Legal Research

Above The Law is reporting that law firm Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell has decided to cut legal research costs by requiring its staff to use Loislaw for all non-billable legal research.  Staff may no longer use Lexis or Westlaw unless the research can be billed to a client.  For those of you who are asking, "What the heck is Loislaw?," it's a more affordable online legal research service with fewer bells and whistles than Lexis and Westlaw.  It offers access to primary materials, such as cases, statutes, and regulations, and some secondary materials as well, but the amount of secondary material available on Loislaw is much more limited than what you would see within the typical law firm Lexis or Westlaw subscription.   Interestingly, the firm states that Loislaw isn't supposed to be "a substitute for Lexis or Westlaw, but as a tool to be used to familiarize yourself with precedent related to new cases or issues or simply to find cases, statutes or regulations."  In other words, attorneys are supposed to use Loislaw to get an idea of relevant primary law, then switch over to Lexis and Westlaw only when they've exhausted Loislaw's resources.

It's not a bad cost-cutting strategy, although I bet it will require a good bit of training.  The strategy is actually similar to what I recommend to students in Advanced Legal Research -- when you're new to a legal topic, use free or low-cost legal research tools to help you gain some familiarity with the new subject and identify relevant law, then switch over to Lexis or Westlaw to ensure that you have the most up-to-date version of primary materials and to ascertain whether your primary authority is still good law.  (Scarily, the commenters to this Above the Law post seem oblivious to the fact that attorneys must shepardize the law to which they cite.  For some entertaining quotes from judges who expose such shoddy research practices by attorneys, check out Mary Whisner's great article, "When Judges Scold Lawyers.")

I am wondering how Loislaw's citator service, GlobalCite, compares to KeyCite and Shepard's these days.  I see that Loislaw has developed ways to refine GlobalCite results by jurisdiction, but I'm wondering if the editorial analysis of primary citing authority has reached the level of sophistication displayed by KeyCite and Shepard's.  If any Loislaw users have an opinion on GlobalCite, I'd love to hear it!