Auto-Link Case and Statute Citations

If your firm uses Lexis, there is an easy to link to cases and statutes cited in a brief. The Shepard’s BriefLink tool is available on the Lexis Advance site. It works very well and is easy to use. You just go to the Lexis Advance Research menu, select ‘Shepard’s BriefLink’ and upload your Word document. There really isn’t much to it. It runs through the brief quickly. I did notice that it messed up a link to the New York CPLR (Civil Practice Law and Rules) in the TOA of the sample brief I used, but this can be easily corrected.

Some courts are considering making it mandatory to include hyperlinks to each cited case and statute in any filed brief. This tool also saves paralegals the trouble of having to look up citations one by one when cite checking a brief.

Bloomberg Legal Analytics

Bloomberg BNA [Bureau of National Affairs] has introduced a great new legal analytics site that can give you instant graphic profiles of the business of law firms; the legal affairs of business; and the decision history of federal judges.

Create an account for Bloomberg Law and visit the site here.

A interactive profile for a federal judge can easily be generated with:

1. Pie charts breaking down his or her history on granting or dismissing motions to dismiss or summary judgments, and being overturned on appeal in different case types that you designate.

2. Line graphs showing the average length of cases in different legal areas.

3. Bar graphs listing which kinds of cases, which law firms, and which companies come to the judge's court most often.

Company profiles can be customized to show litigation in particular date ranges, litigation areas, and jurisdictions - and further broken down to show only cases where the company was represented by one or more firms that you select.

Similarly law firm profiles can be created for specified date ranges, jurisdiction, and case types - as well as being limited to specific clients.

Using Firefox for text searches

When you're up all night checking quotes from case opinions in a brief against Westlaw or Lexis consider using Mozilla Firefox as your browser rather than Internet Explorer. You can search for as many as 29,000 characters (around 4500 words) in Firefox. IE will only do 127 characters (about 20 words). Firefox will make searching and confirming the accuracy of quotations much easier.