KCLL Klues: Washington State Legal Research

King County Elections has just sent Special Elections ballots to voters in six districts for its February 14 Special Election.  The Auburn, Federal Way, Renton, Tukwila and Vashon Island school districts all have bond and levy measures and King County Fire Protection District No. 10 is seeking bond funds for equipment and facilities remodeling.  If you haven’t taken the time to visit the KC Elections web site, you should.  In addition to information about the operations of that office, it also includes a Voter’s Guide lookup feature that enables you to search for upcoming voter’s pamphlet information based on your name,  links to the forms you’ll need to register to vote in our State and a link explaining how to find the 5 ballot drop boxes you can use to return your completed ballot if you forget to drop it in the regular mail.

Washingtonlawhelp.org is a fantastic resource for self-help law guides written specifically for the general public.  The list of topics covered by the site is extensive and includes a variety of guides describing various aspects of home foreclosure law.  Recently, the editors at Washington LawHelp have added a new guide discussing the issue of short sales.  A short sale is an alternative to foreclosure where the buyer and the lender agree to sell a home for less than the balance owed on its mortgage.  The guide is brief–only 3 pages–but provides a good overview of the short sale process and discusses the pros and cons of pursuing a short sale.  It also links to another more extensive guide authored by the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions titled Short Sales Information and Seller Advisory.  Together, these will help you understand how a short sale works and whether or not to consider it as an alternative to a traditional foreclosure.

The GOP news release below came to us directly from Cynthia Etkin, Sr. Program Planning Specialist in the Office of the Superintendent of Documents.  Thanks for the update, Cynthia!  GPO Access was launched in 1994 and has been the official source for Federal government information online.  FDSys is the “next generation” system and includes expanded source materials in multiple formats , a more robust searching mechanism and the use of metadata for retrieval.

Direct from GPO — On Friday, November 4, 2011, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) draws one step closer to shutting down GPO Access. Once the Friday editions of daily updated content (e.g., Federal Register, Congressional Record) have been uploaded, GPO will cease updating GPO Access in terms of both database content and HTML pages. This will mark the start of the archive only phase of GPO Access and new content will only be loaded to FDsys. During this phase, GPO Access will remain publicly accessible as a reference archive.

 In order to make the switchover from GPO Access to FDsys as seamless as possible for users, GPO is in the process of creating one-to-one redirects from GPO Access content to the FDsys equivalent. This will ensure that bookmarks, Web links, URLs in print publications, and other GPO Access references point to valid Web resources. Once this has been completed, GPO Access will be taken offline. A date has not yet been established for the final shutdown of GPO Access; however, it is slated for fiscal year 2012.

Our online public access catalog, powered by EOS International, now has an interface developed specifically for mobile devices. If you’d like to use your iPhone, Droid, Blackberry or other Internet-capable phone to search our collection, simply point its browser to http://207.67.203.67/K80000. If you have any questions about searching our catalog or accessing our collection, please feel free to contact the staff at (206) 296-0940.

The King County Superior Court Clerk’s Office has released the new Superior Court Local Rules effective 9/1/2011.  Copies of the rules can be downloaded directly from the Superior Court Clerk’s web site or can reviewed and purchased in hard copy from either the Seattle or MRJC courthouses.

Even if you have visited the main web site for King County Superior Court many times, you may have missed the departmental links listed on the lower left-hand corner.  In particular I’d like to highlight the Civil and Criminal Department links.

The Civil Department link leads you to information about court rules, civil calendars, court services such as arbitration, settlement conferences and weddings, our State’s civil pattern jury instructions and the Court’s Civil Department Manual.  The latter contains a variety of sample documents including an amended case schedule, order on pretrial conference and a sample trial checklist.

The Criminal Department link leads you to a link to join the Criminal Department’s listserv, links covering the Court’s major criminal calendars, links to community correction services like the Helping Hands and Work Education Release programs,  and links to our State’s criminal pattern jury instructions and Sentencing Guidelines Manual.

The Ex-Parte/Probate committee of the King County Superior Court has decided to continue using the current guardianship training video posted on the Court’s guardianship forms site instead of the new online training routine now available on AOC’s web site.  We will post an update when/if the local Court decides to change its requirements.

We are pleased to announce the addition of a new database from EBSCO that provides online, full-text access to a number of our popular books from Nolo Press.  The database is called Legal Information Reference Center.  It’s available on most of our public computers in both our Seattle and Kent locations.  Books available include Neighbor Law, Every Dog’s Legal Guide, Copyright Handbook, Getting a Green Card, and Represent Yourself in Court.  You can search for information by keyword, general topic or even visually through an interface that graphs your results.  You can also browse or search for forms that are included in the books.  Results may be printed at the cost of 15 cents per page or saved to your own USB drive.

A new online training routine for non-professional guardians has been set up by AOC’s Guardian Program.  Individuals who wish to be appointed as guardians of another person or of an estate must register online with the Guardian Program, view a series of training videos and complete an exam for the specific videos dealing with guardianship of the person and guardianship of the estate.  This new routine was created in response to the passage of HB 1053 in Chapter 329 of the Laws of 2011.  AOC has also prepared a promotional flier describing this training and the recent changes to guardianship law in Washington State.  King County Superior Court’s Ex Parte committee will meet next week to determine how this new routine will be implemented in light of the existing guardianship training video already available on the Guardian Program’s web site.

As part of our National Library Week celebration, we would like to refresh your memory about the many custom databases we provide to support your research.  Use of all of these is free to anyone who visits either of our branches.  If you choose to print your results, the charge is 15 cents per page.

Westlaw — our custom subscription includes full-text access to all State appellate-level decisions, cases from all Federal district and circuit courts, all cases from the US Supreme Court, and the legislative and administrative codes from all fifty states.  It also includes full-text access to our State’s legal encyclopedia Washington Practice, broad-based legal encyclopedias such as American Jurisprudence 2d, AmJur Proof of Facts and AmJur Trials, Washington jury verdicts and West’s citator service Keycite.

Lexis — our custom subscription focuses on Washington State and Washington Federal resources including all decisions from our State Courts of Appeal and Supreme Court, cases originating in the Federal district courts in Washington and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Annotated Revised Code of Washington, and all three of our State’s law school publications, Washington Law Review, Seattle University Law Review, and Gonzaga Law Review.  It also includes access to Lexis’ citator service, Shepards.

Fastcase – the newest addition to our database lineup includes cases and statutes from all 50 states, federal statutes and cases, links to federal and state regulatory materials and specialty databases such as IRS Revenue Rulings,  Board of Immigration Appeals, United States Tax Court and U.S. Court of Federal Claims.  It also includes access to FastCase’s Authority Check system to help you quickly locate additional decisions related to your research.

SupportCalc — our subscription to this specialized software enables you to fill out, save and print child support and support-related documents for Washington State without having to manually calculate rates and figures.

HeinOnline — our subscription to this valuable resource provides access to full-text articles from hundreds of the nation’s leading law reviews and bar journals, the Code of Federal Regulations and United States Code, a variety of Congressional documents including the Congressional Record and the Congressional Record Daily, and legal classics such as Blackstone’s Commentaries.