CD-ROMs
Legal Research
Practice Specific

I do a substantial amount of tax work in my law practice and for many years I have relied on the federal loose-leaf service put out by Research Institute of America (RIA). This loose-leaf service is huge! It takes up two full 6-foot-long shelves. When the updates come in, my secretary and paralegal both look at me and say, "You've got to be kidding." There seems to be no escaping the vastness of this resource.

Still, complex tax problems often require complex solutions. And so a service like RIA's is indispensable. There just has to be an easier way to access and search the information. When CD-ROMs came out, I thought that would be the ticket. And, in fact, CDs were a giant leap forward, mainly because of the search capabilities they offered. But a vast library like the RIA federal service requires multiple CDs and changing a CD in the middle of a search can be a nuisance.

Well, the RIA Group has been aware of these frustrations and has thankfully now put its vast tax resources on the Internet. Named "Checkpoint," this service contains an immense amount of resources covering tax news, cases and rulings, state and federal materials, tax treatises and the famous RIA analysis. The service can be accessed at http://Checkpoint.riag.com. This is a huge resource available at your fingertips.

Among what you will find online, there are RIA's Federal analytical materials including Federal Tax Coordinator 2d and the United States Tax Reporter. There are state and local materials for all 51 jurisdictions including the District of Columbia. Research materials covering international tax issues are also available. Checkpoint offers access to a full library of public domain materials including cases and rulings as well as the Revenue Code and its regulations. Also available are 12 treatises from the Warren Gorham & Lamont series including Bittker & Lokken: Federal Taxation of Income, Estates & Gifts; Bittker & Eustice: Federal Income Taxation of Corporations and Shareholders; McKee, Nelson & Whitmire: Federal Taxation of Partnerships and Partners; Eustice & Kuntz: Federal Income Taxation of S Corporations; Bishop & Kleinberger: Limited Liability Companies: Tax and Business Law; and Saltzman: IRS Practice and Procedures.

You can stay aware of new developments through Checkpoint's TaxBase feature which provides current federal, state, local and worldwide tax news each day, plus full-text tax documentation.

Since Checkpoint is Internet-based, the service is accessible through your browser. You do not need any special software. Checkpoint has a very user-friendly interface and all of the major categories of the service can be easily accessed from the main menu. You can search for information by selecting particular databases and then specifying particular search parameters. There are handy check boxes that allow you to easily identify the resources you want to access. If you want to retrieve a specific regulation or code section, you click on the "Templates" button and then fill in the template with your desired information. You can even browse the over 100 databases offered by the service by clicking on a handy Table of Contents button from the side tool bar. The Table of Contents can be expanded depending on the level of detail you desire. You can click on any item in a Table of Contents to jump to that section of the database.

You can save and retrieve up to 250 previous searches and you can also schedule a search to run automatically for you at the time you specify.

And so what does access to this vast repository of resources cost, you might ask? Well, it's not cheap. Prices vary depending on which libraries you choose to sign up for and the number of users you register. For example, the yearly price for one user for the Federal Tax Library, a State and Local Tax Library, and the International Tax Library is $14,805 per year. The price for two to five users of these core libraries is $15,500 per year. A subscription to the complete tax library including the core libraries set forth above plus Pending & Enacted Legislation, Business Entities Treaties Library and Taxation for Accountants is $18,180 for six to 10 users. At these prices, the service may very well be outside the realm of possibilities for most sole practitioners. Smaller firms and medium-size firms that specialize in tax may be better able to handle these substantial fees.

All in all this is a tremendous service with an excellent user interface. As a small-firm practitioner, I could really use this service. Hopefully, the price to subscribe will come down.

About $15,000 to $18,000 per year

Reviewed by Arlin P. Neser, Esq., business, tax and probate attorney, Orange County, Calif.

Apr/May '98 Issue

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Updated 09/18/01
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