4.7 Researching Virginia Case Law Online

• Library: A Guide to Legal Research in Virginia (Virginia CLE) (2017 Ed.)

4.7 RESEARCHING VIRGINIA CASE LAW ONLINE

A researcher's approach to creating an online search strategy will be driven by the resources available. This paragraph will address basic concepts that are equally applicable to free and low-cost products with basic search capabilities and to the more sophisticated

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algorithms available in subscription databases. It will also provide an overview of finding cases on Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law. Fastcase is fully addressed in Chapter 9.

4.701 In General. The first step in any research project is identifying the legal issues involved and generating relevant search terms. Consulting a secondary source is often the most effective way to gain a broad understanding of an area of law and to identify initial search terms. Michie's Jurisprudence ²⁰ and Virginia-specific treatises ²¹ are particularly relevant to case law research. The annotations in these resources include citations to relevant cases. Locating a "key case" is an important step in the research process.

Without a known case, a researcher will generally begin by initiating a search query in the database. As a preliminary matter, the researcher should determine the resource's content and coverage scope and limit the search parameters appropriately (for example, limiting the search to Virginia Supreme Court opinions). There are several types of full-text word searches.

A. Keyword. A keyword search will retrieve cases or documents that include the specific word or phrase searched. It is important that the researcher select keywords that accurately describe the point of law or exact legal term. This is because a keyword search looks for character strings only and does not search for concepts.

B. Natural Language. With the natural language...