ZiefBrief

WestlawNext Power Searching Tips

Westlaw Insider regularly publishes WestlawNext searching tips, and today's tips are particularly useful.  Did you know you can type in commands like:

kc: 26 usca 501

to quickly KeyCite a case, statute, or other authority?  You can also restrict your search to a particular area of law by typing the area of law followed by a colon in the search box:

family law: custodial parent relocation

Follow this link to view the full list of advanced shortcuts.

They're Baaaack! Witkin and ALR Return to Lexis

Masterful negotiators at LexisNexis have evidently coaxed out of Thomson/West a long-term license to two of ZiefBrief's favorite secondary legal research tools: American Law Reports (ALR), and the four superlative Witkin publications.

These had disappeared from Lexis when the previous license expired and, frankly, ZiefBrief had thought that West would grant a new license only at the same time that ice hockey became popular in Hades. But here they are, and ZiefBrief's pleasure at being able to use them on Lexis outweighs our chagrin at having been so wrong in our prediction.

If you're browsing the "Look for a Source" menu on Lexis, these paths will lead to the returning research heroes:

• Legal > Secondary Legal > Jurisprudences & Encyclopedias > American Law Reports
• Legal > States Legal - U.S. > California > Search Analysis & CLE Materials > CA Treatises & Analytical Materials

If you're using "Find a Source" to pick a specific source, here are the long and short [in square brackets] source names. (The "Witkin Treatises" source combines all four Witkin publications into one.)

• American Law Reports [2NDARY;LEDALR]
• Witkin California Evidence [2NDARY;WITEVD]
• Witkin California Procedure [2NDARY;WITPRO]
• Witkin & Epstein California Criminal Law [2NDARY;WITCRM]
• Witkin Summary of California Law [2NDARY;WITSUM]
• Witkin Treatises [2NDARY;WITKIN]

Westlaw Hornbook & Nutshell Initiative Leaves Law Students Out

ZiefBrief was surprised to learn recently that Westlaw now includes some hornbooks and nutshells. (As of today, there are 7 hornbooks, and 16 nutshells — a tiny percentage of what's available in print.)

ZiefBrief was not at all surprised to discover, when we tried to field test these online nutshells and hornbooks, that they are not included in law school subscription plans. Having nutshells and hornbooks available to law students on Westlaw would no doubt completely undercut the market for the print versions of these excellent study aids, and we can't imagine that West's book publishing division would put up with that.

So who does this help? Researchers with commercial accounts. Nutshells and hornbooks are great way for lawyers to get up to speed quickly on new and unfamiliar areas of law, and having them on Westlaw puts them in the hands of attorneys who wouldn't normally have print copies hanging around.

(To see what hornbooks and nutshells are available, log on to Westlaw, and enter "IDEN" in the "Search these databases" textbox. At the IDEN search screen, switch to "Terms and Connectors," and run this search: hornbook or nutshell. Academic users can run this search, but they won't have access to the publications .

Westlaw's 50 State Regulatory Surveys - Relieving (Some of) the Pain of Multi-State Regulatory Research

Here in St. Louis, ZiefBrief got a first look at a brand new Westlaw database, "50 State Regulatory Surveys" (REG-SURVEYS).

Government executive agency regulations (the third leg of the primary law triad of cases, statutes and regulations) don't seem to get much exposure in the law school curriculum, yet out in law practice most clients' affairs will be subject to any number of federal and state regulations. And clients doing business across the country will be subject to regulations from all 50 states.

Yet searching state by state to identify rules and regulations affecting a client (or relating to an issue in an academic paper or article) used to be, well, beyond awful doesn't even begin to describe it.

Westlaw's REG-SURVEYS database alleviates much of the pain. The West editors have already searched out and listed the regulations from each state that bear on each topic. All you have to do is use the "table of contents" to browse the topics for the issue at hand, or enter a regular Westlaw search.

West launched REG-SURVEYS last Friday with about 60 surveys in 4 broad categories (blue sky laws, employment, health care, and insurance), and more surveys are in the works.

One warning for the folks who aren't lucky enough to qualify for a law school Westlaw account: proceed with fiscal caution. The scope information for the REG-SURVEYS contains the chilling (at least to a law firm librarian) advisory: "'Super Allfiles' billing rate applies to this Premier Advantage database." That's about as much as you can pay for Westlaw searching, so consult with your librarian or a West research attorney for cost-saving tips before wading in to the REG-SURVEYS.

