Computer-assisted Legal Research (CALR) – Technology that allows lawyers and judges to

bypass the traditional law library and locate statutes, court cases, and other legal references in
minutes using a personal computer, research software or the INTERNET, and an online
connection.

The two largest computer-assisted legal research (CALR) services are WESTLAW, offered by
Thomson Corporation's Eagan, Minnesota-based West unit, and LEXIS, offered by Reed Elsevier's
Dayton, Ohio-based LexisNexis unit. Both services provide on-line access to the fundamental
tools of the legal profession—court opinions, federal and state statutes, federal regulations,
administrative law cases, and other law-related materials. Their extensive databases are updated
frequently, providing attorneys with the most up-to-the-minute developments in U.S. law.

CALR systems contain thousands of databases. In addition to primary source materials, they
offer access to business and economic journals, national newspapers, law reviews, federal tax
abstracts, and financial data and materials. Specialized databases for narrower topics such as
taxes, SECURITIES, labor, insurance, and BANKRUPTCY are also available.

When CALR was first developed in the 1970s, it borrowed Boolean search techniques from the
field of computer programming. A Boolean search looks for a particular term or group of terms in
a specific relationship to one another. CALR Boolean searches can include limits with respect to
time: for example, court opinions are always dated, so an attorney can use a Boolean search to
look for cases released in a given year or in a range of years.

CALR service providers have also created plain language search systems. Under the plain
language approach, an attorney simply types in a search in the form of a question.

The following two samples demonstrate the difference between a Boolean search and a plain
language search for the same issue: whether a successor corporation is liable for the cleanup of
toxic waste left by a prior owner of the property. The two examples reflect WESTLAW notation;
the notation for LEXIS would be similar.

The sample Boolean search looks for the combination of successor within five words of
corporation, in the same paragraph as the combination of toxic or hazardous or chemical or
dangerous within five words of waste, within the same paragraph as clean or cleanup or cleans
or cleaned or cleaning (the exclamation mark in clean! causes the computer to search for all
words with clean as a root). Cases are limited to those dated after January 1, 1990.

Boolean search results usually are listed in reverse chronological order (the most recent case
first). A plain language search ranks the first 20 documents that best match the search. The first
ranked document is the one that most closely matches the terms in the search. A document will
be ranked higher if the terms appear more often in that document.

Advances in computer technology have produced another innovation in automated research:

voice recognition research. With this method, a search query is dictated either in plain language
or by using Boolean terms and connectors. After the simple commands are spoken, the
researcher's exact words appear on the computer screen and the requested documents are
retrieved. The keyboard is not used at all during the search.

Legal researchers have the option of using CD-ROM (compact disc read-only memory) libraries,
although these have become less popular in the early 2000s. A personal computer, CD-ROM
drive, and specific software are required. Some CD-ROMs allow for access to a CALR online
service (these require a modem).

Lawyers are also using the Internet, the public access electronic network. Because many
statutes, court opinions, and LIBRARY OF CONGRESS materials are online, the Internet is
becoming a valuable resource for business and legal research. It is also used for document
transfers and client E-mail.

Lexis – An online legal information service that provides the full text of opinions and statutes in
electronic format. Subscribers use their personal computers to search the Lexis database for
relevant cases. They may download or print the legal information they retrieve.

The Lexis service began in 1973. In 1979, the Lexis service was joined by the companion Nexis®
news and information service. Lexis contains more than five thousand legal sources, and Nexis
contains more than ten thousand news and information sources. The services add approximately
17.3 million documents each week to their more than three billion documents online.

The Lexis service contains major archives of federal and state case law, statutes of all 50 states,
state and federal regulations, and public records from major U.S. states. The Lexis service has
41 specialized libraries covering all major fields of practice, including tax, Securities, banking,
environmental, energy, and International Law. Group files combine legal information from all
jurisdictions and, where appropriate, add sources of relevant business, financial, or general
news.

Lexis also has a public records service that provides online access to information from selected
states about real and Personal Property assets, Uniform Commercial Code liens, Secretary of
State corporation filings, a verdicts and settlements library, and court indices and dockets.

