Are the cases, statutes and other authorities that you plan to cite still good law? Summer associates as well as experienced attorneys check using Shepard’s® Citations Service, available online through the LexisNexis® services. Law professionals also use Shepard’s to easily generate comprehensive lists of decisions and other legal sources that have cited their authorities.
While Shepard’s today is a powerful online service, it also remains available in book form, and its heritage as the premier citator tool for law firms goes back more than a century. This summer Shepard’s is celebrating its 135th anniversary.
How did Shepard’s come about? Here’s some insight—and perhaps an interesting topic for your conversations this summer.
Inventing a Better Way
Today it’s hard to imagine legal research without an organized system of citations. But that’s exactly the need 25-year-old Frank Shepard identified—and set out to fill—back in 1873. His idea would become Shepard’s Citations, a cornerstone of the legal research process for well over a century.
As a Chicago-based law book salesman, Shepard observed how his customers tried to keep track of authority. When attorneys found significant mentions of earlier cases in decisions they were reading, they would locate the previously published volumes and make handwritten marginal notations regarding the subsequent references. Handwritten notes may have made sense when the volume of case law was small. But as the number of reported cases grew exponentially, a standard system of recording citations was needed.
Making Analysis Stick
Shepard began to read Illinois decisions, painstakingly noting each instance in which an earlier case was cited in a later one. He turned his notes into an invention he called Adhesive Annotations because the citations were printed on gummed sheets, which were designed to be cut apart and pasted onto pages of case law. (Old case reports, with these “stickers” in place, can still be found in large law libraries.)
Almost from the start, Shepard included a full spectrum of editorial analysis in his product. The original designations included Criticized, Distinguished, Followed and Overruled—analysis that Shepard’s expert legal editors continue to apply today.
Advancing Lawyer Productivity
Shepard enjoyed considerable success due to the accuracy and timeliness of his product. Endorsers included eminent jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., then sitting on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Holmes wrote, “I regard ‘Shepard’s Massachusetts Annotations’ as the most thorough labor-saving device that has ever been brought to my attention. No one owning a set of reports can afford to be without it.”
By the early 1900s, Shepard’s had made the transition from Adhesive Annotations to the maroon-bound books that are still produced today. The company moved in 1900 from Chicago to New York City and in 1947 to Colorado Springs, where the editorial operation remains headquartered today.
In time, the use of Shepard’s became known as Shepardizing™. During the first years of the 20th century, Frank Shepard’s invention was ranked—along with the telephone (invented in 1876) and the typewriter (1873)—among the top three productivity tools for lawyers. One attorney called Shepard’s “the lawyer’s Rosetta Stone,” and described it as “the key to the undiscovered case-in-point that makes the difference between victory and defeat.”
10 Million Connections Online—Every Year!
Starting in the 1970s, Shepard’s gradually made the transition from citations extracted onto slips of paper and set into lines of metal type to today’s massive computerized database. And Shepard’s data first became available in the fledgling online research environment in the early 1980s. During the first hundred years of Shepard’s, more than 100 million citations were processed manually—while today almost 10 million Shepard’s connections are made in a single year.
In 1998, Shepard’s became part of LexisNexis, a significant transformation from “past” to “present.” LexisNexis has added powerful new navigational tools and continues to develop enhancements to the content and functionality of Shepard’s. On today’s lexis.com®, Shepardizing is easier, faster and more reliable than ever before. It includes integration with LexisNexis headnotes, which lets you quickly zero in on relevant authorities that have discussed the point of law of specific interest to you.
Generations of lawyers have relied on Shepard’s. To learn more about the power and confidence Shepard’s can bring to your legal research, see What Can Shepard’s® Do for You?