Discounted subscriptions to Fastcase—Accelerated Legal Research databases are now available through OCLC Western.
Fastcase offers a premium research resource with all the information you need, and an easier way of finding it. Fastcase is a comprehensive law library with all federal cases going back to 1 U.S. 1, 1 F.2d 1, 1 F.Supp. 1, and 1 B.R. 1 and state appellate cases going back to 1950 or earlier, for all 50 states. Fastcase also offers free access to federal and state statutes, as well as administrative codes.
Searching Fastcase has never been easier. If you can search the web, you can search on Fastcase. The Fastcase "best-case-first" search technology lists your results with the cases you need at the top of the list. Search results can be sorted in six different ways, helping you identify the most recent, most relevant, or most authoritative cases, making your legal research faster and easier.
Authority check displays later authorities that cite you case, and enables you to find related precedents, as well as identify contrary authority. The "most relevant paragraph" feature allows you to skip directly to the part of the case germane to your search, saving you countless hours of reading time. Dual-column printing ensures cases are easily readable and court admissible.
Fastcase is a terrific value. With your subscription, you get unlimited access to all 50 states for less than half the cost of a single state on other premium services. Subscriptions include unlimited searching, downloading, printing, authority checking, and customer service.
Fastcase offers benefits and research information crucial to the success of your legal practice, regardless of its size.
Product Features
Fastcase technology makes legal research smarter, faster, and easier than ever. Our research innovations include:
- Boolean and natural language searching
- Multiple citation lookup and extraction
- Sort by search relevance
- Fast document navigation and term navigation
- Search by date range, jurisdiction, and other fields
- Dual-column printing
- Hyperlinked case citations
- Page numbers listed throughout cases
- Most relevant sections displayed in search results
Searching With FastCase
In addition to Boolean and natural language searching, Fastcase allows users to search, sort, using key fields such as decision date, jurisdiction, and citation.
Viewing Results
Fastcase also includes powerful citation analysis tools allowing users to find the most authoritative and important cases faster. Sort the best cases to the top of the list—by relevance, by date, or using Fastcase's patent-pending citation analysis tools. Many times, the winning case is first or second on the list.
Reading Documents
The Fastcase user interface is intuitive and similar to industry standard applications. Application menus provide additional options for viewing, sorting, and printing. If you can search the web, you can search Fastcase. The system also features industry—leading customer service, with online help and telephone support at no additional cost.
Fastcase also allows users to jump to the most relevant paragraph within a document from the specified search with a single click. Hyperlinked citations and document summaries provide instant navigation between documents.
Authority Check Features
You can always confirm the continuing precedential value of your case using Fastcase's Authority Check feature. Authority check is available on the Result screen and on the Document screen, and it lists all later citations to your case, allowing you to confirm its precedential value. Instead of a semantic overlay describing case treatment, Fastcase lists the citing cases themselves, in sortable lists. And on the results page, Authority Check compares how often cases are cited, or enables citation anaylsis sorting to bring the most authoritative cases to the top of the results list.
Fastcase puts the whole national caselaw library on your desktop with online access to more than 5.5 million documents. Most collections date back to 1950 and are updated within 24-48 hours of the courts' decisions.
