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InfoPro Home > Keeping Current > Newsletter
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Professional Update
Issue 4, April 2006
- TAKE A TOUR... 1) New Shepard’s® Brief Suite™: Cite and Quote Verifying, Style Checking, and Table Formatting—All in One Toolbar 2) Here’s How to Produce a Better Brief in Four Steps
- SPOTLIGHT ON ... New Exclusive Alliance in the Law-Firm Market
One “Powerful Personalization” Tool for Daily Updates is One Huge Reason to Celebrate!
- KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE... LexisNexis® PowerInvoice™ Service is Your Firm’s “Power Tool” for Improving Cost Recovery
- FOR IPs ONLY ... Get Billing Search Tips at LexisNexis PowerInvoice Service Center
TAKE A TOUR. . . 1) New Shepard’s® Brief Suite™: Cite and Quote Verifying, Style Checking, and Table Formatting—All in One Toolbar 2) Here’s How to Produce a Better Brief in Four Steps
1) New Shepard’s® Brief Suite™: Cite and Quote Verifying, Style Checking, and Table Formatting—All in One Toolbar
Think you’ve got nothing to help patrons as they draft briefs and memoranda? Think again.
Now your organization can provide access to click-and-go tools that shift the balance of drafting time away from double checking for errors and formatting. Now your litigators can use the new Shepard’s Brief Suite to check and verify brief information—completing the tasks much faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Shepard’s Brief Suite combines citation and quotation verification, style checking and even table creation into one, easy-to-access toolbar for use with word-processed documents.
With the click of a toolbar button, litigators can:
- Uncover possible trouble spots as they draft.
- Match their work to “Bluebook standards” in seconds.
- Verify citations and quotations in one step.
- Create a table of authorities cited in a brief—no formatting needed.
2) Here’s How to Produce a Better Brief in Four Steps
Step 1 : Uncover Possible Trouble Spots as You Draft
Shepard’s Link (formerly known as LexLink) copies a brief or memoranda and pinpoints its citations—case law, law reviews, statutes, rules, regulations and more. Then it adds Shepard’s Signal™ indicators plus links to the full-text documents and to the full-text Shepard’s reports.
Perfect for drafting, Shepard’s Link even allows users to block text sections and add links. To add links to the word-processing or Web document you are viewing:
- Click the Shepard’s Link button, the first button on your suite toolbar. (If you are not logged into www.lexis.com, you will be asked for your Lexis® ID and password.)
- Click OK.
- Now you’re ready to browse the Shepard’s Signal indicators. Any cites worth checking? Link to a full-text document or Shepard’s report.
You can also use your Shepard’s Brief Suite toolbar buttons to create a cite list from your brief draft. Select the Create Cite List button (the second button on your brief toolbar). Your cite list will also include links to the full-text documents and Shepard’s reports. You can also select all or some citations from the list and click Get & Print to print, download* or e-mail* the full-text documents or Shepard’s reports.
Step 2 : Match Your Work to Bluebook Standards in Seconds
Shepard’s StyleCheck checks style against The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (18th Edition) published by the Harvard Law Review Association. Or select the California Style Manual. No citation marking needed!
Shepard’s StyleCheck (formerly known as CiteRite®) verifies text and footnotes for case law, federal and state statutes, federal legislative history, model codes, uniform codes, law reviews, books, services, signals, short forms and complicated string cites. If you request a check against Bluebook style, you can even check citations to tax materials.
StyleCheck provides an error report, highlighting each error found and providing a clear and comprehensive error message. StyleCheck even cross references the exact Bluebook rule.
Default style-checking options are pre-set. Or customize your options, e.g., to fit specific jurisdictional styles. Click Properties in the Options screen after selecting StyleCheck.
To submit the brief you are viewing to Shepard’s StyleCheck:
- Click the Shepard’s StyleCheck button.
- Click OK.
- View your error report. Be sure to save the report if your wish to view it again.
