Legal Research
Should You Use fastcase and How?
By Helen W. Gunnarsson
Whether you make it your primary online research tool
or use it to supplement Westlaw or Lexis, Fastcase can
save you money if you're an ISBA member. Lots of it.
Here's how.
What kind of bang do you expect for your bar
membership buck?
How about this: free online legal research on
supreme and appellate court case law, statutes,
regulations, constitutions, and court rules, not just for Illinois, but for
all 50 states. Add to that case law for the U.S. Supreme Court, all of
the federal circuit courts of appeal, and all Illinois federal district courts.
Let's include free webinars on how
to use the service effectively - and while
we're at it, let's provide that those webinars, which you can view in the comfort
of your office, home or wherever else you
happen to be, will also give you MCLE
credit - for free. How about free online
or telephone support in case you have
a question or a problem? Let's include
that, too.
Oh, and did we mention it's all free?
All of these great services are included in ISBA's Fastcase national appellate
plan, sold to nonmember lawyers for
$695 per year but available to all ISBA
members at no cost beyond your basic
membership dues.
"[N]o regrets"
Since ISBA brought Fastcase to members, many have become devoted followers. Among the most vocal is Huntley
solo practitioner and ISBA Assembly
member T.J. Thurston, who frequently
participates in the lively discussions on
ISBA's electronic discussion groups.
"I'm a long-time Westlaw guy," Thurston acknowledges up front. "For most
of my years of private practice, and up
until recently, I've had a Westlaw contract. But when I learned of the availability of Fastcase through ISBA, I figured I
might as well get used to it. So, I went
to the Fastcase training at the Solo/Small
Firm Conference last September. Ever
since then, I've used Fastcase almost exclusively."
When Thurston's three-year contract
with Westlaw recently expired, he didn't
renew it - and says he's never looked
back. "I have no regrets."
Thurston notes that his is a general
practice, including considerable civil
litigation and requiring him to research
both case and statutory law in a variety
of areas. "Fastcase has all of the features
that I would use on Westlaw. Its search
engine is pretty intuitive, and is really
good on key words. I also use natural
language searches and find that it's good
for that as well."
He's also fond of Fastcase's interactive
timeline. "Its graphic depiction of the
cases that are most on point on the issue
you're looking at is a really useful tool.
Sometimes you have to weed through
dozens of cases on Westlaw to find the
seminal case. The interactive timeline is
a tool that makes that a lot faster and
quicker."
Thurston also likes Fast-case's print queue capability. "You're not locked into
printing cases out one at a
time. On Fastcase, you can
put 30 cases into your print
queue and then do them all
at once. There's no waiting.
It's a huge timesaver."
Thurston does miss one or two Westlaw features.Chief among those are West's headnotes. "I don't typically rely on headnotes, but they are sometimes an easy way to
get to the part of the decision that you
want to focus on."
But, he notes, it's possible to get
around the lack of headnotes by using
Fastcase's capability to go directly to the
search term in a decision. Furthermore,
he points out, "Occasionally the head-notes are wrong. You still have to read
the decision for yourself."
Thurston also sometimes misses West's
annotations to statutes. But, as with the
lack of headnotes, there's a way to get
around that issue as well: "You can write
down the statutory citation and then do
a search [in the case database] for that."
None of those features, he says,
would make him change his mind about
saving the $200 or so per month that he
was paying for his Westlaw package. "I
now get access through Fastcase to all 50
states, which is fantastic. In my practice,
one of my clients may have a contract
that says another state's law applies. I
can now use Fastcase to research that for
free."
He adds, "I like the access to federal
court cases as well. I had to pay a lot
more to Westlaw for federal cases. Since
I had a three-year contract, I would have
to pay for three years' access to Delaware
law or what have you if that was what I
wanted to review for one client."
And if he does feel the need to use
West's or other services, such as Shepard's, he'll pay for it on a transactional
basis. "At a few dollars a pop, that's far
less expensive than paying for a subscription."
A cost-saving supplement,
if not replacement
Many, though not all, ISBA members
share Thurston's views. Nerino Petro, a
longtime ISBA member who is law practice management advisor for the State Bar of Wisconsin, zeroes in on Fastcase's
interactive timeline (see the "Using Fast-case" sidebar).
