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InfoPro Home > Professional Development > Monthly Column
LexisNexis® Case Summaries and Headnotes - A Progress Report
(February 2004)
By Toby Teumer, Marketing Manager, Librarian Relations Group
We are excited to announce that LexisNexis now has 3 Million case law summaries available online!
When LexisNexis„ Case Summaries and Headnotes (then called Core Concepts) first released in late 1999, they were the latest crucial components of the lexis.com research system, leveraging the innovative technology and editorial expertise of LexisNexis to deliver a superior alternative analysis tool. Case Summaries and Headnotes were created to make your research faster, allowing you to more quickly determine whether or not a case is relevant.
From that point forward, Case Summaries have been created
for all new substantive decisions released by the courts. Summaries are available
within 72 hours of the receipt of the case by LexisNexis. In addition, LexisNexis began a massive effort to create Case Summaries for retrospective cases.
Case Summaries are editorially written synopses of cases, containing targeted and concise analysis to help you quickly determine the issues addressed. Each Case Summary has three sections: The Procedural Posture section describes the case€™s procedural history €“ how this case arrived before the court at hand. The Overview provides a brief review of the court€™s holding on the legal issues raised, and the Outcome describes the procedural disposition of the case.
All Case Summaries are written by LexisNexis attorney editors in the U.S., so you can have confidence in the quality.
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Over 93% of our legal editors have passed a state or federal bar exam.
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Approximately 57% have graduated from €œTop 100€ law schools (as defined by U.S. News and World Report)
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Almost 36% have law review or law journal experience
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Approximately 15% have judicial clerkship experience
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Approximately 19% have earned advanced degrees in addition to their Juris Doctorate degrees.
Located beneath the Case Summary,
LexisNexis headnotes
are key legal points of a case, editorially selected by LexisNexis legal editors. They provide instant information about both the legal issues and fact patterns of a case. Headnotes are drawn directly from the language of the case itself, so you won€™t potentially be misled by a misinterpretation of the court€™s analysis.
Generated as soon as the document is added to the LexisNexis services, headnotes are available for all reported and unreported decisions, plus Attorney General Opinions and many administrative decisions. Links let you jump from each headnote directly to the section of the case from which it is drawn. Also, each headnote is classified by the legal topics found in Lexis Search Advisor, so that you can quickly identify related issues and link to Search Advisor to run a search on that topic. All statutory and case citations referenced in Case Summaries and LexisNexis are hyperlinked to the full document text for fast retrieval.
LexisNexis headnotes are numbered to enable you to find the language of the headnotes in the body of the case and link to it. Having the headnotes also numbered in document delivery enables you to quickly scan through a case after it is printed, looking for the number that corresponds to the headnote you have identified as being relevant. Use LexisNexis headnotes to:
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Track the language used by the court in discussing the key points of the law in the case
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Uncover additional information by linking directly to relevant sections in the case, other related documents, or to LexisNexis® Search Advisor
The More Like This Headnote and Retrieve All Headnotes features expand your LexisNexis headnote research beyond your on-point case. More Like This Headnote allows you to focus on the terms of art of key words in a particular headnote. It uses those terms and key words to find more cases with similar headnotes or with closely matching language in the opinions. Use More Like This Headnote later in your research, when you€™re looking for a case pertaining to a specific point of law.
Retrieve All Headnotes works with Lexis Search Advisor to show you all case headnotes written for a specific Search Advisor topic, plus additional highly relevant cases. More than 5,000 Lexis Search Advisor topics are covered. Use Retrieve All Headnotes early in your research to help you understand the topic.
Three million Case Summaries is hardly the end of our work. Instead, it represents a proud milestone, as we continue to deliver on our promise to provide tools to improve your research speed and efficiency with the superior level of quality you've come to expect from LexisNexis.
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