Oliver's Cases - Apr/May '99

Oliver's Cases

Oliver's Cases, a new cyberclipping service, searches over 100 court Web sites to find new opinions. Once you tell Oliver's Cases what courts and areas of law you're interested in, the program looks for relevant opinions and delivers them to you electronically.

I'm the type of person who likes to learn by doing, so when I tell you the program's installation is easy to follow and execute, I really mean it. You don't need to memorize a manual. The program's client installs quickly, the prompts are easy to follow, and setup is simple and straightforward.

I subscribed to my state's Supreme Court and several neighboring states. I refined the retrieval by telling it to look for words and phrases such as "child custody," "parenting plan" and "visitation." Oliver's Cases sent opinions that contained those phrases or key words for the states I subscribed to. I could view the full text of each opinion, download it to disk, print a hard copy, or cut and paste into a document.

Subscription to Oliver's Cases is $195 a year -- not unreasonable compared to a CD-ROM. However, this is an update service only; subscribe today and you won't get last week's cases.

I wanted to see what I could get for free, so I looked at the state court Web pages of each state I subscribed to with Oliver's Cases. Aside from price (most state case law sites offer free access), one advantage of visiting the Web sites themselves is that you can sometimes get the cases quicker. Also note that some state courts do not post their opinions, or post only summaries.

Despite this, Oliver's Cases can still be a valuable tool for those who want to lighten the amount of time they spend researching online. If you consistently struggle to keep up with state case law, this could be the tool for you.

Oliver's Cases
(800) 946-0158
www.oliverscases.com
Windows

$195 per year

Reviewed by Carolyn J. Stevens, family law attorney, Missoula, Mont.

Apr/May '99 Issue

PROS
Works as promised.

CONS
Visiting some sites directly can be more efficient (and cheaper!).

VERDICT
If you need help keeping up with state cases, this is a valuable tool.