Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers a court docket service to keep you apprised of your cases, obtain competitive intelligence, and identify new business opportunities (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of an Outlook add-in with tools for managing large distributions and preventing common errors, a service with model forms and practice guides for transactional lawyers, software for automating the creation of a table of exhibits in Word documents, contract analysis software, practice management software that automates trust account replenishment, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.
Court dockets contain a wealth of data. Mining this data can help you identify new business opportunities, find model briefs, and gain insights about judges and opposing counsel. And of course you should always monitor the dockets of your cases.
CourtLink … in One Sentence
LexisNexis' CourtLink enables you to monitor, search, and mine the largest collection of court dockets and documents — all federal courts and more than 1,200 state courts.
The Killer Feature
CourtLink Alerts can notify you via email about recently-filed cases of interest. For example, Litigant Alerts inform you about docket events relating to existing or prospective clients. You can bulk upload your entire client list, choose specific courts, and enter keyword terms and connectors to narrow the scope. The Manage My Alerts page lists all your Alerts and tools for editing and deleting them.
Alerts can also notify you about litigation work that might be in your wheelhouse. You can focus on the nature of a lawsuit such as a practice area, class action, appeal, etc. Similarly, you can create Alerts for filings by an adversary against whom you've won, a judge you've successfully persuaded, etc. With the ability to receive an email notification within an hour of a new filing, you can send a brochure to defendants and appellees faster than your competitors.
A special CourtLink Alerts tool called Breaking Complaints notifies you about notable new lawsuits filed in courts of interest to you. The CourtLink team creates these alerts based on prominent parties and other factors.
Other Notable Features
CourtLink offers a Lexis Advance-like interface for one-off, full-text terms and connectors searches with tools for refining your results by date, jurisdiction, and other parameters. CourtLink can even search PDF images in a case docket. The search results break out dockets, documents, and premium documents. Premium documents consist of model pleadings and briefs in Word format selected by the CourtLink team that you can download and edit.
Courts with their own online dockets typically offer only rudimentary tracking tools if any. The CourtLink Tracks tool enables you monitor both your own cases and other cases of interest. You can create notifications based on granular searches such as document type, new counsel, additional litigants, etc.
Data analysis has become increasingly important in many aspects of litigation. CourtLink's Strategic Profiles powered by recent acquisition Lex Machina enables you to generate charts to analyze the history of judges and opposing counsel. For example, the Nature of Suit Analysis breaks down the history by type of lawsuit, while the Judgment Analysis shows you the number of cases a party won, lost, and settled.
"Spotting threats and new business opportunities, assessing the competition's litigation history, and developing a winning case strategy are vital," said Jeff Pfeifer, vice president of product management for North American Research Solutions at LexisNexis. "CourtLink delivers this thanks to its database of nearly 200 million dockets and other court documents, and next-generation analytics insights from Lex Machina."
What Else Should You Know?
You can download any available docket document in PDF format. CourtLink has a runner service for state court documents not available for download. You can share search results and tracked dockets with colleagues using Shared Folders. Learn more about CourtLink.
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