Casemaker Weekly – May 26th, 2020

by Tali Thomason on May 27, 2020

You’ve submitted your search and got your results. Now what? This week we will review that results page and what it can do for you.  Let’s get started!

The results page appears after you have submitted your search. These results may vary depending on what you selected in the Jurisdiction and Compilation menu. Unless you specified a specific compilation type, Casemaker4 defaults to showing Cases. On the left, however, you can select a different compilation, such as Statutes, Administrative Code or Attorney General Opinions.

On the left, you will also see a number of ways to narrow the search results you found. Search within results allows you to type in a new search query that will apply only to the results from your initial search. You can set up your Search Within Results query just as you would any other query in Casemaker, using the same search operators. In addition, the left bar allows you to narrow your results by jurisdiction, courts, date and published or unpublished for Case Law. For Statutes and Administrative laws, you can narrow by jurisdiction or by Chapter or Title.

The results page can be sorted. Along the top of the results list is a toolbar with the option to change your sorting criteria. When viewing case results the system defaults to Relevance, but at the top of your results list you can choose to sort by state, date, the number of times cited and court level. When viewing statutes or similar material you will see the options to sort by relevance, state, code section or title. The toolbar above your list of results also provides the opportunity to save the search, create a new search alert, create or edit a document alert, print, email, save to folder, download, and send selected documents to the print queue.

The results themselves show you the case name, citation, and parallel citation where available; court, date decided, and the number of times it was cited in our database along with a graph plotting how often it has been cited over the years. Clicking on this graph will allow the graph to open larger. There are different colored lines for which courts the case was cited in: Same state of publication, Federal, or Other states. You can hover over the dots provided to see how many times it was cited in that year specifically. Clicking on the dot will provide you with a list of clickable links to those cases.

Case results have green thumbs up or red thumbs down icons. These indicators are part of CaseCheck+, a citator service letting you know whether or not the case is still good law. The green thumbs-up indicates the case has not received any negative treatment by subsequent cases, while the red thumbs down indicates that it has. Clicking to view the case will give you more information on the treatment.


That is all for this week! We will back with more tips and tricks next week. Thanks again for making Casemaker a Valued Member Benefit.

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