by Reba J. Nance
The CBA is proud to announce the addition of Casemaker’s suite of premium services at no cost to our members! You now have access not only to Casemaker’s broad and comprehensive libraries that cover all fifty states and federal materials, but also to a suite of tools that make research faster and easier. These premium services include Casecheck+, CiteCheck, and Casemaker Digest. In the past, CBA members could contract directly with Casemaker for these services at a cost of $49 per month; now, these Casemaker services are available to CBA members for free.
Accessing Casemaker’s Premium Services
To access these premium services, begin by logging onto the CBA website as a member. (If you’re having trouble getting onto the website, call us at 303–860-1115.) After you’re logged onto the website, click on the Casemaker logo on the left side of the page. Select the link to enter Casemaker, and then look for the Tools link near the top of the main page. If you don’t see the Tools link, double-check that you are on Casemaker’s main page. Keep in mind that no matter where you are in Casemaker, you can always get to the main page by clicking on the large orange Casemaker logo at the top-left corner of the page.
Click on Tools, and you will be taken to a page with a link to CasemakerDigest and CiteCheck. Casecheck+ works seamlessly inside Casemaker and requires no extra steps to use.
Casecheck+
Casecheck+ works like Shephard’s® and KeyCite® to notify you instantly of negative treatment, identifying whether the cases you’ve cited are still good law. Casecheck+ returns both positive and negative treatments instantly, and links to those cases so you can quickly review the citation history for both state and federal cases.
After you perform a search for cases, a list of cases meeting your criteria will appear. In the list, Casecheck+ places an icon to the left of each case. A green thumb up means the case is good law. A red thumb down means it was viewed negatively by a later court. With this feature, you know even before clicking on the case whether it is still good law.
Click on the name of the case to open it. At the top will be a list of citing references, with a separate link for those references with negative treatment. In two clicks, Casecheck+ takes you to the negative treatment and narrows in on the section that references the case. If a case has been negatively cited multiple times, Casecheck+ will list each individual citation with appropriate links so you can easily review them. The green thumb up or red thumb down also appears at the top of each case as you view it on your screen.
CiteCheck
Members also will have freeaccess to CiteCheck, which analyzes every citation in your brief (or your opponent’s) and provides a report of which citations are still good law and which have negative treatment. To use CiteCheck, click on Tools from the main Casemaker page. Then, upload your document via Casemaker’s secure Internet connection (documents must be in Word, searchable PDF, or text format). Click on the Browse button to locate the document on your hard drive. Once you’ve chosen the document, click the Submit button. That’s it!
Casemaker computers will automatically extract the case citations from your document and then run those citations through Casecheck+. You will see a list of your cases on the screen with the subsequent treatment in report form. A green check mark means it’s still good law; a red x indicates it has received negative treatment. A note giving the type of negative treatment and the case providing the treatment is included. The entire process takes just thirty to ninety seconds, depending on the size of your document. You can then print the report and put it in the file, or e-mail the report.
CasemakerDigest
CasemakerDigest allows you to receive daily summaries of the latest state and federal appellate decisions (within twelve to twenty-four hours of publication), classified by category. There are fifty-four categories, which include practice areas such as family law, criminal law, elder law, and immigration law. Categories also include some select issues, such as damages, discovery, and evidence.
Choose one area, a few, or all, and choose which jurisdictions you want. You can sign up to receive daily or weekly e-mails with cases meeting your criteria. When you choose a case to display, there is a short summary at the top, followed by information about the case, such as name, areas of practice, the court, and the judge. At the bottom is a longer summary followed by a link to the actual case.
CasemakerDigest keeps you current with the newest cases in your practice area. You’ll have access to summaries that you can customize by jurisdiction, practice area, court, or judge. Cases are displayed by date decided or date added, or filtered to a specific jurisdiction. If you filter by jurisdiction, you can further customize the list by adding more criteria, such as key word, area of practice, court, and judge.
You can further refine your search by narrowing it down to one category and entering specific key words to find relevant cases. You also can narrow it down by jurisdiction or judge.
You can elect to receive cases by jurisdiction (all, federal, or state). When you choose a state, a box appears listing all judges in that state. You also can narrow it down by court. As with the rest of Casemaker, courts include the Colorado Court of Appeals and the Colorado Supreme Court.
Sign up today!
The CBA provides complimentary monthly training via live seminar and webinar. CLE credit has been approved for these trainings. Click here to find dates for upcoming webinars and to register. We trust these services will prove invaluable to you in your practice. We also have a full range of tutorial videos which you can access at any time from the CBA website.
Reba J. Nance is the director of the CBA Department of Law Practice Management/Risk Management—(303) 824-5320, reban@cobar.org. This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of The Colorado Lawyer.
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