Hey there, reporters! Sorry this is coming at you late – it’s been a wild week as I’ve been doing Google trainings in three cities – and two more next week.
In the spirit of Google training, let’s talk about:
Good old Google Scholar, saving high schoolers from flunking book reports since 2004. But procrastination isn’t just for teenagers! You can find authoritative, peer-reviewed, professionally-published papers right before deadline, too.
You can filter by date, set up alerts, and even reach out to expert sources.
The cool thing though is that Google is starting to add in case law. That is, you can search judicial opinions and limit it to courts you’re interested in. For example, cases in Louisiana that contain the phrase “battered women’s syndrome.”
There are a couple catches: one, judicial opinions are only one type of court document… and they come at the end. That means new lawsuits, indictments, and other interesting docs are not listed here.
Plus, Google is just now adding them all in. I believe they’ve got all the federal courts, for instance, but not all the courts in Florida. Even with those limitations, I would recommend using Scholar over a lot of court websites, because, yikes.