KCLL Klues: Washington State Legal Research

Those of you who have to report your CLE credits this year may be interested in free or low cost CLEs.  Because you have only a few days to fulfill your requirement, this posting focuses on possibilities for AV credits. 

Earlier this year, I wrote about the Intellectual Property Colloquium, which offers podcasts that have been approved for CLE credit in Washington.  Most of the podcasts offer 1 hour of CLE credit and are often engaging conversations about interesting, timely topics. 

In response to that posting, Washington lawyer Randy Winn wrote to us about his blog, 4 Free CLE.  The blog is nationwide in scope, but there is plenty to interest Washington lawyers.  Many of the programs have already been approved for multiple states; if that is the case, those states are listed.  Also, of particular help to those of you in search of last-minute AV credits, there is a tab at the top of the page “CLE Anytime!”, which will link you to CLEs in that category.  Even more useful at this late date is the December 27 posting, “22+ AV Credits Free . . . in Time for Year-End!”

The Washington State Bar Association provides a number of  low cost MP3 seminars on its CLEtoGO page.  For example, if you need just one more ethics credit, take a look at the offerings.  Also, there is a half-price sale on at least some of the MP3 CLEs from December 27 – December 31.  Check it out here.  

Seattle University Continuing Legal Education has an On Demand Webinar Library, where you can register for reasonably-priced online webinars on demand.  (Prices are discounted for SU Law Alumni.)

The Session Laws of the State of Washington from 1889 to the first two chapters of the 2011 session laws are now available free online, thanks to the Office of the Code Reviser.  This is one of the key resources for doing Washington legislative history research.

EDGAR, the SEC online database, has a new feature that allows for full-text searching of the last four years of EDGAR filings.  The full text that is searched is both the filings and all attachments to the filings.  The home page for the search notes that, “Occasionally, some recent filings are not available through the EDGAR Full-Text Search.”  There is a “FAQ” page, which I highly recommend reading — it may explain why you are or aren’t getting the results you’re looking for, and it has contact information for help with a search. 

There is an advanced search feature, where you can limit your search by form type, company name, CIK (Central Index Key; try this if the company name doesn’t work) or SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) code.

Thanks to the blog beSpacific for this tip.

The Washington State Law Library may have to close if it does not get adequate funding from the State Legislature.   Please see this editorial that ran today in the Tacoma News Tribune. It outlines the State House and Senate budget proposals, and tells how the Senate proposal would mean the end of the State Law Library.

The State Law Library has a complete set of Washington State Supreme Court and Court of Appeals briefs.  The library has a modestly-priced document delivery service.  You can borrow books — the library will send them to you.  Also, the State Law Library oversees the live chat reference service that this library participates in.  And, the State Law Library subscribes to a number of legal databases and will send materials from those databases to any Washingtonian. 

You can read about the State Law Library at its website.

Because of the possibility of a “shutdown” of the federal government, “Passport Day in the USA” will not be held on Saturday, April 9, in King County. You can read the announcement here. The United States State Department canceled the event nationwide.

The Intellectual Property Colloquium is an online audio program that offers free podcasts on intellectual property topics. According to the Colloquium website (and the WSBA website), the programs have been approved for CLE credit in Washington.  The current program from March 2011, “The Federal Trade Commission,” features a discussion of a recent FTC report on patent system reform.  Archived programs include  “More Than a Game” (from November 2010),  featuring the chief legal officers of three of the major video game studios, and “Privacy in a Networked World” (from December 2008).  The podcasts are hosted by Professor Doug Lichtman of the UCLA School of Law.

Your public library, e.g. Seattle Public Library or the King County Library System, can be a resource for legal research, particularly in law reviews and other legal periodicals.  (We aren’t passing the buck; we can help you find that information.) If you have a library card, you can do your research remotely; you don’t have to go to the library. 

For example, both SPL and KCLS have LegalTrac, an index that enables you to search for articles from law reviews and other legal literature.  Some articles are provided in full text, while for other articles, only a citation and/or abstract is provided. If full text is not available in LegalTrac, then you will get a link to sources for the full text if  it is in another database at the library.

You can also find legal publications for browsing or for retrieving an article you’re looking for.  You may be surprised at what is available — for example, many of the ABA journals and periodicals, three BNA Tax Management publications, and the Washington Law Review are available at both SPL and KCLS.  The offerings tend to be recent – maybe the last 5 or ten years.  Here is a list of full-text periodicals (not just law) available online through the King County Library System databases.  Here is a similar list for the Seattle Public Library.

The King County Law Library has both Lexis and Westlaw available for free use by its patrons.  The two products do not necessarily use the same search syntax.  That means that entering the same search terms in a Boolean search in Westlaw may not get you the same universe of results (or any results, for that matter), if you do the same search on Lexis, and vice-versa.  The Cleveland-Marshall School of Law library has compiled a comparison chart of the two systems.   The chart compares not only the search syntax of the two systems, but also their two citators:  KeyCite for Westlaw and Shepard’s for Lexis.   (Be aware that the King County Law Library subscriptions may not have all of the content referred to in the material from the Cleveland-Marshall School of Law.)

Don’t forget that we offer free Lexis at both our Seattle and Kent libraries.

Lexis is available at one terminal in each of the libraries.  The databases available for searching include Washington statutes, regulations, and cases, the USCS, United States Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cases, and cases from federal district courts within the Ninth Circuit.  In addition, you can search Washington treatises published by Lexis, such as Washington Business Entities:  Law and Forms and Washington Criminal Practice in Courts of Limited Jurisdiction.  There are also some Washington news databases, including the Puget Sound Business Journal. 

Also, if you have a citation to a case outside the searchable databases (such as a case from another state), or a publication that Lexis carries, you can generally retrieve that material with the citation. For example, you can retrieve a particular section of Collier on Bankruptcy if you have the citation.  In addition, you can generally access secondary sources that are linked to cases, annotated statutes, and Shepard’s results.

This is a reminder that we have free Westlaw available to all patrons at the King County Law Library.

The Seattle library has two terminals dedicated to Westlaw research, and the Kent library has one terminal with Westlaw access.  Our Westlaw subscription provides access to federal statutory and case law, state statutes and case law, and some primary law for Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.  Also included in our subscription are the Restatements, Federal Practice and Procedure, Federal Jury Practice and Instructions, several AmJur and ALR databases, and West’s Federal Forms.  There is a database of law reviews, and several Washington resources, including Washington Practice and Jury Verdicts Northwest.  We have access to databases in addition to what is listed above, and generally, Seattle Westlaw access is somewhat broader.  For example, it includes access to the administrative regulations of the 50 states.  Although we do not have a list of Westlaw databases we have access to, we can help you find out if a database you’re looking for is included in our subscription.