"To be able to look at the case law
in this way when you're trying to decide
what has a bearing on your research is
really helpful," he said. "If a case is being cited a lot, it will be represented by a
much bigger circle. It may or may not be
on point, but chances are that it's a seminal decision that you need to review."
And, though Petro notes that many
members may find that Fastcase alone
meets their needs for online research,
"If you need access to special databases,
treatises, forms [that aren't available on
Fastcase], Fastcase may allow you to reduce the scope of your Westlaw or Lexis
subscription. You could get a paid subscription from another service to Illinois
only and then use Fastcase as a supplement for out of state or federal materials."
That's exactly what Champaign lawyer John Phipps, whose firm pays for two
other commercial research packages,
does. Phipps lauds Fastcase's access to
cases and statutes from all 50 states, say
ing he's found it invaluable for some of
his probate and divorce matters as well
as for issues involving business regulation, long-arm statutes, and the Uniform
Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act.
"Most lawyers need online research
for other states at least a couple of times
solos and small firms who don't want
to spend the money for online research,
or for whom it doesn't make economic
sense to upgrade from an Illinois-only
service."
Like Phipps, Chicago lawyer Mike Maslanka's firm pays for an online re
search service. He, too, finds Fastcase a
valuable supplement. Maslanka notes
that he's had the disquieting experience
of searching for a case that he knows exists but doesn't appear in his search results, whether he's searching using Fast-case, Westlaw, or Lexis.
In his view, "You can't rely on any one service and be a hundred percent
sure that you're getting all the cases with
the terms you're searching for. But if you
use two or more services, your chances
are greatly improved. So, Fastcase is a
nice benefit even for those who can afford one or even two online subscription
services."
Some ISBA members point out, however, that Fastcase's database of Illinois
case law extends back only
to 1950. Phipps doesn't
view that as a significant
problem.
"Most of what we lawyers do involves more recently decided cases," says
Phipps. Agreeing, Petro
says the ISBA special committee that selected Fast-case held the same opinion
(see the "How ISBA chose
Fastcase" sidebar). Petro
remarks that in 16 years of
practice, he relied only once
on a case decided before
1950.
As Urbana lawyer Thomas Bruno recognizes, "The reality is that lawyers with
different practices have widely varying
needs for practice tools." Bruno, who,
like Petro and Phipps, served on the
ISBA special committee that chose Fast-case, responds to member criticisms that
Fastcase lacks the bells and whistles of
the more expensive services.
"Fastcase is more than adequate for
many practitioners, and the cost savings
more than outweighs even the top tier of
ISBA dues. It may not meet the needs of
those who have the need or habit for the
cream of the crop in research tools, but
let's not let the perfect be the enemy of
the good."
Bruno points out that even those who
never use Fastcase nevertheless benefit from its availability through ISBA.
"Think of Fastcase as a tool that brings
or keeps in hundreds, if not thousands,
more members to ISBA and thereby adds
value to your ISBA membership by making it more diverse, more robust, and,
thus, a more powerful organization."
Others point out that the presence in
the market of Fastcase and other competitors helps keep down the cost of the
gold-standard research services.
"I see things from your
perspective"
For his part, Fastcase CEO Ed Walters says, "We view ourselves as a partnership with ISBA." Walters urges users
not to suffer in silence if they happen to
come across a case that, for example, appears only in slip opinion form.
"Contact our customer service team
by telephone, 866-77-FASTCASE, from
7 AM to 7 PM central time Monday
through Friday. After business hours, you
can send an e-mail to support@fastcase.com. We will get you the official citation,
probably while you're still on the phone,
and we'll make sure the slip opinion is replaced by the official version by the first
thing next morning." Walters also notes
that his staff includes some night owls,
who may even reply to e-mails that evening or overnight.
Commenting on his company's
philoso phy, Walters adds, "We're not a
global publishing conglomerate - we're
lawyers who wanted a better alternative
to the other commercial research services, so we work in partnership with our
members. I see things from your perspective because not long ago I was a practicing lawyer myself. If you have an idea
for us to make things better, tell us about
it." ■
Helen W. Gunnarsson, a lawyer in Highland Park, is an Illinois Bar Journal contributing writer.
| How ISBA chose Fastcase |
As the Internet has become ubiquitous in homes and
law offices alike, wouldn't it be nice, ISBA lawyers started
thinking some years ago, if members could get free online
legal research as a benefit of ISBA membership? As early as
2002, the ISBA Committee on Bar Services and Activities
reviewed online research services with a view toward
making a recommendation for a legal research provider as a
member benefit, says Chicago lawyer Mike Maslanka, at the
time a committee member. But at that time, Maslanka says,
the committee regretfully concluded that the service was
prohibitively expensive.
