Introduction

• Often you need information for a specific case. If you have the names of both the plaintiff and the defendant, it is relatively straightforward. Of course, there may be multiple caselaw between two parties, including appeals and remanded cases, and you need to have the correctly spelled names.
• Judicial decisions or "opinions" in federal appeals and Supreme courts as well as regional, state, and specialized courts are published in a series of volumes called "reports" or, more commonly, "reporters.
• You need to know in which court a decision is likely to have been made as well as the format of the citation in the appropriate reporter(s) for that court. See the page on "Abbreviations for Legislation & Court Reporters" for examples.

Process

• There are several ways of searching for caselaw by name in Lexis, but one of the easiest is to click on the Get a Document tab at the top of the screen.
• In the red bar right below "Get a Document" you select what type of information you are going to enter In this case you click on Party Name. You use this to enter the name of one or both of the parties (plaintiff, defendant, appellant) involved with the case you are searching for.
• Notes:
  • You do not have to capitalize.
• Example:
  • In the below, I've entered "apple" and "microsoft" and selected all federal and state courts.
  • I have not selected a date range because I want to see all cases involving the two that are in the Lexis database.

    

  • Click on Search.
  • Lexis retrieves the following: