fastcase

Description

What is Fastcase?
Fastcase is the leading next-generation legal research service that puts a comprehensive national law library and smarter and more powerful searching, sorting, and visualization tools at your fingertips.

Comprehensive.
Fastcase’s libraries include primary law from all 50 states, as well as deep federal coverage going back to 1 U.S. 1, 1 F.2d 1, 1 F.Supp. 1, and 1 B.R. 1. The Fastcase collection includes cases, statutes, regulations, court rules, and constitutions. Fastcase also provides access to a newspaper archive, legal forms, and a one-stop PACER search of federal filings through our content partners.

Legal research.
Fastcase’s libraries are searchable, just like you search the Web or traditional legal research services – by keyword (or “Boolean” search), natural language search, or citation lookup. What makes Fastcase’s solution so much smarter is its tools that find the best answers fast, saving you time, and making your practice more competitive to clients.

Trusted.
More than 500,000 lawyers have access to Fastcase, making it one of the world’s most trusted research services. Twenty-one state bar associations and dozens of other membership organizations have purchased Fastcase subscriptions for all of their members, most after rigorous review and thorough analysis. Lawyers love Fastcase because they know they can trust that they will find the most authoritative cases first.

Features

Find answers faster. Traditional research services present a conundrum: either read screen after screen of irrelevant results, or “focus” results and run the serious risk of excluding important cases (maybe even the winning case!). Because Fastcase is the only legal research system that sorts the best results to the top of the list like Google, you can find the most important cases right away (at the top), no matter how many search results you get – and without the risk of overfocusing your research. Unsure what’s the best result? Fastcase includes 12 different ways to sort search results (such as relevance score, number of citations, or date decided), so you can customize what’s important to you.

Visualize search results to see the best results instantly. Only Fastcase features an interactive map of search results, so you can see the most important cases at a glance. Long lists of text search results (even when sorted well), only show one ranking at a time. Sorting the most relevant case to the top might sort the most cited case to the bottom. Sorting the most cited case to the top might sort the most recent case to the bottom. Fastcase’s patent-pending Interactive Timeline view shows all of the search results on a single map, illustrating how the results occur over time, how relevant each case is based on your search terms, how many times each case has been “cited generally” by all other cases, and how many times each case has been cited only by the super-relevant cases within the search result (“cited within” search results). The visual map provides volumes more information than any list of search results – you have to see it to believe it!

Integrated citation analysis. Search results on Fastcase automatically include the number of times each case has been cited – Fastcase is the only service that allows you to find the most cited case in your results with a single click. On traditional services, you could do that only by Shepardizing or KeyCiting every case in the search results. Finding the seminal case is one of the most important tasks in legal research, and Fastcase’s integrated citation analysis tools are by far the most powerful way to find the seminal case in any kind of research.

Affordable.Fastcase provides the law exactly as it comes from courts, legislatures, and agencies, without the extraordinary overhead that characterizes traditional legal research and its editorial gloss. We communicate that overhead savings directly to our subscribers, with prices that are an average of 80 percent less than comparable subscriptions on traditional services.

Flexible, predictable, “no contract” subscription options.Subscribing to Fastcase is easy. You can subscribe month-to-month, and without minimum contracts or duration requirements. Pricing is transparent and predictable – you know what your service will cost, with no surprises, so you can budget your legal research expenses with confidence.