What are free online legal research tools? These are search engines, software, and sites or platforms that help law firms in gathering enough information on precedents and statutes that can define the outcome of a legal issue. For every law firm, legal research is a must to find the maximum support for a specific legal issue.
In the face of this, paid research platforms were cashing in huge on law firms until technology came to the rescue with free online legal research tools that does excellent jobs based on data available online. This is helping law firms do free legal quality research without drilling holes in their pockets. You only have to be careful on choosing the right tool. This is where this article comes in.
In this article, we have listed the top of the list of free online legal research tools for law firms that either want to swerve paid research platforms without compromising the quality of their research or just want to add more knowledge to their legal research portfolio. These ratings are based on user reviews across over 10 review sites.
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Top 10 Free Online Legal Research Tools
Courtlistener – Legal Opinions
Courtlistener is a free legal research website sponsored by a Non-Profit Free Law Project containing millions of legal opinions from federal and state courts. By just searching courtlistener by names, topics, or citations, journalists, lawyers, academics, and the public can research an important case and stay updated with cases are they are filed.
Caselaw Acess Project – Book-published Case Law
Caselaw Acess Project puts the knowledge about US law into the hands of the people. They aimed at making all published US court decisions freely available online digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law School Library dating 360 years back in time – 1658.
Caselaw Access Project data sources are among the most trusted information portfolios in the US: The Harvard Law School collection and Fastcase collection though they have collection scope limits on both parties.
Bloomberg Law – Data Analytics And AI Research Portal
Bloomberg Law is a subscription-based service that uses data analytics and artificial intelligence for online legal research. The service, which Bloomberg L.P. introduced in 2009, provides legal content, proprietary company information, and news information to attorneys, law students, and other legal professionals.
Justia – Legal Information retrievals
Justia is a website that serves as one of the online free legal research tools that offer free opinion summaries, case law, codes, and other basic legal texts with free and paid services. Justia also provides legal marketing services to law firms, services such as law firm web design, lawyer blogs design, content curation development, Search Engine Optimisation [SEO], etc.
Justia likewise is aimed at making available all legal resources for benefit of society.
Casetext And ROSS – AI Assistance legal research
Casetext and ROSS are not totally free but it is worth the charge as the service guides your legal research with artificial intelligence hence making a huge on your bottom line. Powered by AI to help you conduct legal research better and faster, Casetext’s search finds your cases and other authorities on the same facts, legal issues, and jurisdiction as your matter.
This is how it works; drag and drop a brief or complaint and casetext’s AI searches, CARA, find relevant cases – whether to enhance your research for your own drafts or to check for missing or omitted cases within opposing councils briefs and complaints.
Casetext’s AI is very cheap compared to the service it renders, and you still have 14 days trial with no credit card required.
A paid subscription to ROSS Intelligence is another way to leverage AI to enhance your legal research. Ross’s AI-powered tool lets you focus your research by emphasizing the unique facts of your case, and helps you identify cases with the same procedural posture presented in your case, plus much more.
Thomas Reuters Westlaw
Thomas Reuters Westlaw is an online research provider with the largest collection of legal information such as cases, statutes and regulations, secondary sources, practice areas, news, briefs, trial court documents, public records, expert materials, and more for lawyers and legal professionals. Their latest version, Westlaw Edge is the future of legal research, it allows attorneys to give the fastest answers and gain valuable insights – a clear strategic advantage.
Thomas Reuters Westlaw is not totally free, you will have access to every info you need for 7 days with no credit card required, and from there, when satisfied, you can purchase their plan.
LexisNexis
With LexisNexis, you conduct more authoritative research and develop a solid strategy for your issue using viral intelligence from over 60k business, legal, news, and public records. With LexisNexis data-driven research tools, you’ll discover valuable connections that would’ve been difficult to reveal using conventional text-based research tools.
You will be able to find relevant documents faster and easier using unprecedented analytics resources and easily scan your results with intuitive visualization aids, go beyond traditional legal research and amplify your work using the Lexis Advance service.
‘Lexis Advance is extremely user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing. Anytime I use Lexis Advance, I am always confident that I am getting the best search results and satisfied with the product. I have never had any issues with Lexis at all, and their customer service is fantastic!’ A reviewer wrote about what he liked most about the service.
‘Lexis Advance, like most legal software, is expensive. I also think that they could improve their legal news offerings. Otherwise, I am extremely happy with the product. He wrote about what does not like about the service. So obviously, the service is not totally free but you have your 7days trial.
The list of free online legal research tools is long but only a few are really free and still provide you with top-notch service. Yes, those listed here made that list and we will continue to update we continue reading reviews and conducting our checks.
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