Articles Posted in General Legal Research Resources

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Suppose you want to find out what lawsuits a business or an individual has filed in Oregon against another business, a customer, or an individual. How and where do you look that up?

1) Here in the U.S., if you are searching state court records (rather than federal court records), you will generally look to a courthouse docket, database, or other lists of “lawsuits filed.” These lists will sometimes be kept in statewide databases, but not always. For example, when the court is local, not statewide, it is possible that the only listing of parties sued, or being sued, will be held by the Court – and they may still be in print only.

2) NOT ALL COURT RECORDS ARE ONLINE. In fact, not all ANYTHING is online. (Sigh – except maybe those documents “born digital.”) And even if the court records are stored in a digital database, this does not mean access to it is free or available to everyone.

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The Law Librarian Blog (LLB) has an interview with the Quid Pro Books publisher:

Law Prof as Independent Law Book Publisher: An Interview with Alan Childress, Founder of Quid Pro Books:

Excerpt “… Wait a minute, a law prof as independent law book publisher?! When I saw that Alan’s corrected and annotated version of Holmes’ The Common Law was available in eight digital formats and in paperback and read the Publisher Information page about Quid Pro, LLC, sidebar, right, my interest peaked. This isn’t some law prof who has gone the self-publication route because no major publisher would accept his 2010 edition of Holmes’ The Common Law. Quid Pro Books is a new venture that publishes eBooks of original manuscripts in law and law-and-society, in addition to classics, for worldwide distribution….” (Link to full LLB blog post and to Quid Pro Books.):

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People who work in the legal community don’t generally ask us this question, but ordinary mortals do. I am an ordinary mortal too, mostly, so the question seemed well worth a blog post on the subject:

Before trying to track down that transcriptionist, aka transcriber, or even doing it yourself:

1) First, make sure you know what is on the CD and how it was recorded. For example, Oregon Courts use FTR (“For The Record”) to record trials. Is that what is on your CD?

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That little old “space key” or its absence can matter, a lot.

Abbreviations can drive one crazy, especially when searching online, either on the free web or in subscription databases. Those of us in the digital searching world know that searching for something by its abbreviation is an exercise in frustration. (Librarians (almost) never give up so it’s not an exercise in futility. We WILL FIND that document, if we have to die (figuratively speaking) trying.)

Most of us vividly remember searches where we had to try a dozen variations on a theme in the effort to locate a case, a person, or a document, where the only unique “name” was an abbreviation.

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I love the Wisconsin State Law Library Newsletter and always learn something new when I read it. This month, August 2010, in addition to other useful legal research tools (e.g. CiteGenie), they had links to two handy-dandy published reviews / comparisons of Smart Phones. We can’t get enough of those, our mini-brains!

1) Lifehacker smart phone comparison

2) CNET smart phone reviews

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We are not able to answer reader’s specific legal questions, although we do try to respond when the answer has legal research value to other readers.

Suggestions:

1) Look for updates to specific Oregon Legal Research blog posts, by clicking on the subject Tags at the end of the post. Or, link to the Oregon Law Help website, which has excellent guides for real Oregonians with real legal problems and questions. (Or, check the Oregon Legal Assistance Resource Guide.)

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If you haven’t heard or used Zimmerman’s Legal Research guide, give it a whirl. You might find you use it again and again.

Andy Zimmerman has now created a handy-dandy ZRG blog, which is an excellent way to keep atop his updates to the ZRG.

Recent updates include these, but you can find them all, including an RSS feed, from the ZRG blog homepage:

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Whether you’re researching juvenile sex offender laws or marijuana taxation or jails or something in between, you will want to use an Index, that is, “indexes to periodical literature,” including magazine, journal, newsletter, and other print and online specialty or general publications indexes.

Indexes save you time, lots of time, and enable to you to locate articles you might otherwise miss if you search only full-text resources or simply “Google” a subject.

Most of the following indexes are online, but none is free online, although one or more may be “free” to institutional members, e.g. public library cardholders, educational institution students, staff, and faculty, and professional associations, to name a few groups that offer no-charge online index and other database and literature searching to their members.

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Gallagher Blogs on June 23, 2010, takes us to this article, which caught my eye because I comment often on how few state law school law reviews publish useful articles anymore on their own state’s laws. There was a time when you could go to them, the law reviews, for excellent case or statute histories. It’s a rare thing now. Many of the law review requests we get now are for articles written 30 years (or more) ago. (Thank heavens for our HeinOnline subscription (and their blog).)

“Law Professor Slams Law Reviews for Impracticality“ …

“The Wit, Wisdom, and Worthlessness of Law Reviews,” by Gerald F. Uelmen, June 2010:

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