revealed herein will supercharge your search results regardless of whether you subscribe to Westlaw, Lexis or TheLaw.net.
