Users of Mendeley or Zotero are probably already managing articles or case law or other documents downloaded in PDF format. An interesting newcomer to this area is Qiqqa. Unlike academic researchers, for which all of these tools appear to be primarily designed, I’m always curious to see how they do with law-related PDFs. While they will handle a law journal nicely, I test them against case law. Zotero, for example, has the ability to capture an item as a case, with special feeds to store date decided, and reporter volume.
Qiqqa does not have a specific case law attribute but offers a lot of other ways to get into the documents you have. I downloaded an opinion of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in PDF. It was easy to add to my local library – there is also an online sync function available, so you can have your library stored online – and Qiqqa automatically will perform optical character recognition (OCR) on the document.
It displays this information in interesting ways. First, it shows a tag cloud of terms that occur frequently in the document. For example, the case I used – Johnson v. City of Detroit – dealt with housing discrimination and was a Section §1983 case. The tag cloud displays a large 1983 among the other keywords it highlighted in the case. You can click on any term in the tag cloud and Qiqqa will highlight that keyword wherever it exists in your document. You can also search across your library for a keyword to quickly bring documents together.
Qiqqa’s metadata sniffer didn’t extract any useful metadata but, with the PDF of the case downloaded from the Sixth Circuit’s site, when I clicked on Google Scholar, it ran a search and retrieved the same case. That can help you quickly get into other citations, using Google Scholar’s How Cited feature.
Like Zotero, Qiqqa isn’t ideal for legal research management unless you are primarily dealing with traditional journals and articles. However, the features it has for handling PDFs are quite useful and I could see this being a great tool for managing a case with a lot of downloaded PDFs or for internal functions, like managing articles or knowhow that you have found that relate to your practice.
