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Will the VSB renew Fastcase?

You’ve done your research and you’re ready to represent your client, a Virginia Beach night club, in a challenge to the local noise ordinance.

Case law in hand, you head to court.

There may not be controlling Virginia authority, but using your Virginia State Bar Fastcase account, you found a Wisconsin case to cite to the judge.

Excuse me, you say that case has been reversed?

This embarrassing moment prompted Virginia Beach lawyer Kevin E. Martingayle to take a long look at the online legal research service the VSB began offering to all members in 2006. Martingayle is part of a VSB task force that is reviewing member experience with the service, up for contract renewal in February 2009.

The task force, chaired by VSB President-Elect Jon Huddleston, met Aug. 22 in Richmond. It plans a user survey to go beyond the anecdotal evidence from those who love Fastcase and those who find it lacking.

Through member log-in at the VSB Web site, Fastcase provides access to federal codes, regulations and case law, to codes and case law back to 1950 for all states and back to 1925 for Virginia appellate authority.

At an annual cost of $94,000, the service has seen over 12,000 total log-ins as of August 1, as well as an overall increase in total unique log-ins from June 2007 through July 2008, to 2,668. Huddleston said there has been a 30 percent increase in log-ins over the last 12 months.

Fastcase has been well received by VSB members, especially solo and small-firm practitioners, according to VSB Executive Director Karen Gould, also a task force member.

Initially available only to active VSB members, Fastcase now is available through the VSB to retired judges and all retired VSB members, VSB Deputy Executive Director Mary Yancey Spencer told fellow task force members.

Earlier this year, Fastcase digitized all VSB disciplinary orders, providing a searchable product for bar staff, according to Spencer.
Through training and its online tutorial, the Fastcase service acknowledges limitations in its “Authority Check” feature, and reminds users that citators such as Shepards and KeyCite are available at a per-transaction charge to supplement research in Fastcase.

Fastcase, which now has contracts with 12 different bar associations, works constantly to improve its pattern recognition software for better search results, according to CEO Ed Walters. The company “revises its algorithms every day. We’re always working on Fastcase” in response to user feedback, he said.

And Fastcase soon will add its own searchable version of the Virginia Code to the Virginia Fastcase service, Walters said.
Martingayle is not the only lawyer to document problems with search results. Task force member Sarah Louppe Petcher has moved from private practice to her current position as associate general counsel at the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors® Inc., where Fastcase is her only onsite research tool. Petcher told VLW in a later interview that moving from full-service Lexis searching in the private firm environment to Fastcase has “been a learning experience.”

Petcher told the task force, “Our law department has only two attorneys. The only legal research tool we have is Fastcase. We use it a lot and we are running into the same problems” Martingayle has observed.

Both Martingayle and Petcher emphasized they were most concerned about cases that seem to be missing entirely from the database, or that only show up through precisely rendered citation searches.

“You roll up in front of the wrong judge with some authority that’s been overturned and there’re going to be some consequences,” Martingayle said.

These apparent omissions may come from whether data is simply scanned into an online system or if it is massaged prior to entry. For instance, Shepards still has some “human intervention” and West still changes character spacing to correct citations before entry into databases, according to task force member Timothy Coggins, Director of the Law Library at the University of Richmond’s T.C. Williams School of Law.

It “doesn’t do us a whole lot of good to say you still need Lexis and Westlaw,” Martingayle said.

The quality of the Fastcase product “goes to the concern that this is a VSB-endorsed tool,” so that users will come to it with certain presumptions, said task force member Donna Bausch, Director of the Norfolk & Portsmouth Bar Association and the association’s law library.

Realistically, Bausch asked, how many attorneys are willing to use multiple vehicles per search. “That puts a pretty heavy burden on the end-user.”

The VSB may have to decide whether they only want to endorse a comprehensive research tool, or that the better choice for members is to endorse a more limited product and make sure users understand the limitations.

The advantage of Fastcase is that now VSB members have access to a legal research tool where many had none before. But if “you can’t really jettison the high-end tools” it may not be much of a benefit, Huddleston said.

Fastcase usage may pick up with newer lawyers. Taking a hint from the get-them-in-law-school, get-them-for-life marketing model, Fastcase is now “aggressively marketing” to academic law libraries, according to Coggins. For one low rate, Fastcase is providing all UR law students and faculty a single password that allows unlimited simultaneous users of the service.

“It’s a very different market” than three years ago, Petcher told the task force. She said her two-person legal department is now getting “very competitive quotes” from major vendors for legal research services.

Task force members say a survey will help the VSB develop a better framework of what users are doing, so they have something to present to Fastcase. Lawyers also have been suggesting that additional resources be added to Fastcase, including circuit court opinions, jury instructions and treatises.

How much time are users spending per log-in? “Are they jumping in and jumping out, or doing in-depth searching as opposed to case pulls,” asked Bausch.

The group also hopes to have law students conduct comparative testing in head-to-head match-ups between Fastcase and other online legal research tools, getting them to “push and pull and tug on the system,” Martingayle said.

“We have a good but flawed product that we can afford. We would like to provide a better, less flawed product,” Huddleston said.

Other Fastcase task force members include Richmond lawyer Jacqueline McClenney, Williams Mullen law librarian Jeanne Ullian and State Law Librarian Gail Warren.

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