Find it for Free (or Cheap) on the Internet
By Tom Mighell

Recently, my firm dealt with an ever-increasing issue: clients who will not pay for traditional online electronic research services. More and more, the litigation policies of corporate and insurance clients completely prohibit the use of electronic research or allow it only with prior approval. Other clients cannot afford to pay for the relatively expensive services.

Fortunately, there are a number of sites on the Internet where comparable materials can be found for free, or at least at a greatly reduced price. I asked the attorneys at my firm to tell me how they use the online research services. Here are the top 13 uses, and Internet sites that provide some of the same information for free. Before you try one of the paid online services, give these sites a try.

Researching Case Law

Alas, you won’t find a perfect substitute for researching case law on the Internet; no service matches traditional online services for the scope or timeliness of case law materials. However, there are a few good places to start your research – and for free. The Oklahoma Supreme Court Network, offers all reported decisions of Oklahoma appellate courts in a searchable format. It’s a great place to start your research and then move on to a regular pay service if necessary.

Other free case law can be found at LexisOne a great but not well-known service provided by Lexis. There you can find state case law for the past five years, federal appellate law for the past five years, and all U.S. Supreme Court opinions. Again, it’s not a substitute for the major services, but a great free place to start.

KEYCITE/SHEPARDS

This is one feature a lawyer cannot do without; and one where Westlaw and Lexis are the only games in town. There are no equivalent services, free or otherwise, anywhere else. Luckily though, you can Shepardize your cases more cheaply than by spending an hour or two in a library, or spending money on Westlaw or Lexis; just try LexisOne’s Shepard’s Citations Online, which you can “rent” for $32/day, $52/week, or $107/month. You can’t beat a deal like that anywhere.

Statutes

Finding statutes on the Internet for any state is a bit easier than Shepardizing or finding case law. Most (if not all) state legislature Web sites provide access to the most recent statutes; it’s finding and getting to those sites efficiently that can be a problem. Fortunately, there’s a page of full-text state statutes at http://www.prairienet.org/~scruffy/f.htm that contains links to the statutes, constitution and often the administrative code of each state. This is a great site to keep handy in your Favorites folder. Oklahoma statutes and other legislative information are provided as part of the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network.

If you’re researching federal statutes, Thomas, at http://thomas.loc.gov, is the place to go for legislation and other statutory research. For laws that have been enacted into law, Cornell’s Legal Information Institute has a fully searchable version of the U.S. Code at www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/. Federal regulations can be tricky – they are updated more regularly than the statutes, and the traditional online services usually can be counted on have the most recent regulations. So can eCFR, the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, www.gpoaccess.gov/ecfr/. When this article was written, the most recent update of the eCFRs had taken place only four days earlier.

Appellate Briefs

A number of the attorneys in our firm use pay services to find appellate briefs on particular subjects. A number of Internet sites provide similar services, for free or cheap. If you can afford to pay for your briefs, check out BriefReporter, www.briefreporter.com, or BriefServe, www.briefserve.com. BriefReporter offers thousands of briefs from all over the country; the site charges a monthly $35 fee and $10 per brief. BriefServe provides access to briefs from the U.S. Supreme Court and selected state and federal appellate courts; the cost there is $25 per brief.

There are a number of other sites on the Internet offering free (and not-so-free) access to appellate briefs, and many of them are included on Bob Ambrogi’s Finding Briefs on the Web, www.legaline.com/freebriefslinks.html, which contains links to 58 Web sites with briefing materials.

Law Review Articles

Law review articles are another area where traditional pay services excel over the Internet. Although most law reviews have an online presence, you’re not likely to find original content; the law schools prefer to charge a subscription fee for the print version. The Law Review Project, www.lawreview.org, offers a free abstract e-mail service, as well as listings of law reviews broken down into subject areas (at www.findlaw.com). Other directories of law reviews can be found at American Law Sources Online, www.lawsource.com and the USC Law Reviews Page, http://lawweb.usc.edu/library/resources/journals.html.

ALR

The rights to the American Law Reports are owned by West, so as you can imagine they are not available for free on the Internet. However, West has the right idea in giving away a little something for free with its ALR Free Resources page. There you’ll find access to E-Annotations (annotations that may be published in subsequent bound volumes of ALR,) Critical Issues Guides and the ALR Alert Center, which highlights annotations in upcoming volumes of the ALR.

Locate People/Criminal-Civil Background Checks

There are lots of free people finders on the Internet — Yahoo! People Search, AnyWho, www.anywho.com; and InfoSpace, www.infospace.com, are just a few of them. The most you’ll get out of such sites, however, is a name, address and phone number. To dig down to the good stuff, you’ll need a site like Accurint, www.accurint.com, where you can find not only people, but businesses, assets, licenses, court information and more. A comprehensive people search at Accurint costs only $4.50 – and the information you get is pretty impressive, right down to the person’s neighbors for the past ten years.

