For lawyers, Paralegals, Legal Assistants, Law students and non-lawyers, the Internet has made finding cases, statutes and pending legislation easier than ever before. Trips to the local law library are still necessary in some rare occasions but online resources have made it so much easier for this profession. What’s more important than that is the fact that most of them are free of charge for anyone to use.
The following are some of the industry favorite free online legal resources:
http://www.law.cornell.edu: Operated by Cornell Law School, this site is one of the more comprehensive resources on the Internet for finding state and federal cases, statutes, regulations, law reviews, etc.
http://www.findlaw.com: This is an easy to navigate site that contains links to various state and federal on-line sources. If you are looking for information on state laws or court decisions this is a good place to start.
http://www.lawguru.com: Similar to findlaw.com and very easy to use.
http://www.thomas.loc.gov: The legislative research service of the Library of Congress. This is the most up to date site for information on both existing laws and pending legislation before Congress.
http://www.law.indiana.edu/v-lib/: Run by the University Law School, this site allows users to search for legal documents by keyword or information type.
http://www.law.duke.edu.lib/: It provides access to many online legal information sources.
http://www.ilrg.com: Comprehensive index of more than 4000 websites with an emphasis on United States material. However, it provides access to an extensive collection of legal material from other countries. Websites are selected for relevance and uniqueness. It allows restricting searches to particular jurisdictions or types of domains (e.g. .gov, .org or specific countries .uk).
http://www.washlaw.edu: Large and diverse collection of web links to legal material. The information is arranged by jurisdiction and topic.
If you still can’t find what you’re looking for and money is no object, you can’t find it anywhere else and a trip to the law library at your nearest law school or courthouse is out of the question, the following companies allow you to use your credit card to search and download documents from their comprehensive legal and information databases.
Unfortunately, these commercial sites are often the only online source for retrieving older cases and secondary resources, such as law review articles. Prices generally start at about $10 per downloaded document. Read the user agreement carefully.
If you are looking for copies of court records or standard legal forms you can use the following resources:
