Law Technology

Citations the Easy Way

By Bryan

Bonnie Shucha of WisBlawg recently pointed her readers in the direction of a great new Firefox add-on called CiteGenie.

CiteGenie describes itself as being able to:

Automagically copy text with correct citations from Westlaw and other websites

Cite Genie further explains:

Cutting and pasting when doing legal research using your browser is simple. But having to construct the citation for what you pasted is not so simple. This is especially true with legal citations from sources like Westlaw. You have to stop and copy the case name separately, determine the pinpoint page numbers, and adjust the date and court name format.

So I decided to write a browser plugin that would automatically add a pinpoint citation to the text I copy and paste. Thus CiteGenie was born.

* * *

When CiteGenie is installed, it adds a new option to the browser’s right-click menu to “Copy with CiteGenie.”  To use CiteGenie, simply highlight the text in the court opinion, right-click and select the “Copy with CiteGenie” option (or just press Ctrl-Shift-C).  Then you can paste the text into any other program, such as your word processor, and the text will be pasted, along with the pinpoint citation for the selected text from the court opinion.

This sounds almost too good to be true. However, a review of CiteGenie on LLRX.com reveals that it may work as easily and accurately as promised.

I have not yet had the opportunity to use CiteGenie in a brief. However, I have installed it in my browser and am ready to take advantage of it.

Full post as published by The Connected Lawyer on October 24, 2008 (boomark / email).