The company is a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc., part of Reed Elsevier P.L.C., a group of
international publishing and information businesses with headquarters in London. Lexis-Nexis is
based in Dayton, Ohio. During the 1990s and into the 2000s, Reed Elsevier purchased a number
of other publishing companies; many of the materials published by these companies are
available on the Lexis system. Among the most notable companies are Matthew Bender & Co.,
which publishes several popular legal practice materials, and Shepard's, which publishes
Shepard's Citations.

WestLaw - Westlaw is an online legal research service and proprietary database for lawyers and
legal professionals available in over 60 countries. Information resources on Westlaw include
more than 40,000 databases of case law, state and federal statutes, administrative codes,
newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms
and other information resources.

Most legal documents on Westlaw are indexed to the West Key Number System, which is West's
master classification system of U.S. law. Westlaw supports natural language and Boolean
searches. Other significant Westlaw features include KeyCite, a citation checking service, which
customers use to determine whether cases or statutes are still good law, and a customizable
tabbed interface that lets customers bring their most-used resources to the top. Other tabs
organize Westlaw content around the specific work needs of litigators, in-house corporate
practitioners, and lawyers who specialize in any of over 150 legal topics. Most customers are
attorneys or law students, but other individuals can also obtain accounts.
Westlaw was originated by West Publishing, a company whose headquarters have been in Eagan,
Minnesota, since 1992; West was acquired by the Thomson Corporation in 1996. Several of
Thomson's law-related businesses outside the United States have their own Westlaw sites, and
Westlaw's international content is available online. For instance, Westlaw Canada from Carswell
includes the Canadian Abridgment and KeyCite Canada, and Westlaw UK provides information
from Sweet & Maxwell and independent law reports, case analysis and case status icons. More
recently, Westlaw China was introduced, with laws and regulations, cases, digests, and status
icons (similar to KeyCite flags), for the law of the People's Republic of China. Westlaw Ireland
(IE) was established in 2002, covering information found in Round Hall publications as well as
legislation, books, cases, current awareness and full-text articles from many of the country's
notable legal journals. In total, Westlaw is used in over 68 countries.
Westlaw is descended from QUIC/LAW, a Canadian computer-assisted legal research project
operated by Queen's University from 1968 to 1973. The original name stood for "Queen's
University Investigation of Computers and Law." It was directed by Hugh Lawford and Richard
von Briesen, and the original code was based on an internal IBM text search project called
INFORM/360. The IBM code turned out to be incomplete and required substantial modifications.
In 1973, the project was commercialized in the form of a new company called QL Systems and a
new product name, QL/SEARCH. In 1976, QL Systems licensed the QL/SEARCH software to West
Publishing as the original foundation for what would become Westlaw.

West's chief competitor in the legal information retrieval market is LexisNexis. (Ironically,
Lawford and von Briesen sold what by then was called QuickLaw to LexisNexis in 2002.) Both
Westlaw and LexisNexis started in the 1970s as dial-up services with dedicated terminals. The
earliest versions used acoustic couplers or key phones; then smaller terminals with internal
modems. Westlaw's terminal was known as WALT, for West Automatic Law Terminal.

Around 1989, both started offering programs for personal computers that emulated the
terminals, and when Internet access became available, an Internet address (such as
westlaw.com) became an alternative that could be selected within the "Communications Setup"
option in the client program, instead of a dial-up number. West's program was known as
Westmate. It was based on Borland C++ around 1997, and then changed to a program compiled
on a Microsoft platform that incorporated portions of Internet Explorer. This was the first
program to incorporate HTML; prior to that, Westmate had "jumps" indicated by triangles instead
of "links." Shortly after that, both publishers started developing web browser interfaces, with
Westlaw's being notable for the use of "web dialogs," emulating the piling of open books on a
table. Westmate was discontinued on June 30, 2007.