With the passage of time, however, as with other
developments in technology, competition among service
providers increased, service capabilities expanded, and prices
came down. Though lawyers still acknowledge Westlaw and
Lexis as the gold standards for legal research, due in large part
to their proprietary features such as Shepards and KeyCite,
other legal research companies are looking for a piece of those
behemoths' market share. Among them are Loislaw, Versuslaw,
Casemaker, and Fastcase.
Fastcase cofounder and CEO Ed Walters said his company was born in his suburban Washington, D.C. living room on November 10, 1999. Walters and fellow D.C.
attorney Phil Rosenthal, now president of Fastcase, said they
realized that clients of their BigLaw firm, Covington and
Burling had grown tired of the pass-through cost structure
of traditional legal research. They decided to quit their jobs
and see whether they could make a living offering lawyers an
affordable alternative or supplement to other commercial legal
research services.
Walters and Rosenthal made their dream come true.
Fastcase now serves almost 340,000 lawyers and has
partnerships with bar associations in Arizona, Florida, Illinois,
Iowa, Maryland, Missouri, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Minnesota,
among other states.
In late 2004, ISBA president Ole Bly Pace appointed a
Special Committee on Electronic Research and charged
it with the mission of reviewing the services and costs
from an array of online legal research providers and
making a recommendation to ISBA's Assembly. A year
later, the committee had completed its work and had a
recommendation for ISBA.
Committee chair John Phipps of Champaign said the
lawyers on the committee came from diverse practices,
including larger firms as well as small firms, solo practitioners,
and government lawyers from across the state. "We had a
broad perspective from legal consumers, including several
lawyers who were just starting out in practice."
And, Phipps notes, the committee included some particularly technologically savvy lawyers, such as Winnebago
sole practitioner Nerino Petro, who now serves as advisor to
the State Bar of Wisconsin Law Office Management Assistance
Program (Practice411TM) and whom Phipps describes as a
"certified technology guru."
Says Phipps, "We wanted a useful member benefit that
would allow ISBA members to have access to free legal
research that was workable and usable." The committee
solicited and received proposals from five research firms,
he says. Committee members spent the time it took to
educate themselves and extensively questioned the company
representatives about their firms' products.
"You cannot believe the grilling we gave these people.
Everyone on the committee went out and played with these
things." Some of the company reps, members felt, were less
than responsive to their questions, and some companies had
unsatisfactory search engines or provided more limited services
than committee members felt bar members should receive.
Fastcase, Phipps says, emerged as the clear winner on all
points. "Fastcase was very user-friendly, had a good search
engine, and its company representatives were very responsive
to our questions and concerns."
Furthermore, Phipps notes, Fastcase was willing to enter
into a shorter-term contract than the other finalist. "The
committee felt that technology was changing so fast that a
shorter term was appropriate. And then, as it turned out,
Fastcase was making significant advances in its services and
ultimately was able to provide ISBA with some extra features
for very little additional cost."
By the time Phipps's committee was ready with its recommendation, Irene Bahr had become president of ISBA. Says Phipps, "Irene saw the value of a nationwide
service for members, especially for those practicing in areas
bordering on other states, and worked very closely with our
committee. She championed Fastcase when we presented our
recommendation to the Board of Governors and also brought
the idea to ISBA Mutual, which partnered with ISBA in funding
Fastcase for members."
In addition to Phipps and Petro, the selection committee
included Adrienne Albrecht, Maria Berger, Tom Bruno, Susan
Dawson-Tibbetts, Kelly Gordon, Ross Levey, Jennifer Shaw, and
Richard Wilson.
- Helen W. Gunnarsson |
| How to use Fastcase |
Haven't used Fastcase, you say? What are you waiting for?
If you're an ISBA member, you can explore and experiment
as much as you like for as long as you like at no cost.
Boolean, natural language, and citation lookup
To get started, go to ISBA's home page at http://www.isba.org/index.html. Near the upper right-hand corner of
the page you'll see the legend "Free Legal Research" next to a button saying "Fastcase." Click on the button and you'll
find yourself at a login screen. (You'll also find an excellent
user guide, a set of FAQs, and links to online training demos
and free monthly Webinars.) Use your last name and ISBA
member number to log in, and you'll be ready to begin
searching.
