Legal News

Introducing: Fastcase Forecite

By rdasgupta

We have had a big couple of weeks here at Fastcase. As you may have heard, our iPhone app was recognized as the New Product of the Year for 2010 by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL). We are also planning to release a brand new mobile app for the iPad.

If that weren?t already enough, we have a new addition to our suite of smarter legal research tools: Fastcase Forecite®.

What Does Forecite Do?

Forecite, a new addition to our suite of smarter legal research tools, is the perfect backstop to your case law research. When you perform a keyword search on Fastcase, Forecite goes the extra mile and identifies seminal cases that can easily be missed by ordinary keyword searches.

Consider this example.

Let?s say you were researching the Miranda Doctrine under the Fifth Amendment. Can you imagine concluding your research without reading the Supreme Court?s seminal decision, Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966)? We can?t either. The trouble is, if you search for ?Miranda doctrine? using most legal research engines, the Miranda decision will not be in your search results, because those words do not appear anywhere in the decision.

This is where Forecite comes in. Run the same search on Fastcase, and Forecite has you covered.

- At the top of your search results screen, you will see a salmon-colored banner indicating that Forecite has identified additional decisions that may be relevant to your research topic, but do not contain your search terms.

- Click the orange View Results button and the first suggested case is Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966).  It is that simple.

How Does Forecite Work?

Like Authority Check, Forecite carefully and comprehensively analyzes the citation structure of your search results. Forecite looks for cases that are frequently cited by other cases in your search results that do not contain all of your search terms.

Seeing Is Believing.

But don’t take our word for it, see for yourself.  Sign up for a free, no-strings 24-hr trial of Fastcase to test drive Forecite and the rest of our smarter research tools by visiting www.fastcase.com/subscription.  (Current subscribers to our web-based legal research service already have access to Forecite.  This feature is not currently available on our mobile apps.)

Questions? 1-866-773-2782 or support@fastcase.com.

Full post as published by Fastcase Legal News on July 13, 2010 (boomark / email).