Step 3: Verify Citations and Quotations in One Step
Shepard’s BriefCheck (formerly known as CheckCite®) collects your brief’s case law and law-review citations, verifies them through Shepard’s Citations Service and Auto-Cite® and generates a summary report that tags problem cites for immediate attention. Plus it ensures all quoted case law conforms to the actual reported or existing language in the case-law opinion. Not only are quote errors reported, your BriefCheck™ report also provides the correct language.
To use Shepard’s BriefCheck for the brief you are viewing:
- Click the Shepard’s BriefCheck “check mark” button. You can identify a client or matter. Default checking options are selected. (To change options for Shepard’s, Auto-Cite or quote checking, click Modify. Check and uncheck specific options. Then click OK. If options have changed, you can save the new option set.)
- Click OK.
- View your citations list. (You can add, delete or modify cites and view document quotes.) Then click Create Report.
View your summary report. Problem areas are in bold for fast review. Select Expand All from the View menu to display signal links. Save your BriefCheck report if you wish to view it again.
Step 4: Create a Table of Authorities Cited in your Brief— No Formatting Needed!
Shepard’s FullAuthority prepares each cite for the table. Choose your table criteria. Cases and statutes can be separated as can U.S. and state materials. Alphabetize by defendant or public party name and sort by category (case, statute or miscellaneous). Remove explanatory second parentheticals, expand abbreviations and correct simple punctuation errors.
No tagging or marking citations is necessary! The FullAuthority program underlines reporter abbreviations, case names and histories, and even locates short forms. Options make it easy to combine long- and short-form citations, add reporters, or specify alternative spellings to fit a specific practice or jurisdiction. (You can even share the dictionary with other LexisNexis programs.)
To create a table of authorities for the brief you are viewing:
- Click the Shepard’s FullAuthority “gavel” button. Default table options are selected. (To change the options, select Properties. Click to check or uncheck options under Sort, Edit, Search and Format. Click OK. If options have changed, you can save the new option set.)
- Click OK.
- View your table. Be sure to save your table of authority.
Ask your LexisNexis account executive about
Shepard’s Brief Suite. Or get more details at: http://www.lexisnexis.com/shepards/briefsuitenews
SPOTLIGHT ON. . .New Exclusive Alliance in the Law-Firm Market
One “Powerful Personalization” Tool for Daily Updates
is One Huge Reason to Celebrate!
Sometimes law-firm librarians call themselves “human routing machines.” Each morning by 6:30 a.m. they’re at their desks, tackling mountains of e-mail alerts and updates from dozens of subscription. It takes until almost 9 a.m. to get all the updates out to the 100-plus firm attorneys who request them. Sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes attorneys ask, “Can’t I get it earlier?”
Stop. Stop being the firm’s human routing machine. Stop worrying about the other work on your desk piling up. Stop thinking about the patrons who are waiting and about the partners who agree that you can probably add some vital insights into the firm’s client-development strategies … if you only had the time.
Now each of your attorneys can turn to ONE daily e-mail consolidating their alerts and updates. And you have ONE, easy-to-use administration tool for managing the hundreds of distribution lists throughout the firm. That’s ONE HUGE reason to celebrate!
New LexisNexis® Research Total Alerts powered by Ozmosys® can deliver a streamlined, daily e-mail update or intranet/portal entry that fuses the best information from an attorney’s favorite sources. LexisNexis® CourtLink® Alerts and Tracks. LexisNexis® Publisher updates. LexisNexis® Mealey™ alerts.
And it doesn’t stop with LexisNexis resources! Choose content from more than 2,000 Web alert offerings. For example:
- WSJ.com Alerts—Subscribing firms can feed The Wall Street Journal Online updates through LexisNexis Total Alerts powered by Ozmosys. No problem!
- Alerts from hundreds of premium information providers such as Institutional Investor and BNA®. Include updates from international central banks or the Federal Reserve Board.
- Government and public Web sites—Not just the Fed, but SEC, FTC and DOJ regulatory sites and many others. Consolidate information you already receive from public sites such as the Virtual Chase: TVC Alert or CNN Top Stories.
