Happy New Year!
It's been 3 ½ years since we last updated our index to our online research resources. That's almost ⅓ of the total life of the blog, which started in way back in 2006. We've been blogging now for well over ten years. Our first substantive research post, on the presumption against preemption, was published that November. We are now up to over 3400 separate posts of greater or lesser import.
We use this blog regularly as a research tool, and we regularly pass posts along to others in our firms when they ask. We suspect that a lot of you do, too. Even for us, it becomes progressively more difficult to find what we've already posted – particularly when we want to do it quickly. Given that we're the authors of (almost) all these posts, and presumably we remember at least something about them, we can only guess how difficult accessing our posts must be for the rest of our readers. We've tried with categories and tags, describing the topics, but not only are they less than 100% accurate, but they're less than 100% consistent, since each member of the blogging team treats them a little differently. Beyond that, some of our more heavily used topics, like preemption with nearly 500 posts, are quite unwieldy to sort through. We'd guess that over half of all of our categories have over 100 posts.
We like to know where things are too. One of the many reasons we write the blog is to provide our clients with more value for less. The ripple effects, of course, go beyond our clients to the industry as a whole and the defense community as a whole. But if another law firm saves a mutual client X dollars by using one of our posts to get a leg up on a research topic, we still think we're providing extra value, even if indirectly. In order to do that, we can't be re-inventing the wheel, any more than in our billable matters. Using free – or at least non-billable – blog research seems like an eminently reasonable step for any of us to take.
The alternative would be to keep things internal and not share. But then why blog at all? Our basic philosophy that defense wins anywhere help defendants everywhere – whether that win is in Philadelphia or Poughkeepsie, Los Angeles or Laramie, D.C. or Des Moines. Value is value, whether billed to a client or not. We are acutely aware that not every defendant and not every case can independently justify the depth of research we do. But we are egotistical enough to think our research could be beneficial to the defense of just about any case. So we've decided to share ... again.
What follows is a really boring post. We're lawyers, not librarians, but we're going to try to organize things so that people who want to use our research posts (as opposed to our single-case posts and other stuff) can find them. For "value," it is hard to beat "free."
So, if you're looking to be entertained, come back tomorrow. But if you're a defendant or a defense lawyer who might actually want to use the blog's research resources, you'll want to save this post somewhere.
Here's how we go about this.
Our serious research is of four overall types. First, are our scorecards. These compile all cases that we know of, pro or con, on a topic. Scorecards are updated on an ongoing basis, so the date of the post is not particularly important. Keep in mind, that, because we're not in the business of doing the other side's research for them, scorecards only address subjects where historically the defense usually wins. That's why we had to retire our prescription drug preemption scorecard after Wyeth v. Levine, 555 U.S. 555 (2009).
Second, are our cheat sheets. These address subjects where the weight of precedent is more mixed. Cheat sheets only contain favorable precedent – that is, where the defense side won. Cheat sheets are also updated on an ongoing basis, although often not as religiously as our scorecards. When using cheat sheets, always be aware that adverse precedent exists, but is not listed in the cheat sheet.
On numerous occasions, we've either discussed other topics, frequently on a nation-wide basis. Sometimes we've organized such research in 50-state fashion, with the headers formally divided on a state-by-state basis. We'll keep to that division here. So, third, we'll list our state-by-state research topics.
Fourth, and finally, we'll follow that with our remaining nationwide research organized by topic. We're also including the date of the post, so you'll know how current the research is, because with only a few exceptions, our research posts other than scorecards and cheat sheets is not updated.
Download >> Where To Find Our Research 3.0
This article is presented for informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute legal advice.