An even cheaper Web site with good information is PublicData, www.publicdata.com, where you can purchase 1,500 “lookups” for only $250. Here you’ll find basic criminal background and drivers’ license information as well as voter and DMV registration, professional licenses and FAA information.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many good places online to determine an individual or company’s civil litigation history, especially if you are in state court. Fortunately, the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network has this covered, with information from 12 Oklahoma counties and every appellate court. Accurint offers civil court information for limited jurisdictions, as does PublicData. Additionally, more and more district and county court Web sites are going online with case information; while it can be time-consuming to research on a county-by-county basis, at least it’s a place to start.

If you’re looking for federal court case information, you may have more luck. Thanks to PACER, http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/, and the federal government’s e-filing initiative, more and more court records are being made available online; once you register for PACER, it’s only seven cents a page to download original documents from federal case files.

Public Records

Increasingly, public records are being made available for free on the Internet. The trick is in knowing where to find them. And Search Systems, is all you need to know about finding public records. This site offers access to over 21,442 free searchable public record databases, and links to many more sites that charge a fee for pubic records. The site is broken down by category or by jurisdiction.

Opposing Counsel’s Other Cases

There are a number of free or cheap sites where you can learn about other cases in which your opposing counsel is involved. A search on PACER can reveal this information for federal cases. If you’re a member of Lexis-Nexis File and Serve, (registration is free, assuming e-filing is available in your jurisdiction,) you can search for other cases in which other lawyers are signed up for e-filing. And a new promising service from FindLaw, the Thomson Legal Record, allows you to research a lawyer you know, or locate a lawyer with experience you need. The site combines a lawyer’s real-world litigation history (drawn from Westlaw) with basic profile information from the West Legal Directory, as well as that attorney’s published articles on FindLaw.

Jury Verdicts

Comprehensive jury verdict information is tough to find anywhere, even on the major online pay services. The reason for this is that each state has one (or more) jury verdict publisher, and they don’t share with each other, for commercial reasons. One free site that offers nationwide verdict information is MoreLaw, maintained by Oklahoma attorney Kent Morlan; his site allows you to search by state, keyword or a number of pre-determined fields. If you would rather go directly to an official jury verdict publisher, the National Association of Jury Verdict Publishers, provides an easy-to-use map with links (or contact information) for most of the major publishers in the country. Many of the publishers offer online access to their databases for a fee.

News Articles

I was surprised to learn that attorneys in my firm use pay online services to read the news. While such providers indeed have good clipping services, I would certainly look elsewhere to read my news. Currently I divide my loyalties between two news sites. Google News, has long been the champion when it comes to searching for the news; it crawls over 4,500 news sites, and the search results are just as good as those found at Google’s search engine. But a new site, www.topix.net, is quickly winning attention all across the Internet. Topix features news from over 7,000 sites, and for those of you who are savvy about RSS feeds, Topix allows you to create an automatic search feed for any topic or keyword you can imagine.

If you’re looking for a particular newspaper, just head over to News Voyager, where you can find links to just about every newspaper in the world with an online edition. A site like this can be especially helpful if you are looking for news that has been archived, where it is “invisible,” and therefore inaccessible, to any search engine.

Remember when I mentioned that the online pay services have great clipping features? Well, Google News Alerts, also offers a pretty nifty clipping service, and for free. Just plug in your keywords, specify how often you want to receive the alerts, and you’re set. You can create unlimited news searches, and it’s all for free.

Forms

Finding quality forms online is not always an easy task, especially if you’re looking for free documents. FindLaw Court Forms, has a nice array of forms in various categories, including state and federal court forms, issue-specific forms, business contracts and lots of links to other forms sites (some free, some not). One such free site is FindForms, which offers thousands of free forms and quite a few more “premium” forms. Another good source of form sites can be found at LLRX Court Rules, Forms and Dockets. In addition to loads of links to court forms, you’ll find over 1,400 sources here for court rules and dockets.

CONCLUSION

This article is not intended to advocate the abandonment of the more traditional online pay services; on the contrary, such providers are a valuable tool in a lawyer’s research arsenal. However, the sites mentioned above should prove a good free (or cheap) substitute for paid services, or at the very least a good starting point. And if you can lighten your client’s bill at the same time, it’s a win-win situation.

About the Author

Tom Mighell is senior counsel and litigation technology support coordinator at Cowles & Thompson in Dallas. He is a frequent speaker on the Internet and technology and is the author of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, which can be found at his legal research weblog, Inter Alia. He is also a member of the 2005 ABA TECHSHOW Planning Board.

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal November 6 , 2004 - Vol. 75; No.31