ZiefBrief

New! -- Damage Analytics Available with Westlaw's Litigation Analytics

You can now use the damages analytics feature on Westlaw's litigation analytics to identify damages awarded in a particular jurisdiction. To use this feature, select the "Courts" search option, then enter the court for which you would like to view damages data. For example, you could enter "United States District Court, N.D. California" to view damages data from this federal court. Click the "Damages" tab to view damage amounts for that court. You can filter by case type, judge, damages type, damages amount, party, and date. This data can be useful in determining the value of a case, performing a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether to continue with litigation, or helping to craft your settlement negotiations. 

Law Library Chat Research Support: Closed November 25 to 27

The librarians' live chat research help service will be closed for the Thanksgiving break starting Wednesday, November 25, through Friday, November 27. Chat research assistance will resume on Monday, November 30, at 9 am.

Use the Law Library's Analytics Tools to Prepare for Interviews

The law library's digital resources include legal analytics tools from Bloomberg Law, Westlaw, and Lexis. These resources are extremely useful for interview preparation because they aggregate data about law firms, judges, and attorneys and package it in easy-to-read graphs, lists, links, and charts.  For example, you can quickly view cases that are currently being litigated by a law firm or attorney, review a judge's current caseload by type of case, view which clients law firms or attorneys represent most frequently, determine how often an individual judge grants or denies particular motions, and much more. The law librarians are available to USF Law students for one-on-one tutorials on all of these resources; you can make an appointment by emailing us at: lawlibrarians@usfca.edu

 

Westlaw's Litigation Analytics tool allows you to browse litigation data for attorneys, judges, and law firms. For attorneys and law firms, you can review current caseloads, types of cases handled, case outcomes, motions filed, and dockets. For judges, you can review how a judge typically rules, categories of cases in the judge's caseload, how long it takes for a judge to rule on particular types of motions, and the authority they tend to cite. This online tutorial introduces the features of Westlaw's Litigation Analytics to law students.

 

Lexis offers Litigation Profile Suite, which provides a visual representation of verdict, settlement, and docket data on judges and attorneys. You can also find biographical information, news stories, and a list of cases in which they are currently involved. This guide thoroughly explains how to use Litigation Profile Suite.

 

Bloomberg Law allows you to review federal court data for judges, law firms, and attorneys. Because analytics are combined with Bloomberg Law's docket data, you can easily access the dockets and litigation documents for federal cases, reading complaints and motions filed by attorneys and law firms before your interview or meeting. Much like Westlaw and Lexis, you will see visualizations of the data that allow you to track trends over time. This short 5-minute video introduces new users to Litigation Analytics features.  

Picking the Right Study Guide from the Wolters Kluwer Online Study Aid Library

The Wolters Kluwer Online Study Aid Library provides USF Law students with unlimited, simultaneous digital access to hundreds of study guides covering the courses offered at the law school. The study guides in this library can help students with issue-spotting, analyzing fact patterns, learning legal concepts, and applying the rules. Here’s what you need to know about three of the most widely used study aids available through this resource. Each study guide is created to support specific learning styles throughout the semester:

• Examples & Explanations (E & E) – provides an alternate perspective to help students get a clearer view of the big picture. Each book in the E & E series includes hypothetical questions with detailed explanations that allow you to test your knowledge and compare your own analysis.
  
  
• Emanuel Law Outlines – covers topics, cases, and black letter law in a way that’s easy to digest. There are questions that allow you to test your grasp of the material, capsule summaries of legal concepts, and test-taking tips to help you prep for exams.
  
  
• Glannon Guides – this series is designed to help students learn course material through multiple choice questions and analysis of both correct and incorrect answers. Glannon Guides mirror the classroom experience by teaching through explanation, interspersed with hypotheticals to illustrate application.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Life and Legacy

For many women attorneys of my generation, the news of Justice Ginsburg's death has hit particularly hard. I entered law school in 1994 inspired by Justice Ginsburg's commitment to gender equality and social justice.  HeinOnline recently posted a wonderful summary of Justice Ginsburg's legacy that is worth taking some time to explore. The post closes with an oft-cited quote from this great jurist: "Fight for the things that you care about. But do it in a way that will lead others to join you."

Get the Lexis Digital Library App

The law library's Lexis Digital Library features personalized home pages for students, a user-friendly reading experience, and an app for simpler offline reading.  This guide provides instructions on getting the app and this "getting started" guide describes all of the useful features of this digital library, such as note-taking, highlighting, and one-click access to cases and statutes cited in ebooks through integration with Lexis.

New Zief Digital Resources: Examples & Explanations, Glannon Guides, Emanuel Outlines & more!

We're excited about our purchase of new digital resources for USF Law students! You will sign in to use these online resources in the same way that you sign on to access other myUSF applications, such as campus email, course registration, etc.

• The law library’s Lexis Digital Library furnishes digital access with highlighting, note-taking, and printing options for study guides in the Understanding and Questions & Answers series. Check the Fall 2020 booklist to find out if your professor recommends an Understanding series text. In addition, the Lexis Digital Library has been enhanced to offer free access to the following required Fall 2020 course texts:

• Animal Law (Liebman): Wagman, Waisman & Frasch, Animal Law: Cases and Materials, 6th ed. (Carolina Academic Press 2019).
  
  
• International Human Rights Law (de la Vega): Donoho, International Human Rights Law (Carolina Academic Press 2017) & Weissbrodt et al., Selected International Human Rights Instruments and Bibliography for Research on International Human Rights Law, 4th ed. (LexisNexis 2009).
  
