LexisNexis Quicklaw Search Tips

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Electronic Searching in a Law Firm Environment

Using a product such as QL in a law firm is quite different than using it during law school. In a firm, there is little room for error. Because of the extremely high cost, searches have to be efficient and on point. You will not have the time or the funds available to do endless searching with ineffective search strings. No client will be willing to pay for such things, which means the firm will have to absorb those costs – and this will reflect badly on you. Make sure you think about what you want to search and how before you start using QL – the more preparation you do ahead of time, the better.

Cost-Effective Tips

• The QL homepage is the least expensive way to get to a document. You can use this as a quick, cost-effective way to find the materials you need.

• Browsing for information is more cost-effective than searching. Your client will not be charged until you actually click on the link that takes you to the document for which you are looking.

• The ‘Note up with Quickcite’ search box on the homepage is a more cost-effective way of noting up a document (searching for the case or legislation first then noting it up costs more).

• Start out with a broad search; once you have conducted this search, do not click the ‘Modify Search’ option. Instead, use the ‘Narrow Search’ option. Modifying the search will incur another charge which will be passed on to your client; using ‘Narrow Search’ does not incur another charge. This will save your client money. NOTE – when using the ‘Narrow Search’ feature, it will only search for the new search terms within the limited number of results your original broad search gave you. For example, you searched for a case using the search string “bill of costs” and you only searched for cases in New Brunswick. You got 89 hits. When you type the word ‘divorce’ in the ‘Narrow Search’ option and click ‘Go’ you get 7 hits. These 7 hits are the only ones of the original 89 that includes the word divorce.

 

Useful Information

• With the ‘My Bookshelf’ section on the homepage, you can save all your favourite sources in a list for quick access.

• A $ next to a source name means that it is not included in your licence & will cost extra to use. Check to ensure this is ok before going forward.

• QL has a digest service akin to the Abridgment – ‘The Canada Digest’ allows you to find summaries of cases under different areas of law.

• When searching for a case, tribunal decision, or commentary, you can limit your search to a specific area of law. This will help weed out the cases that are not relevant to you.

• If you need to print out several documents, you do not have to do so one at a time; by clicking on the checkbox next to the item and then clicking on ‘Add to ’ you can save the document you want to print; at the end of your session, click on ‘View ’ at the top of the screen and you can print all your documents at once.

• Did you know that connectors (and, or, /n, /p, etc.) have a priority? When searching, click on the ‘View Connectors’ link to understand connector priority. In the ‘View Connector’ information page, you can also learn how to change connector priority by using brackets in your search.

• You can look at your search history to find an interrupted search; searches are saved for seven days. Click on the ‘History and Alerts’ tab to find your history. Running searches from the history will result in another charge to your client; however, documents retrieved in the last 48 hours can be accessed from your history page for free (to find these, click on ‘Recent Documents Viewed’).

• Halsbury’s Laws of Canada (a legal encyclopedia) is available electronically in QL. This is a great resource to use at the start of your research.

• QL has introduced Practice Areas. Legal information in a specific area of law will be gathered under its particular Practice Area (for example, FamilyPractice). This is a great way to find resources on a topic all in one place.

 

Special Thanks

Thanks to Sharon Forsythe, a trainer with LexisNexis Quicklaw, for these excellent usage tips. As someone who works closely with law firms, she has seen firsthand how ineffective searching can impact the firm’s bottom line and the articling student’s career.

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