Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Accessing Court Documents on Lexis

LexisNexis is now providing the academic market limited access to CourtLink. CourtLink is a docket/document retrieval and e-filing product containing millions of state and federal case dockets, briefs, motions, and complaints. For now, academic subscribers can access over six million of the 85 million documents available to commercial customers.

Washington-specific documents are limited to those filed in these federal courts: U.S. District Court, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Washington state court dockets/documents are not available.

One way to find CourtLink: log in to Lexis at www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool and click Research Now to enter the research system. From the Legal tab, click on the heading Court Records, Briefs and Filings. On the next screen, click on the heading Court Records. Finally, click on the link for Litigant, Attorney & Judge Strategic Profiles. This opens a new window into CourtLink.
One of the new features now available is the Single Search box where you can enter a terms & connectors search to find your specific topic. Once you get to the results, there will be two tabs: one for dockets and one for documents.

After entering your term(s) in the single search box, you can then refine your search results on the left hand side by choosing case type, litigation area, state or date filed. You can narrow your results by entering a keyword in the “Search within Results” box.

The dockets currently do not provide live links to the documents listed.

Coverage for Washington’s federal courts is as follows:
  • U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington: civil documents back to 1986; criminal documents back to 1992.
  • U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington: civil documents back to 1987; criminal documents back to 1991.
  • Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Washington: back to 1988.
  • Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Washington: back to 1992.
  • Also, the U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit (including the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel) has documents back to 2000.

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