LexisNexis Communities: Free Current Awareness Resource

LexisNexis Communities contains news, blogs, top cases, podcasts, videos, emerging issues and more.  Students can use this resource to get ideas for paper topics.   There are also lots of RSS feeds for automatic updates.  LexisNexis Communities has separate pages for different practice areas, including Corporate and Securities Law,   Environmental Law and Climate Change and International and Foreign Law.  There is even a special page for Emerging Issues, which has information on hot topics such as health care reform, immigration and the oil spill.

You can create your own custom LexisNexis Communities page by selecting which parts of each page you want.  For example, you can select New Lawsuits from the Litigation Resource Community, Top Cases from the Environmental Resource Community and Spotlight on Health Care Reform from the Emerging Issues Resource Community, and all of these will appear on your page when you log in.  Just click on the button in the upper left corner that says “Add Content to My Page”.

There is also a “Free Case Law” tab to search the last ten years of State & Federal Courts plus U.S. Supreme Court from 1781 to present (ie. the same content as LexisOne).  Another tab links you to Lexis Web, which indexes many legal web sites, and enables you to get web results geared toward attorneys.  (See our prior post on Lexis Web)

Lexis Communities is free even if you do not subscribe to Lexis.