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Narrowing Your Shepard’s® Results with FOCUS™
Shepard’s is the perfect tool to determine if a case, statute, or regulation is good law. Shepard’s is also an excellent resource to find additional cases, statutes, regulations, or secondary materials that discuss the same or similar points of law. Use the FOCUS Restrict By feature to narrow your results after you retrieve a Shepard’s report.
Suppose you need to research Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 U.S. LEXIS 2094. In particular you are interested in cases in the Second Circuit that cite to Brown and mention the phrase “separate but equal.” To retrieve the Shepard’s report for Brown click the Shepard’s tab, type the citation, and click Check. Once you have retrieved the Shepard’s report, click the FOCUS Restrict By link, type in “separate but equal” in the FOCUS Terms box, check the box next to 2nd Circuit, and click Apply. The Shepard’s report now shows 11 cases within the Second Circuit that mention both Brown v. Board of Education and “separate but equal.”
As this example illustrates, FOCUS Restrict By allows you to narrow a Shepard’s report by both jurisdiction and terms. The terms used in the FOCUS Terms box can be any Terms and Connectors search string, which greatly enhances your ability to narrow your search.
The FOCUS feature is only available if the number of citing references within the Shepard’s Report is 2000 or less. With Brown v. Board of Education, the original report contains 10,667 citing references. Our search got around this limitation by choosing a particular jurisdiction which has less than 2000 citing references.
For additional information on using the Shepard’s feature, visit the LexisNexis® Knowledge Base and click on Shepard’s® Citations Service.
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