West introduced WestlawNext on February 8, 2010. The main advances are that a user can start
a search without first selecting a database, which is helpful because WestLaw has over 40,000
databases, and the search screen allows one to click checkboxes to select the jurisdiction and
nature of material wanted. A new search algorithm, referred to as WestSearch, claimed to be the
world's most advanced legal research engine, executes a federated search across multiple
content types. Users can either enter descriptive terms or Boolean connectors and select a
jurisdiction. Documents are ranked by relevance. WestlawNext also supports retrieving
documents by citation, party name or KeyCite reference. An overview page enables users to see
the top results per content type, or to view all results for a particular content type. Filters can
also be applied to refine the result list even further. On the results page, users can also see links
to related secondary sources relevant to their research. WestlawNext also provides folders for
storing portions of the research selected by the user.

The classic Westlaw.com platform was retired in August 2015. WestlawNext was renamed
"Thomson Reuters Westlaw", effective in February 2016.

Legislative history research – refers to efforts to track the progress of a bill through the
legislative process and to the examination of documents created through that process. The
purpose of conducting such research is to ascertain the legislative intent, that is the purpose for
the legislation as intended by Congress. In the words of Morris Cohen, Legal Research in a
Nutshell, 6th ed. (1996), at 160:

"The ambiguities so common in the language of statutes require lawyers and scholars to locate
legislative documents from which they can learn the intended purpose of an act or the meaning
of particular statutory language."

The processes that comprise legislative history are, therefore, of two distinct types: determining
the meaning or intent of an enacted law, and ascertaining the status of a pending bill. The
specific components of a legislative history consist of the bill and its successive amendments,
remarks by the bill's sponsors, floor discussion and debate, committee hearings, committee
reports and committee prints.

These documents can be researched at the Interior Library and will involve the use of a
combination of print, microform, Internet resources, and other electronic databases. These
sources are discussed and compared below.

1. What is legal research?

1. Legal research is the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to

support legal decision-making. In its broadest sense, legal research includes each step of
a course of action that begins with an analysis of the facts of a problem and concludes
with the application and communication of the results of the investigation.

The purpose of legal research is to find "authority" that will aid in finding a solution to a
legal problem.

2. What is legal authority?

It is any published source of law that presents the legal rules, legal doctrine, or legal
reasoning that may be used as the basis for legal decisions. Authority also includes the
weight or degree of persuasiveness of the legal information.

3. What are the types of legal authority?

There are two categories of legal authority: primary or secondary. The term "source" is
also used when talking about authority. This guide will use the term source when
discussing actual legal research resources.

Primary authorities are the rules of law that are binding upon the courts, government,
and individuals. Examples are statutes, regulations, court orders, and court decisions.
They are generated by legislatures, courts, and administrative agencies.

Primary authorities are authorized statements of the law by governmental institutions.

4. Secondary authorities are commentaries on the law that do not have binding effect but
aid in explaining what the law is or should be. The resources available to find legal
authority are vast and complicated leading many law schools to require students to take
a class in legal research.

Secondary authorities are statements about the law and explain, interpret, develop,
locate, or update primary authorities. For example, treatises, law review articles,
American Law Reports annotations, Restatements of the Law, and looseleaf services are
types of secondary authorities. Secondary authority can never be binding only
persuasive.

Administrative Rule - further detail the implementation of administrative regulations.

Code - a compilation of enacted laws; generally arranged by subject
Constitution - fundamental body of principles by which a poltical body such as a nation
or state governs itself
Court Opinion - decision of the court with reasons supporting the conclusion
Court Rule - control the operation of the courts and the conduct of persons appearing
before them
Regulation - published under the authority of a statute that further interprets the
statute and operates to carry-out the statutory intent
 Session Law - the laws enacted by a legislature at an annual or biennial session; usually
published on a periodic basis during the session and then physically printed and bound
upon the completion of the session; generally arranged numerically or chronologically.
Statute - also referred to as legislation, a positive statement of legal rules enacted by a
legislature

When used to describe the degree of persuasiveness of the legal information, authority
can be futher categorized as binding or persuasive. Binding authority (also referred to as
mandatory) means that a court or other decision-maker believes the authority applies to
the case before it and must be followed. Only primary authority can be binding.

Authority which is not binding is persuasive meaning that a decision-maker can, if so

persuaded, follow it.

Sources:

https://libguides.law.uga.edu/c.php?g=177163&p=1164736

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_research

https://libguides.law.illinois.edu/Law627/overview

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_research

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_research