Legal Research with Google and other cheap sources

Researching Unpublished COA Opinions in Texas has a trick for using Google to do legal research. Google indexes all the COAs in Texas except for Dallas. The site explains:

"Texas has fourteen courts of appeals. Luckily, the opinions in thirteen of those (all but Dallas) can be quickly searched in Google by including the following operator within your search query: site:courts.state.tx.us/opinions. If you want to focus your results on a particular court, such as the appellate district your case is in, just add that to the operator. For example, site:3rdcoa.courts.state.tx.us/opinions restricts the search to opinions coming out of the Austin Court."

The site also explains how to research the Dallas Court of Appeals. For those a little slow on the uptake like me all you need to do is paste site:courts.state.tx.us/opinions followed by your search term.Example: site:courts.state.tx.us/opinions ERISA would bring up all the Texas cases using ERISA. Play with it. It will not break you computer. Thanks to Erika Wayne for posting this this tip to legalresearchplus.com.

A word of caution, I attempted to check some language in Bonnie Cicio, Individually and As Administratrix of the Estate of Carmine Cicio, Plaintiff-appellant, v. John Does 1-8, Defendants,vytra Healthcare, and Brent Spears, M.d., Defendants-appelleesUnited States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit. - 321 F.3d 83 as reported in Google scholar by entering the cite in Google. It returned a page from Justia that listed two other cases in vol. 321, but not the case I wanted. I then ran the same query in Ask that brought up the correct citation in Justica. The citation entered was identical, because all I did was change from Google to Ask on the address bar. The questioned language was the same on both, motion to discuss instead of motion to dismiss. Of course, even bound reporters are sometimes misbound, but it pays to run a query through different search engines..

For doing research on a more national scope try, Justia or Google Scholar or JuriSearch or LLRX. Google Scholar has the advantage in that the citations are with hyperlinks that can be used without violating the copyright provisions of the other sites. This makes it easy to share cases by including a hyperlink. It, also, makes it possible to provide the court with a hyperlinked brief.

For those unfamiliar with Google Scholar to the right of the main Google search bar is a heading, "advanced search". A click on it will take you to a page that starts with several types of searches you can conduct. Scroll down and you will see, "Google Scholar" click it and away you go.