- Non-U.S. government sites too! Find international regulatory sites, stock exchange events and memos.
- Client Web sites—Get new disclosures as clients release them.
- RSS feeds, blogs, Internet updates—including Google™, Yahoo!®, news RSS feeds, and more.
Each user opens a personalized e-mail, clicks on headlines of interest—and is authenticated directly into the full-text sources. No multiple log-ons to remember.
E-mail updates come twice a day—8 a.m. morning updates and 5 p.m. evening wrap-ups. But users can click to update any of their topics throughout the day. No news on a topic? The update says so.
Plus users can click on a topic and move directly to a monthly topic archive … valuable information, compiled, copyright compliant and ready to use.
And so much easier to administer. With LexisNexis Total Alerts powered by Ozmosys, you can manage and distribute highly relevant alerts based on each attorney’s practice, clients and information needs.
Distribution is centralized through an easy-to-use tool that lets an administrator forward hundreds of subscriptions to hundreds of internal users in a fraction of the time. Create group alerts by topic, practice area, client teams, etc. Readers may subscribe and unsubscribe.
Here’s more good news. Your organization still controls the subscription process with third-party sources. The team from LexisNexis Total Alerts powered by Ozmosys acts as your technical intermediary only.
“Ozmosys delivers the right information to the right people at the right time. Subscription management used to be an administrative nightmare. With Ozmosys, managing of all of our subscriptions is simple.”
–Ronda Fisch,
Director of Library Services,
Reed Smith
KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE. . .LexisNexis® PowerInvoice™ Service is Your Firm’s “Power Tool” for Improving Cost Recovery
by Carol Barra, LexisNexis Librarian Relations Consultant
The current economy makes your firm’s cost-recovery and business-management acumen more vital than ever before. Fortunately LexisNexis offers some powerful business tools to assist you as you work with firm management to meet
business goals.
Today let’s discuss the PowerInvoice™ service. This service provides secure Internet access to current, comprehensive billing data and invoice images. PowerInvoice maintains six months of billing data and 24 months of invoice images. Access requires an ID and password that your LexisNexis account team can request for you.
When I was a law-firm librarian, I worked with our Billing Department to implement the automatic downloading of the billing data from PowerInvoice into our billing system. I also assisted in PowerInvoice training for the Billing Department staff.
The library was responsible for monitoring use of the LexisNexis services, watching for cost-effective searching and ensuring the firm was recovering all LexisNexis services usage that could be attributed to a client/matter. That task included following up on the weekly “exception” reports the Billing Department provided. These “exception” reports included office general charges and client/matter numbers that were not accurate.
I discovered this task kept me in touch with the research our attorneys were conducting and gave me an additional opportunity to reach out and contact the attorneys. It also helped me recognize which attorneys needed additional training so they could research more cost effectively. Another bonus … it kept management aware that the library did impact firm profitability.
Before we go on, let me go over a few PowerInvoice basics. It will help when I start talking about the specific PowerInvoice report I used to follow up on the “exceptions” report.
When you sign onto the LexisNexis PowerInvoice service, you see tabs for Billing Data and Invoices. Billing Data is updated regularly throughout the month. Invoice data is the actual invoice your organization receives after the monthly billing data is complete.
For this article, let’s focus on Billing Data.
- At the top of the basic Billing Data screen, you see the latest date posted and the most recent invoice available in final format.
- You have a variety of choices on how to retrieve billing data for date ranges. For example, choose standard date ranges, which is the current month. Or select custom date ranges; just fill in the dates you need.
- Once you choose your date range, then select the report type you want. This part is easy because you can click Sample Reports to see examples of each available choice.
- In addition to choosing a specific report type, you’ll be asked to select an account number for which you wish to retrieve billing data.
Note there is a drop-down menu with all of your LexisNexis account numbers. (If your firm has multiple offices, you will have several account numbers. You can determine which account numbers correspond with each office by looking
at an invoice.)
Now, back to managing exceptions—and improving the bottom line.
