Legal Research using WestLaw...

Dave Karoly, post: 380079, member: 94 wrote: My local Law Library has a WestLaw subscription. They recently added a Lexis Advance subscription too.

I need to write an article about researching the Law but I have learned a few things I can relate here. One is to use Legal Encyclopedias such as CJS, American Jurisprudence, and California Jurisprudence. Legal Encyclopedias have short articles found by major topic and section. They also have cites to authority, primarily case law so they are a good way to get a little opening information on a specific legal topic and get some cases to read. In addition to this there are Treatises which are limited to a major area of law, our area of interest being Real Property (or sometimes Real Estate). Those will have more in-depth articles and more case cites.

I have also found West's key cite service to be very useful. They again have major topics...one key one being Boundaries. So if you click on Boundaries from the major topic list (they also have Easements) then there will be a list of sub topics such as Boundaries-Order of importance of conflicting elements. I limit my search to California (an all state list would probably be thousands of pages). What you get is a list of head notes from cases that the editor has determined falls under this sub topic. So you have a case cite with the relevant head note from that case. The cases for that subtopic can also be printed to a PDF so if any of the head notes intrigue you, then you can read the entire case (and the rest of its head notes). West also publishes a series of books known as Digesters which is essentially all the topic areas with headnotes; these come by State or sometimes groups of States.

I have not used Lexis very much and don't really see its advantages but it probably has some. I looked at it a little bit today. They have a topic list that you can browse. Boundaries is under Real Property->Encumbrances->Boundaries and that just yielded a list of cases. I find WestLaw's way more useful but it may just be I'm more used to it.

Lexis is used by many. I don't know if it is a regional thang.
Years ago , I attended a seminar on legal research by Wendy Lathrop who now writes for American Surveyor. It appeared that she used Lexis for her presentation material.
It was a tough presentation being that the material covered was both dry and meticulous. I thought it would have been a very good presentation if it was presented at a law library instead of a hotel space.
Good luck on your writng project. it is needed. Your case law presentations here have been instructive besides spawning good(and bad) discussions.

Dave Karoly, post: 380079, member: 94 wrote: They recently added a Lexis Advance subscription too.

Back in the day, after college but pre-surveying (86-88), I worked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Conservative_Political_Action_Committee&apos ;">here. We had one of the early Nexis subscriptions that could access a database of news stories from The NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, Time & Newsweek. You rented a dedicated LexisNexis terminal that had its own stand that held a dot matrix printer and a case of paper

Boy, is Westlaw still around? I used it in the early 80's.
They must have a fantastic business model.

I like to use http://scholar.google.com/ and if I can't find anything there I go to fastcase which used to be loislaw.