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.
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.
The successor to the United States Government Printing Office GPO Access, the Federal Digital System, has announced a pilot project to bring Federal district court opinions to the free Web. The district courts are the trial courts in the U.S. Federal system and are frequently only available in print or in fee-based databases. The initial pilot will include one district court, two bankruptcy courts (same level), and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals (self-indulgent note: I used to play my bagpipes just outside the 39th story window of Judge Morris Arnold of the 8th in the Little Rock TCBY tower).
While some district courts publish a selection of opinions on their Web sites, there is no easy way to search across multiple courts and all opinions. If this project is successful, it will be a great resource for legal researchers to be able to access this information in aggregate, through a site as powerful as FDSys. They already make available the primary legislative and executive regulatory documents for the U.S. Federal government.
You can already search and browse the 4 courts on the FDSys Web site and feedback is encouraged. The site says opinions go back to 2004, but the 8th Circuit lists back to 2001, and the Florida bankruptcy court starts in 2006.