Casemaker Shines!

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.

As always, we are standing by to provide personal Casemaker training for any VBA members who request it.  Just drop me a line. The video tutorials on the Casemaker homepage are also quite helpful.

 Happy researching!