The race to be a top-ranked website means a race to flood your website with relevant content. If you are a lawyer, that means you are trying to flood your website with articles and discussions on legal topics. Last week, I wrote about how websites can be an inefficient marketing tool for some practice areas, but that does not mean that they are altogether useless for lawyers. This flooding of the internet with legal content is changing the way legal research is done.

I am not saying that Google and blog reading is a substitute for Lexis or Westlaw. Anything you find on an attorney’s website, you should check in Westlaw or Lexis to make sure it’s still current. You can then find related cases from there. What I’m saying is that recently, there are a lot more tools for starting your legal research before you finish it off in Lexis or Westlaw.

SEO Explained:

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of letting search engines like Google or Bing know you are out there. This is done a variety of ways – coding tags into the headers of your webpages to tell search engines what your page is about, adding coding tweaks to images on your site to describe them to search engines, using header tags to tell search engines what is important on your pages and what is not, etc. The most important thing anyone can do to make their webpages appear more relevant is to add relevant content that actually makes them more relevant. So, if you are an attorney that specializes in corporate formation, you might write a lengthy description of the pluses and minuses of organizing as a corporation instead of a partnership. This puts a lot of relevant searchable terms on your website and shows Google that you are not just a shell of a website but actually have useful information that people might be searching for, so your website goes to the top.

Whitepapers Explained:

A whitepapers is usually a short report or guide on a certain topic. It might include citations to the points made or a bibliography to follow up on the referenced information. Think of a whitepaper as akin to a law review article.

Here’s how this ties into legal research online.

The Olden Days:

In the olden days (circa 2004), legal research would begin maybe with a secondary source, such as a treatise or a practice guide. That secondary source would give a summary of the area of law you are researching and maybe give you some buzzwords that you can search or some citations to look up. Then, you would go into your online legal research tool and type something like “attorney-client /2 privilege /p (former employee).” Then, you would sift through the results to find the case(s) that support your position.

Nowadays:

Now, if I want to research an issue related to a former employee asserting attorney-client privilege, I can start by Googling it.

I can even narrow down by specific state:

I’ve got pages and pages of free legal advice. Let’s start with the article in the article on the ABA’s website here. It explains the principle I was looking for and offers citations to cases and statutes. If I choose an article that does not fit my query, I can quickly move on to the next article. The advantage to starting in a search engine is that a lot of the articles and white papers are written at a beginner level. Explaining things at a beginner level is a good way to explain a concept using as many prime search words as possible.

If the topic is too broad, I can narrow it and still have tons of relevant results:

It even works in reverse. The ABA article that I found in the first search references a case called Visa USA, Inc. v. First Data Corp. If I google that case, I find more blogs that talk about that case in particular, blogs that point me to similar cases:

Usually, you can find blogs that point to cases that are distinguished from that case.

Again, you should never assume that everything you read on a law firm’s website is accurate without verifying it for yourself in Lexis or Westlaw. But this does give you a good primer to begin your legal research, especially if it’s a topic that is new ground for you.

Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner from San Diego. When not handling his own cases, he’s consulting lawyers on how to use technology to not be boring in trial or managing e-discovery projects in mass torts/complex litigation cases. If you want to be disappointed in a lack of posts, you can follow him on Twitter or on Facebook. If you have any ideas of things you want him to cover, email Jeff at jeff@trial.technology.