As most of our members know, Casemaker is just one of the many benefits provided to VBA Members at no extra cost. Casemaker is a comprehensive on-line research library featuring Vermont
state and federal court decisions, statutes, codes, rules of procedure, Green
Mountain Care Board and Labor Relations Board decisions, state
agency decisions, advisory ethic opinions and much more. VBA members have exclusive access to a huge
library of materials from twenty-eight other states, including every New
England jurisdiction, the United States Supreme Court and Circuit Court of
Appeals opinions. With complimentary Casemaker Pro (under the "features" tab),
members have access to the Casemaker
Digest, Case Check (a citator)
and Citecheck,
where you can upload a brief and have every citation analyzed!
What our members may not know is how Casemaker outperforms the alternative research library provided in a similar fashion in other states. This news just came to us from Casemaker:
"In a landmark study circulated at the Annual Meeting of the
American Association of Law Libraries in Baltimore..., Casemaker
consistently outperformed Fastcase across multiple areas of comparison.
In “Database Evaluation: Drawing The Silken Thread,” three
highly respected Connecticut law librarians set out to objectively evaluate seven
legal databases by researching six topics. They performed identical searches on
each service, and then assessed each result set against five pre-determined
criteria.
The study showed that Casemaker consistently returns more
relevant results than Fastcase, our data is more current, and our citator,
CaseCheck+®, is more precise and less cumbersome to use than Fastcase’s Bad Law
Bot.
At several junctures, the study’s authors remark upon the
evident shortcomings of Fastcase’s “AI-based approach” to harvesting,
interpreting and manipulating data, and contrast it to the editorial processes
of Casemaker, Westlaw, and LexisNexis, which entail a greater degree of human
involvement.
The numbers speak for themselves: Across 30 potential points
of comparison, Casemaker outperformed Fastcase 20 times, often producing
results at a par with or even superior to those of the leading high cost
services. By contrast, Fastcase outperformed Casemaker in just one area (the
result of an oversight we have since addressed)."
Casemaker distilled the study’s findings
into a simple table, that we can provide on request. The full study can be found at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3203546.
Happy researching!