Fastcase enables users to search using three different
methods: a keyword (or "Boolean") search using industry
standard search terms and connectors such as "and", "or,"
and quotation marks " "; natural language search; and citation
lookup. You can pick which database you wish to search -
case law, statutes, regulations, constitutions, court rules, and
federal filings, all for one or more state or federal courts.
If you'd like to search filings in the nation's federal
courts, Fastcase gives you the option of narrowing your
search by district, by judge, by case type, and by date; you
can also limit your search to cases having downloadable
opinions or orders. (Though this search will give you case
names, numbers, types, filing dates, and the judges to which
the cases have been assigned, you'll have to use a PACER
account to view or download the filings themselves.)
The site also contains links to Fastcase partners such as
ChoicePoint and NewsLibrary.com for searches of public
documents, newspapers, and legal forms. You'll have to pay
additional fees for the use of these services.
Don't remember how to do a search with terms and
connectors? The right-hand side of the initial search page, as well as the "Help" link at the top of every page on the
Fastcase website, provides options. Users with questions
may check the list of frequently asked questions (FAQ),
view any or all of a series of brief online tutorials, read the
user guide, participate in live chat with a Fastcase customer
service representative, e-mail a question to the company, or
telephone Fastcase's toll-free number.
You can also click on the "Resources" header and find
links to a Fastcase blog with posts relating to law practice
and technology, a Fastcase forum for asking questions and
viewing answers on how to get the most out of Fastcase,
and articles on searching, printing, saving, and using other
Fastcase features. That page also contains a link enabling you
to add a button to your computer's toolbar to make it even
easier to access Fastcase.
There's even a free Fastcase podcast to which you can
subscribe by visiting http://fastcase.blogspot.com/2009/02/subscribe-to-fastcase-podcasts-on.html. And you can receive
free e-mails that will let you know when new news has been
added to Fastcase's blog.
Put in your search terms for cases and hit the "Search"
button and instantly you'll get a screen showing the first
twenty results, including case names, citations, and the first
few sentences of either the most relevant paragraph or the
first paragraph, whichever suits your pleasure. You can sort
the results by relevance, by decision date, by court hierarchy,
by name, or by the number of times cases are cited in
Fastcase's entire database. Click on a case to read the entire
text or send it to the print queue; you can also add the case to "My Favorites," save it to your hard drive, into the
word processing program of your choice, or perform other
functions.
Shepards and KeyCite ala carte
Lawyers who are understandably attached to services
such as Shepards and KeyCite may feel some disappointment
that those proprietary services are not included in Fastcase.
Fastcase does provide Authority Check, an automated
tool that searches for other cases that cite the case you're
looking at and displays the results as a list of hyperlinked
names.
You can then go to those cases and figure out for
yourself to what extent the case remains precedential. Use
Authority Check on your page of results and you can sort
them in order of authority, so that the most frequently cited
cases are at the top of your list.
But there's no question that Shepards and KeyCite are
the most powerful tools for determining the subsequent
treatment of a case. "We do not hold Authority Check out
as a complete replacement for services such as Shepards or
KeyCite - both of which we like very much," the company
says.
Fastcase therefore provides links to each of those
services so that you can pay for using them on a
transactional basis - generally around $5 apiece - which,
ISBA Fastcase aficionados point out, is likely to be far less
than the monthly subscription fee.
New on Fastcase is the Interactive Timeline feature,
which you can access on your results page by clicking on the
tab helpfully labeled as such. Once you do, you'll see a graph
with circles of various sizes placed between a vertical axis
with relevance values ranging from zero to 100 percent and
a horizontal axis showing dates. You can change the vertical
axis from relevance to show the court level if you'd prefer.
Each circle represents one case from your search results;
you can also tell the timeline how many cases from your
search to display at a time. Hover your mouse over the
circle without clicking to see which case, some relevant
language from its text, and the number of times it's cited in
the Fastcase database.
The circle's size corresponds to that number. And if a
case has a yellow dot inside its circle, it's been cited by other
cases within the search you've just done. The larger the
yellow dot, the more times other cases within your search
result set have cited it. See the main article for lawyers'
comments about the value of the Interactive Timeline.
- Helen W. Gunnarsson |
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