Category: Databases

Law students: don’t forget to plan for your legal research accounts over the summer.

Bloomberg Law. Sign up to request a student ID for Bloomberg Law. It can take a few days to process a request for a new password.

• You do not have to go through a special summer registration.
• There are no summertime restrictions on using Bloomberg Law – you can even use your account if you’re at a firm*.

Lexis: You can use your Advance account to do research over the summer.

• You do not have to go through a special summer registration for Advance.
• There are no summertime restrictions on using Advance – you can even use your account if you’re at a firm*.

Westlaw: You might be able to use your student Westlaw account to do research over the summer.

• You need to sign up for “Summer Extension” at lawschool.westlaw.com/registration/summerextension.aspx 
• There are important restrictions on law school accounts over the summer, regardless of whether you sign up for a Summer Extension. Non-academic use is prohibited. Check the summer extension link above for details.

* Always check your employer’s policy for tracking and billing research costs.

Plus more titles from the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), at ailalink.aila.org.

Kurzban is the go-to guide for practical immigration questions; our clinic students and faculty rave about it. When the print copies aren’t checked out to somebody working on a clinical or pro bono issue, they live upstairs in the Reading Room at KF 4819.85.

Please note:

• This site is restricted to UCI Law. Law students: see the VPN information in Technical Resources from UCI Law IT Services.
• Only eight people at a time can use this site. If you can’t get to it, wait for a bit and try again. And please let us know.

Update 9/20  Most Lexis links are working now! Clicking on the Lexis icon in our guide to Legal Treatises should bring you to the first page of the first chapter. To see the table of contents, check up on the right.
Using treatises in Lexis got a little more complicated this summer when Lexis moved to Advance as its default platform. The change broke all of the Lexis links in our guide to Legal Treatises. Lexis will provide new links later this year.

To get to a Lexis treatise, for now, you should log in to advance.lexis.com, then choose the treatise. To do so:

1. Click “Browse Sources” above the big red search bar.
2. Use the Sources search box in the tab on the left to search for a title.
3. Click on the title of the treatise to see your options, or click on “View table of contents.”

Law students: don’t forget to plan for your legal research accounts over the summer.

• Bloomberg Law. Sign up to request a student ID for Bloomberg Law. It can take a few days to process a request for a new password. You do not have to go through a special summer registration, and there are no summertime restrictions on using Bloomberg Law – you can even use your account if you’re at a firm.
  • Questions about Bloomberg Law? Contact Shaina Zamaitis at SZAMAITIS@BLOOMBERG.NET.
• Lexis: If you’ve registered for Lexis Advance, you can use your Advance account to do research over the summer. You do not have to go through a special summer registration for Advance, and there are no summertime restrictions on using Advance – you can even use your account if you’re at a firm.
  • Questions about Lexis Advance? Contact Michelle Yacoob at Michelle.Yacoob@lexisnexis.com.
• Westlaw: For Westlaw, there are important restrictions on law school accounts over the summer, regardless of whether you sign up for a Summer Extension. Non-academic* use is prohibited.
  • If you don’t sign up for the “Summer Extension,” you have only 40 hours per month in June and July to use your academic Westlaw account.
  • Need more than 40 hours per month? Use the Summer Extension form: lawschool.westlaw.com/registration/summerextension.aspx.
  • Questions about Westlaw? Contact Kelly Z. Stein at Kelly.Zermeno@thomsonreuters.com.

*Check Westlaw’s Summer Extension form for details about their distinction between academic and commercial use.

Imagine getting helpful infographics instead of long lists of names when you search for cases. Some research systems are starting to move in that direction by offering innovative, graphic-focused results that make it easy to see relationships among cases. You might consider trying a search in one of these systems if you’ve already done some background research in secondary sources and are having a hard time finding good cases.

Ravel (www.ravellaw.com) is a project that recently came out of Stanford Law School. At this time, there are a few options for the charts, and all of them make it immediately obvious that some cases are more “important” than others. To try Ravel, go to their website and give it a whirl.

Fastcase (www.fastcase.com) has also been offering a visual search result option for a while now. Fastcase is a research platform that’s popular with many smaller firms; over 20 state bar associations offer Fastcase subscriptions for their members. (California is not one of those states.) To try Fastcase, sign up on their website for a 24-hour trial.

*Fastcase image comes from a talk given by Fastcase CEO Ed Walters on “Who Owns the Law” at the 2013 “Reinvent the Law” conference – skip to about 11:30 to see Walters mention this “Interactive Timeline.” (You can also skip to about 1:15 to listen to the story of how Westlaw “stole” the roots of its online research system from the federal government in the 70s. And then skip to 4:04 to listen to the story of how the state of Georgia has locked away their own state statutes in a contract with LexisNexis.)

No, think again! If you asked me that last month, I would have told you that the core cases on a Shepard’s® and KeyCite report would be roughly the same, although not identical. But a new empirical study just came out showing just how wrong that conventional wisdom is. The author found that even though both systems use computer algorithms to generate the results:

…Shepard’s is finding twice as many unique relevant results as KeyCite, but it is not finding all of the relevant results… It was surprising how few cases each citation system had in common…

The takeaway: definitely use both Lexis and Westlaw when you are trying to identify all relevant cases, and if you don’t have access to both then make sure to run some redundant searches in the cases database.

Source: Susan Nevelow Mart, The Case for Curation: The Relevance of Digest and Citator Results in Westlaw and Lexis. Available on SSRN and forthcoming in Legal Reference Services Quarterly.

Prepare-to-practice training sessions for law students are at the following times:

• Wed. Mar. 20, 12-1 in Law 3750
• Thu. Mar. 21, 12-1 in Law 3750

RSVP by email to Shaina Zamaitis at SZAMAITIS@BLOOMBERG.NET.

Password information

If you don’t yet have a Bloomberg Law account, you can sign up at http://www.bloomberglaw.com/activate.

Summer use

• No restrictions. At this time, law students can use academic Bloomberg Law accounts at any summer job — paid or unpaid.
• 3Ls take note: Bloomberg Law provides access for six months after graduation.

About Bloomberg Law

Bloomberg Law is an online research platform. You can find: cases and statutes; dockets and filings; SEC filings; BNA content; search and alert tools; and news, market and company information.

This week, the Guardian UK has a brief and informative overview of Google’s search algorithm for its News product.

But how exactly does Google News work? What kind of media does its algorithm favour most? Last week, the search giant updated its patent filing with a new document detailing the 13 metrics it uses to retrieve and rank articles and sources for its news service. …

What follows is a summary of those metrics, listed in the order shown in the patent filing, along with a subjective appreciation of their reliability, vulnerability to cheating, relevancy, etc.

Neat stuff! Check it out: Frederic Filloux, Google News: the secret sauce, The Guardian,  Feb. 25, 2013.

I talked about the “secret sauce” of big-box search in the fall during research labs. It’s a tired metaphor, but I think it works well here because once you look at the ingredients of Google’s ranking system, it makes quite a bit of sense (even if you couldn’t replicate it in your own kitchen.) These types of sophisticated algorithms are fantastic tools in the right context, and the article above give you a little peek into how one of them works.

Via beSpacific.com