Feb. 17, 2010 – The amount of research conducted via the Internet is drastically increasing. A search could include attorney profiles, news or blog posts, articles, topical web pages and so on. Many of these pages contain case and statutory citations. A separate search is often required to see if those case or statutory references are available online in full text.
There are two online tools designed to streamline this process. They assist the researcher by locating free full-text versions of citations found on a specific site. The first is Jureeka!, which is a Firefox or Chrome add-on. The second tool, Citer, is by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute and still in early development. Citer works in a variety of browsers including Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. This is a significant distinction since IE is the predominant browser among law firms. I recently surveyed 50 law firms, and all used IE as their primary browser.
Jurreka!
Jureeka! has been available as a Firefox add-on since 2008 and Chrome since December 2009. Jureeka! "adds hyperlinks to different types of legal citations and allows you to jump directly the cited source material.” This is a seamless process. When opening a web page, the hyperlinks are automatically inserted. The researcher can then follow the links to read the text of a referenced case or statute section.
As referenced in a recent WisBlawg post, Jureeka! has very broad coverage linking to international, federal, and state legal resources. It also recognizes a select group of law review citations. The creator maintains a spreadsheet identifying source coverage and reports a success rate of approximately 92 percent. I have read some reviews stating that if a Web site already has hyperlinks to cases, that Jureeka! will overwrite them. This may or may not be a concern. To test the extent of this issue, I checked the links within the State Bar’s access to Fastcase. Opening cases in Firefox, with the Jureeka! add-on installed, did not overwrite those hyperlinks.
An additional feature is the Jureeka! “find by citation.” From this toolbar option, the researcher can enter a case, statutory, or regulatory citation and Jureeka! will attempt to locate a full text version online. The Jureeka! toolbar also offers a radio button to convert .PDF documents to .HTML. I, however, have had limited success with this feature to date.
Citer
Citer is a very new “swipe-and-click” program. The website explains that the researcher selects “an area of text that contains the cite you would like to look up, then click a button in the browser bookmark linkbar, and our program on the server will attempt to turn it into a link, and transfer you to that page.”
Coverage is limited at this time to the U.S. Code, Federal Supreme and Appellate Court decisions, CFR, Statutes at Large, and Federal Register references. Expansion to state courts and .PDF to .HTML conversion appears to be on the horizon.
This program requires the researcher to select the citation of interest and, as a result, requires some keystrokes. However, the attraction to the Citer product for most law firms is that it functions with IE.
Both Jureeka! and Citer are designed to assist the legal researcher in quickly locating full text versions of citations found within Web pages. Currently, Jureeka! has broader coverage and works without intervention from the researcher. However, it is only available to Firefox and Chrome users. Citer is narrower in scope, but works within IE and is still in the development stage.
Bev Butula is the manager of library of services at Davis & Kuelthau, Milwaukee. She is a past president of the Law Librarians Association of Wisconsin. Bev has written articles and spoken to numerous groups on issues such as effective Internet research, evaluation of Web sites and legal research. Prior to obtaining her Master's Degree in Library Science from UWM, Bev was a litigation paralegal.
• Related: Learn about Fastcase free legal research for State Bar members
