March Madness: Electronic Eight 2023

NOTE: Most of these resources are IP-authenticated and available when signed on to Campus Wifi or from home using the Law School VPN (see the LawNET IT VPN page on MyLaw for details). Bloomberg Law Analytics, Practical Law (from Westlaw), Lex Machina (from Lexis), and CEB Practitioner require individual accounts; instructions are included with the descriptions of those resources and on our Databases page in MyLaw.

Round 2 - Part 1

Lex Machina v. Bloomberg Law Analytics

Lex Machina does exactly one thing: litigation analytics. It’s one of the oldest and biggest litigation analytics products, and quite powerful. For a deep dive into docket-based data, you can access Lex Machina in full from the home page of Lexis – log in to Lexis, then click on the square at the top left formed by the nine dots. You’ll get a menu of Lexis products that you have access to – choose Lex Machina and it will launch into a different site with even more data and tools for you to use. However, if you only need a bit of information, you can access some of Lex Machina’s data in Lexis via the Litigation Analytics icon, on the lower left of the home page.

Among the many, many features of Bloomberg Law, it also has litigation analytics. Research federal district court judges, lawyers and even companies. Whether you’re preparing for your SAW paper, a job interview, or a pitch to a potential new client, find out how Bloomberg Law Analytics can help you.

The two resources above, Bloomberg Law Analytics and Lex Machina, provide access to litigation analytics. Lawyers have long sought ways to get information about judges, opposing counsel, even new clients, to develop strategy for their cases. Court analytics help lawyers gain insights based on data analysis of federal and state court dockets. Learn more in this video.

Round 2 - Part 2

CEB Practitioner v. Practical Law by Westlaw

CEB Practitioner is a practical resource designed to help both litigation and transactional attorneys in California complete legal tasks efficiently. CEB Practitioner contains a variety of types of practical guidance documents:

• Strategy Notes (recommended strategies for different phases of a lawsuit or transaction) 
• Charts and Checklists (summaries of the relevant law, with lists and outlines to emphasize and highlight important points) 
• Standard Documents (sample legal documents that can be useful as a guide when drafting your own legal documents)
• How-To Guides (step-by-step guidance with respect to particular legal tasks)

Practical Law is a practical resource within Westlaw designed to help both litigation and transactional attorneys understand legal matters and complete tasks efficiently. It contains a variety of materials such as:
 

•  Practice Notes: Simple but thorough overviews of a topic. Often a great place to start.
• Standard Documents: Sample legal documents that can be useful as a guide when drafting your own legal documents.
• Decision making aids such as checklists, flowcharts, and timelines.

Resources are well integrated with each other. If you click the “Knowledge Map” link for a resource in the result list (or “Explore Related Content” from within a resource), you can see all the other resources related to a resource.

To access Practical Law from the Westlaw homepage, you can select the link at the bottom of the screen in the Key Features area, or you can choose Practical Law from the drop down menu at the top left of the screen.