What’s an Index & Why Would You Want to Use One
Using an index at first seems pretty old school After all, the original indexes were the ones found in the back of books that you used to located information in that publication.
These days there are indexes available online, and they can be pretty efficient ways to located what you want quickly. To illustrate, consider doing the search “promissory estoppel” in the big box in Lexis or Westlaw. You’d probably get over ten thousand results, because this search would pull up your search terms anywhere in a document, and even if it was mentioned just in passing.
Contrast that with that same search done in an index – you would get far fewer results, but they would be much more on point. That’s because your search term would likely only appear in the title or abstract of the result, meaning that each result would be all about promissory estoppel instead of just mentioning it.
You have several legal indexes available to you –
