Introduction

• Frequently, you need to find caselaw or statutes that relate to the subject of a current legal issue.
• It is often the case that you do not have a specific citation to a prior decision or the number of a particular section of a state or federal code.
• You many also not have any names of people or titles of laws that relate to the current legal issue. So what do you do?

Subject Searching Methods

• Lexis offers several ways of doing subject searching under the Search, Research Tasks, and Search Advisor tabs.
• You need, though, to consider the components of the caselaw that you are going to search. Specifically, each judicial opinion typically contains the following components that are searchable:
  • Headnotes, which includes the names of the parties involved and, maybe, their location and type of organization, if not a person.
  • Date
  • Disposition
  • Procedural Posture
  • Summary, often called an "Overview."
  • Outcome
  • Core Terms
  • Body of the decision
  • Conclusion
  • Footnotes
  • and more.
• Lexis supports a powerful range of sophisticated search functions, including full Booleans, several proximity operators, wild cards, phrase searching and nesting, and "segment" (fields) searching. See the Lexis Cheatsheet (a Word document) for details.

Process - Example Starting from the Search Tab

• The first thing to do is click on the type of court(s) (or codes or other documents) that you want to search.

  

This brings up a search box

• You can create complex search statements in this box and in the similar ones that come up under Research Tasks and Search Advisor.
• Notice that Lexis provides a brief table of "connectors" (which are called "operators" in most other databases) on the right side for guidance.
• Also notice that you can use the "Restrict by Segment" pulldown menu to find "segments" (which are called "fields" in most other databases) to limit one or more search terms to. When you enter the search term then click on the "Add" button, the "segment" and its contents (your search term) are "anded" to your search in the search box.

  

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This brings the following record