[Update: 12.13.2006. If you are doing 50-state statutory research, see our post 50-State Statute Surveys - Making an Onerous Research Task a Little Easier.]

Searching Blogs With LexisNexis - Yes, LexisNexis!

ZiefBrief is just back from a quick Lexis update, in which we were surprised to stumble on a blog search source (aptly, if a bit redundantly, named "Web Blogs") in the LexisNexis News & Business materials.

It's not completely clear how many blogs are included, but we're guessing maybe a couple of dozen, including Wonkette. [See update, below.] The collection appears to start with January of 2006.

So why search a small collection of blogs on Lexis when you can search thousands via Technorati or Google's Blog Search?

Two reasons occur to us: (1) to retrieve a manageable sample of what a few well-known blogs are saying about a person or issue; or (2) to be able to exploit all of the power of Lexis searching, including the use of proximity connectors (such as w/s or w/p) and ultra-precise date restrictions. [It can't hurt that LexisNexis treats each blog post as a discrete document, either. 7.10.2006.]

If you're a LexisNexis subscriber, here's how to search the LexisNexis blog collection.
Sign on, then, in the "Look for a Source" box, select the "News & Business" tab, then "Combined Sources" and then "Web Blogs." (For Lexis geeks, the short name is: NEWS;BLOGS.) The Web Blogs source is also included in the "News, All (English, Full Text)" source (short name: NEWS:ALLNWS).

[Update, 7.10.2006] Here in St. Louis at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries, ZiefBrief managed to get some hard data on Lexis's new Web Blogs source. First, the source contains 425 blogs, many more than ZiefBrief guessed earlier. Second, LexisNexis has advice on incuding and excluding blog content from search results in news group files (such as "News, All").

To limit your results to blog content, add the following to the rest of your search:

and publication(blogs)

To exclude blogs from your search, tack this on to the end of your search:

and not publication(blogs)

The Wall Street Journal… Available on Lexis for Law Schools… At Last!

Law school students, faculty, and staff now — finally — have access to The Wall Street Journal on Lexis.

More than a year ago content from Factiva (The Wall Street Journal's corporate parent) moved from Westlaw to Lexis, and in the move law schools lost access to the Journal. At the time Lexis promised ZiefBrief that someday ("not never" was the exact time frame) the Journal would reappear, and now the day has arrived.

Along with The Wall Street Journal, law schools have also gained access to other Factiva content on Lexis, including the Asian Wall Street Journal, Barron's and Reuters News.

If you're an authorized Lexis user, you can get to The Wall Street Journal by following these steps: Select the "Find A Source" tab in the "Look for a Source" box; enter "Wall Street Journal" in the text box; make sure "Match terms in long names" button is checked. The Journal's coverage begins with January 1984.

[Thanks to Gleeson Library, all current members of the USF community have access to The Wall Street Journal via ProQuest Newspapers — which is why the law school did not feel the "Wexis" WSJ hiatus too keenly.]

A Growing Federal Register Archive from Westlaw's RegulationsPlus

In its RegulationPlus initiative Westlaw has not only annotated the Code of Federal Regulations and create a CFR index from scratch, it also now offers the entire Federal Register, from 1936 to the present.

The Federal Register is "the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents." (GPO Access Federal Register site.)

For some time, the Federal Register from 1980⁄81 has been available on Westlaw in the FR ("Federal Register") database — and on Lexis, too, in the "FR - Federal Register" source. Westlaw's RegulationsPlus project extended coverage back to the inception of the Federal Register.

The pre-1981 Federal Register appears in the Westlaw database FR-OLD ("Archival Federal Register 1936-1980") database. As Westlaw's Scope screen notes, users' queries search  "the citation, date, and summary information of the content, in addition to the Adobe text in the attached PDF file." Search results show document summaries, and each summary links to a downloadable PDF file of the full Federal Register document.

Members of the University of San Francisco community can also find the Federal Register via HeinOnline. HeinOnline's Federal Register covers 1936 to the present, in exact page images.

All researchers may use the Government Printing Office's Federal Register site, which covers  1994 (volume 59) to the present.