  
• Legal Research, Writing & Analysis I (Abelkop): Chew & Pryal, The Complete Legal Writer (Carolina Academic Press 2017 – note that the second edition will be posted as soon as it is available from the publisher).
  
  
• Legal Research, Writing & Analysis I (Hutchinson): McFarlane, Dudovitz & Rowe, California Legal Research, 3d ed (Carolina Academic Press 2016).
  
  

• The Lexis Digital Library also offers free access to Expert Learning for Law Students. This book is highly recommended by several USF Law professors and teaches students how to incorporate specific successful learning strategies into their law school studies.

• Our new Wolters Kluwer Online Study Aid Library offers access to these study guides: Examples & Explanations, Glannon Guides, and Emanuel Outlines. Students can personalize their accounts to take notes, highlight, and print digital books. Check the Fall 2020 booklist to find out if your professor recommends a Glannon Guide or Examples & Explanations text. The Wolters Kluwer digital library also includes over 200 videos with coverage of 21 course areas written and presented by law professors and practitioners.
  
  
• Whenever possible, the law library is purchasing some required course texts through Marketplace OverDrive and making them available to law students through the Lexis Digital Library platform. Unfortunately, any digital books that we purchase from publishers that aren’t affiliated with Lexis are subject to more restrictive loan rules. Each copy may only be borrowed by one student at a time for a period of 7 days. The following required Fall 2020 course texts are available to borrow for 7-day periods:
  
  
  • California Civil Discovery (Driscoll & Piasta): Moore et al., Depositions in a Nutshell (West Academic 2016).
    
    
  • Appellate Advocacy (Vu): Garner, The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (West Academic 2019) & Legal Writing in Plain English (University of Chicago Press 2013).

The law library is reviewing publishers’ digital package offers on a rolling basis. We just added an ebook library with scholarly books on international law. We'll continue to add more digital titles throughout the Fall 2020 semester. Watch for the law library’s announcements in This Week at USF for details about new digital collections!

The librarians are available if you have any questions about accessing and using these materials. You can reach the librarian team via live chat, Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm.  You can also email the team at: lawlibrarians@usfca.edu 

We look forward to working with you this semester, and please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have suggestions about how the law library can assist you with your learning objectives this semester!

Lexis Announces Lexis+

LexisNexis began rolling out its new legal research platform Lexis+ to students on August 3. In addition to an upgraded visual design and built on the foundation of the existing Lexis Advance, Lexis+ includes both new and enhanced features for users, many of which are powered by artificial intelligence.

Research starts at the landing page, where the user can select from three “experiences,” as Lexis+ calls them: legal research, Practical Guidance and brief analysis.

New Features

1. Shepard’s At Risk: identifies cases that are at risk of being overruled, even if they have not directly been. It flags cases in which the underlying points of law on which they rely have been negatively treated by other decisions in the same jurisdiction, which would suggest it is at risk.

2. Brief Analysis: allows users to upload their briefs and quickly receive recommendations for other cases to cite and similar briefs to review based on the citation patterns and legal concepts in the original document. The relevant cases include highlighted passages that would be of interest, and users can filter the results by the legal concepts that they are prioritizing in their research.

3. Search Tree: displays visually how the terms in a terms-and-connectors search were applied and how those relationships impacted the results. In the Search Tree, each part of the search is represented in a box that displays how many results would be retrieved if only that part of the search was run. You can select any of the boxes to refresh the results with those search terms.

4. Missing and Must Include: highlights terms from your search query that are missing from a specific document in the results set, without having to open the document. When you see a “missing” term at the bottom of the search-results snippet, you can select “Must Include” to rerun the search and force inclusion of that term.

Upgraded Features

Existing features that have been upgraded include Lexis Answers, which allows users to type in their questions and see the top three answers, along with an option to click on “Show More Answers.” The answers contain text from the relevant cases, as well as other key details about the cases where the answers were found.

Practical Guidance is an upgraded version of Practice Advisor in Lexis Advance. It is a collection of practice-specific forms, clauses, checklists, articles and practice notes designed to help a legal professional get up to speed more quickly on a particular matter.

Finally, Lexis+ expands the Search Term Maps feature of Lexis Advance from just case law to more than 30 content types, including news, statutes and legislation, administrative codes, secondary materials, administrative materials, and litigation documents. These maps show the location and distribution of your search terms both within the results list and within the full text of documents.

Additional analytics capabilities will be offered through Lexis+ later this year, including the integration of Lex Machina analytics, Courtlink, and other tools. Early in 2021, content from Law360 will be incorporated into the platform.

Students can log in at plus.lexis.com using their Lexis Advance usernames and passwords.

HeinOnline Search Tips and Tricks

Current USF Law students, faculty, and staff have remote digital access to HeinOnline.  To access Zief digital resources remotely, follow these instructions.

1) To access our databases remotely, you must use the specially-formatted links on the Zief Law Library A to Z database page.

2) After clicking a database link on this page, enter your myUSF username and password when you are prompted to do so.

To get the most out of your HeinOnline searching, review this very thorough and helpful guide from the HeinOnline Blog.

USF Observation of Juneteenth this Friday, June 19

This Friday, June 19 — Juneteenth — is a USF holiday, a time for the university to engage in anti-racism work. We hope you check out the excellent resources that Gleeson Library has compiled on its Anti-Racism Resources page! The Zief librarians' virtual chat service will not be staffed on June 19. We will be back on virtual chat on Monday, June 22, at 9 am.