Casetext From The Stanford Center For Legal Informatics

While at SWALL, I learned of a great new FREE legal-research tool called Casetext. Pablo Arredondo was on hand from Casetext and The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics to tell us about some of the exciting new things happening in this open-access legal research platform.

From Casetext's "About Us" section:
"Casetext is a public legal research tool and online community that’s quickly becoming the best place to discover and share legal knowledge. Search millions of cases and statutes, for free, annotated with insights contributed by the legal community. Linking commentary to a legal database gives authors a platform to demonstrate thought leadership to the roughly 250,000 people researching on Casetext each month. Together we’re changing legal research."

Like Ravel, Casetext is a next-gen legal-research platform. It allows for sophisticated searching with both natural language and boolean searching. You can sort and filter your results based on area of law, for example.

As noted, "[y]our search queries will cover more than 6 million federal and state cases, statutes, and regulations, and our library of legal documents is growing fast." The current database includes:
  • U.S. Supreme Court cases
  • federal circuit court cases from 1925 to present
  • federal district court cases, published and unpublished, from 1925 to present
  • state appellate court cases from 1925 to February 2015
  • the United States Code
  • the Code of Federal Regulations
  • State statutes will be available soon!
Another great feature is that Casetext crowdsources legal analysis and allows attorneys to upload their briefs to continue to enhance the database and the open-access movement. Not only is Casetext great for legal research, it is a great place to connect with other attorneys. 

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