[This is ZiefBrief’s third post on RegulationsPlus. The first was An Annotated CFR At Last! New From Westlaw . The second was More Ways to Find Federal Regulations - RegulationsPlus Index on Westlaw.]

More Ways to Find Federal Regulations - RegulationsPlus Index on Westlaw

This month Westlaw introduced a new way to find relevant regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations: the RegulationsPlus Index.

What is an Index? In this case, it's an alphabetical list of thousands and thousands of terms or concepts that shows which CFR provisions relate to those words or concepts.  (For more see Wikipedia's Index (publishing).) The RegulationsPlus CFR Index is so extensive that in print (yes, Thomson⁄West is selling a print version, and the Zief Library should have it shortly), it takes up four large volumes. [Update, 5.19.06: Zief's copy of the new West's Code of Federal Regulations Index is now on the shelves at KF 70 .A34 W47 Law Stacks.]

Why in the world would you want to use an index when you can do a key word search? Well, take the following example:

Suppose you want to know if there are regulation that govern whether a federal contractor who is kidnapped by insurgents in Iraq can get workers' compensation benefits? If you search the CFR for:

"workers compensation" and  kidnap!  or  abduct!

you will get no documents.

But if you go to the RegulationsPlus Index for the letter "K," and then  scroll down and select the word "Kidnapping," you'll see, at the end of the list of entries for Kidnapping, a reference to: "War, workers compensation, 20 C.F.R. § 61.300 et seq."

Why did the index work when the full-text search failed? The regulations beginning at Section 61.300 use the term "detention," but West's indexers, in reading these regulations, realized that they would cover kidnapping, so the indexers listed the regs in their index under the term "kidnapping."

How can Westlaw subscribers get to the RegulationsPlus CFR Index? At the Westlaw welcome screen enter "CFR" in the "Search these databases" textbox. Then, at the search screen, select the "RegulationsPlus Index" link. You can browse alphabetically or search for index entries that start with or contain certain words or phrases.

[This is ZiefBrief's second post on RegulationsPlus. The first was An Annotated CFR At Last! New From Westlaw. The third is A Growing Federal Register Archive from Westlaw’s RegulationsPlus.]

An Annotated CFR At Last! New From Westlaw

Back in the day, when ZiefBrief was learning the techniques of legal research, it was a given that there was no truly satisfactory way to find cases interpreting the Code of Federal Regulations. The one tool, Shepard's Code of Federal Regulations Citations, was so beset with quirks and pitfalls that it intimidated even expert researchers. Then came Lexis and Westlaw, and we could write full-text searches to pick up references to the CFR. But that technique (like the Shepard's CFR citator) depended on anticipating all of the ways a court might possibly have referred to a relevant CFR section.

Westlaw's new RegulationsPlus changes all that.

Among the many features of RegulationsPlus are annotations for the CFR. The annotations are written by West editors and are exactly analogous (in concept and look-and-feel) to the annotations to Thomson⁄West's USCA. (Thomson⁄West even plans on taking the retro step of bringing out selected annotated CFR titles in print.)

For examples of CFR annotations, take 36 C.F.R. 1191.1, the Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines for Buildings and Facilities. To see the annotations written by the Thomson⁄West editors, be sure you select the "Links for" tab in the left-hand frame, then click on the "Notes of Decisions" link in the "Links for" tab.

Or, if you prefer, you can use Westlaw's KeyCite to find cases and other documents that cite your CFR section. To use KeyCite, Select the "Links for"” tab, then select the "Citing References" link.

[This is ZiefBrief's first post on RegulationsPlus. The second is More Ways to Find Federal Regulations - RegulationsPlus Index on Westlaw. The third is A Growing Federal Register Archive from Westlaw’s RegulationsPlus.]

Principles of Corporate Governance - New on Lexis

As the Enron trial unfolds with all deliberate speed, Lexis announces a timely new source: Principles of Corporate Governance: Analysis and Recommendations, covering "objective and conduct of the business corporation, the structure of the corporation, the duty of care and the business judgment rule, the duty of fair dealing, the role of directors and shareholders in transactions in control and tender offers, and corporate remedies."

Principles of Corporate Governance, while new to Lexis, was adopted by the American Law Institute in 1992 after lengthy study and analysis. The Zief Library's print copy of Principles of Corporate Governance: Analysis and Recommendations is at KF 1422 .P75 1994 Law Reserve.