GSB Vol. 18, NO. 7, Pg. 62. Member Benefits.

Authorby Sheila Baldwin

Georgia Bar Journal

Volume 18.

GSB Vol. 18, NO. 7, Pg. 62.

Member Benefits

GSB JournalVol. 18, NO. 7June 2013Member BenefitsFastcase's Newest Addition : Bad Law Botby Sheila BaldwinOn May 1, Fastcase announced a new I addition to their set of visually oriented tools that make online research smarter and faster. Bad Law Bot, yes, it's really called Bad Law Bot, is an enhancement to the Authority Check feature to show you where courts have noted that a case has been treated negatively (i.e., reversed or overruled on any grounds). The Bluebook requires that courts indicate negative history of cases cited within opinions. This new feature uses algorithms to find negative citation history. Bad Law Bot then flags those cases so that you can easily spot those that have negative citation history and provides you with the links to those cases.

Fastcase differentiates itself from other search engines by designing innovative features such as the Interactive Timeline, Authority Check and now Bad Law Bot to visually display results and highlight important cases quickly and easily.

Fastcase's Interactive Timeline view shows all of the search results on a single map, illustrating how the results occur over time, how relevant each case is based on your search terms and how many times each case has been cited providing more information than any list of search results.

Fastcase's citator function, Authority Check, displays all later citing cases visually in the form of a report which shows which jurisdictions have cited the case, the number of times it's been cited and when it was last cited. This is a great research tool for finding related precedents, or helping to determine the continuing value of a case as a precedent.

Although Fastcase does not hold Authority Check out as a complete replacement for services such as Shepard's or KeyCite, with the addition of Bad Law Bot, Authority Check becomes more valuable by pointing out negative history associated with a case. When a case in the search results is found to be negative the bot identifies it as bad law by tagging the case with a red flag. The flag will also display in the document view when you view the...

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