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| Jurisdiction | Georgia,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 21 No. 2 Pg. 0042 |
| Pages | 0042 |
| Publication year | 2015 |
Legal Writing Using Fastcase Shortcuts
Shelia Baldwin, J.
Fastcase is famous for having smarter tools for doing legal research, but what about legal writing? Finding the perfect case, statute and law review article is only the beginning of the task. Consolidating legal research can be daunting, especially at the beginning of your project. Often you will find portions of cases that are relevant to your issue, but the majority of the opinion is unimportant for your purposes. Long fact sections, discussion of unrelated principles and judicial commentary can get in the way. Several shortcuts built into Fastcase ease the process of writing a brief. The Foresite algorithm finds cases you may have missed. Editorial tools such as Copy Document Text and Bookmark, and the ability to incorporate Static Links, are useful in organizing the data.
These shortcuts come in handy when working on a project where an insurance company contends it's not responsible to cover damages to an insured property contaminated by waste based on the definition of the term sudden used within insurance policy exclusions.
Running a search in Georgia using the query ((environmental* and (damage or contamination)) and sudden, 10 cases come up in our results screen. An additional three cases appear at the top of the results page folded under a pink ribbon entided Forecite (see fig. 1). This patented sorting algorithm finds highly cited cases that don't show up in the results list because they don't contain the search terms or are outside of your jurisdiction. However, they are frequendy cited by the other decisions in your search results and therefore, may be highly relevant to the topic you are researching. Two of the three cases that show up in Forecite concern the definition of specific terms used in environmental cases and insurance policy contracts. While not the exact word we are looking for in our query, the legal principals may apply and be useful for our argument. Below the Forecite area we find the cases that fit our criteria within Georgia. The first case in the list contains a paragraph that speaks to our point, what is the meaning of the word sudden as used within insurance policy exclusions. Upon opening the case, one paragraph sums up my argument.
Using the Copy Document Text shortcut, it's easy to copy that portion into the document. To copy text with a citation simply click and drag to...
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