Should You Use Fastcase and How?

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

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 isba.org. 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