The report I used most often was the Detail Report (by User/Client) because I wanted to see as much information as possible, including the user’s name, ID, client/matter number, search details (broad category of sources searched like Lexis Legal and Shepard’s Citations Service), search dates, number of searches, online time, printing and linking.
By the way, if you have a subscription contract, you’ll also see the gross cost, the amount of the adjustment based on your contract, net amount, outside-of-contract amount, before-tax total and total with tax. If you do not have a subscription contract, you will not see the adjustment or the outside-of-contract columns.
Often I could determine that the user had transposed numbers for a client/matter, and I was able to send the corrected information to the Billing Department. I was also able to provide the attorney with information that might help in determining if an office general charge should be changed to a client charge. Today attorneys can more easily determine the appropriate client/matter to charge by using PowerInvoice in conjunction with the History log available through lexis.com®.
There are several other PowerInvoice features worth noting, including Enhanced Search, which allows retrieving data for a single user or client/matter, and Custom, which allows you to set rates or percentages for recovery and to rename the LexisNexis services. The Reallocation feature allows you to redistribute or remove non-billable charges.
PowerInvoice is a powerful tool to help you assist management in improving recovery. Your LexisNexis account team, including your LexisNexis Librarian Relations Consultant can help you get the most from it. Just ask them.
Or go to the new LexisNexis PowerInvoice Service Center, now available on the LexisNexis InfoPro Web site. Download PowerInvoice reference literature, get answers to frequently asked questions and find more information on recent PowerInvoice enhancements.
FOR IPs ONLY ...Get Billing Search Tips at LexisNexis PowerInvoice Service Center
Would you like to verify what data is available in PowerInvoice billing reports? Can you change the exchange rate for currency displayed PowerInvoice billing data?
You can. Find out how at the new LexisNexis PowerInvoice Service Center, now available on the LexisNexis InfoPro Web site.
Geared specifically to information professionals who use the PowerInvoice Service to gain secure access to current, comprehensive LexisNexis billing data and invoice images, the PowerInvoice Service Center offers concise tips on how to:
- choose PowerInvoice tabs and search the billing data
- use the Custom Billing feature to generate a variety of billing reports
- review nonbillable charges over a specific period of time (and generate reallocation reports)
- find and view current open invoices with the new Open Invoices feature.
You can also use the PowerInvoice Service Center to link to a downloadable PowerInvoice Service Quick Reference Guide, which provides step-by-step assistance on:
- downloading and printing billing reports,
- finding and viewing invoices,
- reviewing payment history,
- setting cost-recovery profiles,
- reallocating charges, and much more.
Go to the LexisNexis PowerInvoice Service Center for information professionals: www.lexisnexis.com/infopro/powerinvoice
LexisNexis™ Information Professional Update
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LexisNexis Information Professional Update is a monthly newsletter (November/December issues combined) for law-firm, law-school, corporate, and government information professionals published by LexisNexis, P.O. Box 933, Dayton, OH 45401-0933..
Managing Editor
Barbara M. Byrd
barbara.byrd@lexisnexis.com
Contributors
Peter Adams, Beverly Burns, Kara Cox,
Lorraine Gongla-Coppinger,
Jayne Nash, Carol Sandy
Legal Liaison
Shari Townsend
For comments or questions regarding legal products, contact:
Cindy Spohr, MLS
Senior Director, Librarian Relations Group
cindy.spohr@lexisnexis.com
LexisNexis, Lexis, Shepard’s, FullAuthority, CheckCite, CiteRite, lexis.com and the Knowledge Burst logo are registered trademarks, and Shepard’s Link, LEXLink and Shepard’s Signal are trademarks of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc., used under license. Auto-Cite is a registered trademark of Reed Elsevier Inc. BriefSuite, BriefCheck, StyleCheck, PowerInvoice and Mealey are trademarks of LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. CourtLink is a registered trademark of LexisNexis CourtLink, Inc. BNA is a registered trademark of The Bureau of National Affairs Inc. Other products or services may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their
respective companies.
© 2006 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
All Rights Reserved. LB2006-4 0306
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