Tracking down free case search alternatives

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When I attended law school in the early 1990s, part of the required curriculum was electronic legal research, taught by Westlaw or LexisNexis reps. I took full advantage of free Web searching.

Today’s law students still enjoy free access to “Wexis,” which is the sarcastic nickname for Westlaw and LexisNexis given to them by lawyers who are tired of paying them too much money.

Come graduation day, the free lunch ends, and unlike student loans, you can’t defer the high price of online legal research from those two. Alternatives to Westlaw and LexisNexis exist, which are free or cheaper. The freebies are the topic of this article; the next will look at the lower-priced options.

Veteran law librarian Mary J. Koshollek, the legal research guru with whom I consulted, says none of the competitors equals the legal research giants. There are reasons that Westlaw and LexisNexis have earned their stature: namely, their wide variety of primary and secondary law, plus their extremely thorough citators.

However, Koshollek, of Godfrey & Kahn S.C. in Milwaukee, says there’s a budding movement to tackle the Goliaths. To these would-be Davids, primary law should be free and easy to find.

‘Public Domain’ Promoters

Among them is a free, advertiser-supported search engine called PreCYdent, at precydent.com. When I clicked on “About,” I saw the following: “We believe judicial opinions and statutes must be in the public domain, in practice as well as in theory. To us this means that effective legal research in all of these materials should be free to the user — not expensive, not inexpensive. Free.”

Sounds great. But there are limitations, such as that PreCYdent is in the “beta” or testing stage, and there’s no guarantee of completeness. Of central importance to many Wisconsin small-firm practitioners is Wisconsin case law, which only goes back to 1996, for example.

To test the waters, I entered the search term “economic loss doctrine” and designated Wisconsin as my jurisdiction. And 71 results appeared. You can also search multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

Probably the best PreCYdent feature is its search variations, such as the results ranking.

“Authority” ranks highest the most authoritative cases, as judged by its algorithm.

“Chronological” shows the results list of cases ordered in reverse chronological order, with the most recent cases first. And, “traditional” ranks cases like the major for-fee commercial services do, according to jurisdiction, starting with the U.S. Supreme Court, federal courts of appeal, federal district courts, state supreme courts, and so on, and within each jurisdiction, chronologically.

Most everyone has heard of sites like Findlaw and the Cornell Legal Infor-mation Institute, which also have searchable case law. However, with Findlaw, a Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) property, the database of Wisconsin appellate court cases goes back to 1995, and cases are searchable only by title or party name, and case number. That’s combined with links to the Wisconsin courts Web site, where you can perform a conceptual search.

You probably already thought of that. As for Cornell, it takes you straight to the Wisconsin Courts site.

Another public-domain resource is AltLaw, which endeavors “to make the common law a bit more common.” AltLaw provides a free, full-text searchable database of U.S. Supreme Court and federal appellate cases. However, coverage for most circuits is limited to about the last 40 to 50 years, and there are no state or district court cases.

Yet another public domain option is the nonprofit Public.Resource.Org. There’s no advertising here, although if you want to donate to the public domain cause, they’ll take your money.

In February, Public.Resource.Org made some 1.8 million pages of U.S. caselaw available on the Web, including all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all federal appellate decisions since 1950. That’s a lot of cases, and unfortunately, I found wading through them very difficult. There’s no tutorial, help files or FAQs. So, if someone figures out a simple way to navigate that database, please let me know!

From the Commercial Publishers

Public.Resource.Org bought its caselaw from FastCase Inc., which, in addition to a for-fee service, also publishes the free Public Library of Law.

With its tutorials, the PLoL is much more user-friendly than Public.Resource.Org. It contains cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts of appeals, cases from all states back to 1997, statutes, court rules, etc. Like PreCYdent, it’s also in the beta stage, and is advertiser-supported.

I tried out PLoL by searching once again for “economic loss doctrine” and Wisconsin. It found 170 results. Compared to PreCYdent, there are fewer options to refine the search.

It also conveniently informed me that, if I’d only subscribed to FastCase, I’d have 145 more results. If I were a regular user, the constant reminders that I’m too cheap to use FastCase might get annoying.

Like FastCase, LexisNexis offers a free resource called lexisONE. You must register to access its 10 years of searchable Wisconsin case law and lots of other primary law. When I tried to search “economic loss doctrine” and Wisconsin over that entire timespan, because there were more than 100 results, I had to narrow my search by time. But, it did offer a helpful one-sentence overview for each result, which could potentially accelerate the winnowing process.

Undoubtedly, I’ve just scratched the surface. Not surprisingly, there are Internet sources that talk about new Internet sources for law, such as the Virtual Chase electronic research news alert service, InSITE-L, the ABA’s SITE-TATION, and LLRX.com.

Send me an e-mail if you unearth any other free gems!

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