Fastcase Improves Its Citator with Bad Law Bot

Fastcase’s  Authority Check citator now retrieves SOME BUT NOT ALL negative treatment.  Those of you familiar with Fastcase may know that it provides a list of cases citing your case and blurb of text from the citing cases, but no signals.   With the recent addition of Bad Law Bot, Fastcase now red flags cases where the Bad Law Bot picks up negative authority.   Here is how it works:

When a court cites a case that has been overturned or reversed (even on other grounds), the Bluebook requires that the court indicate the negative history right there in the citation.  Bad Law Bot reads through the citations in Fastcase, identifying this kind of negative “signal information” in citations.  It then reports what other courts have said about this case when citing it, flagging negative history reported by the courts.  Note that this is a limited form of negative history. It reports only what cases say in citations.   So the Bad Law Bot will not flag a case that has been overturned but never cited, for example. And Bad Law Bot uses algorithms, not human editors. If you see no negative history, that does not necessarily mean that your case is good law.

For more information, see this press release.

For those unfamiliar with Fastcase, it is a low cost legal research database.   Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association membership benefits include access to Fastcase.   CMBA membership is free for law students, but DOES NOT include Fastcase.  For more information see our legal research Guide – Cost Effective Legal Research: Low Cost Databases.