Introduction

• Often you need to validate the usefulness and importance of prior or related cases and other documents to a current case. Citation to other caselaw or statutes can facilitate arguments in a legal case.
• "Citators" provide this capability. In either print or online form, a citator is a searchable compilation of cases that enables the user to determine:
  • If a particular opinion or statute is still current law.
  • What the adjudicative history is of a case.
  • If a case has been cited by other cases and, if so, by which ones.
  • What other cases a particular case has cited.
  • Other relevant materials, including parallel citations and treatises.
  • What is the the legislative history of a statute.
• The largest publisher of citators in the United States is Shepard’s, and the process of using a citator is often referred to as “Shepardizing.”.
• Citators use the standard numbering formats of "reporters," so you need to know the standard format of the citation in the appropriate reporter(s) for the case you are interested in.. See the page on "Abbreviations for Legislation & Court Reporters" for examples.

What Lexis Offers

Lexis provides three ways of checking citations and verifying caselaw and statutes.

• Shepards Citations Service
• Auto-Cite
• LexCite

Shephards

The Shepard's Citations Service enables you to assessing the relevance and validity of legal documents to your research, as well as to find additional supportive documents. Specifically, it can find such things as:

• Citations to a case.
• Parallel citations.
• History of a case.
• Analyses, treatments, and treatises on or relevant to a case.
• Additional citations from secondary sources such as law reviews.

Lexis offers two choices (click the appropriate bullet) when Shepardizing a citation:

• Shepards for Validation - This only provides subsequent (mostly appeals court) citations to the citation that you enter.
• Shepard's for Research - This provides the more comprehensive citation search results, including prior history and subsequent history, particularly the appelate history of the case. This "full" format also provides additional citations to and from other cases, statutes, and secondary sources.

• Click on Get a Document 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:
  • Citation number - Be sure that you have the correct number and format.
  • Party Name - This is the name of one or more of the parties.
  • Docket number - This is a tracking number for the particular case.
• Notes:
  • You do not have to capitalize.
  • You can omit periods, but you must input the spaces where the periods would have been.
• Example:
  • In the below, I've entered 55 Cal. App. 3rd 573 , a citation number for a case that has been before the California Appeals Court.

    

  • Click on Check.
  • Lexis retrieves the following:

    

AutoCite

This is from Lexis's Help pages:

"You can use the Auto-Cite® service to verify the accuracy of your research. The Auto-Cite service gives you the procedural history of your opinion, the full case name, and a very reliable set of parallel citations. However, Auto-Cite does not provide every citation to a given case. Auto-Cite gives you only cases referring negatively to your selected case."

The AutoCite interface is pretty simple.

LexCite

LexCite enables you to more precisely define the courts and dates for the citations that you are searching for. It can also locate both reported and unreported cases and a wide range of secondary sources, including law reviews and other references.