Golden Rule of Legal Writing: Never, ever cite to anything you haven’t read carefully.
There is a reason law librarians try to drill that rule into the heads of lawyers and law students (and journalists):
“Is it a “Good” Case? Can You Rely on BCite, KeyCite, and Shepard’s to Tell You?,” by Kristina Niedringhaus, JOTWELL (April 22, 2019) (reviewing Paul Hellyer, Evaluating Shepard’s, KeyCite, and BCite for Case Validation Accuracy, 110 Law Libr. J. 449 (2018)).
I recently asked law librarians for alternate, non-proprietary, ways of saying “Shepard’s” or “KeyCite” (or Shepardizing or KeyCiting). Below you’ll find a short list and a long list of responses, and not a few “namemushs.”
We focused primarily on case citators, but keep in mind you can cite-check a lot of things, including law review articles, court rules, statutes, and regulations (to name only 4).
What’s a citator? We like this concise description of Online Citators, from the University of Washington Law School librarians.
“.... The newly launched WeCite Project, co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and the free legal research platform Casetext, aims to bring the win-win power of crowdsourcing to the task….” [Link to the full Legal Research Plus blog post.]
What might Frank Shepard (the Shepard of Shepardizing) think?
Oregon Legal Research Blog