teaching legal research

In this highly competitive legal job market and era of law school reform, law schools and law libraries must develop new programs to create practice -ready graduates. Some law libraries are now offering non-credit certificate programs to address this need. At the University of Denver, we developed a Certificate Program in Legal Research in the spring of 2013. The Certificate program is offered in a traditional classroom setting for our day students and as an online program for our evening students.

Full-text case law searching is inefficient due to the vagaries of, and subjective qualities of language, and the objective nature of standard search algorithms. Mining secondary materials for cases identified by scholars as leading ones, and then using them as a core filter in which to begin an online research session is one way to make full-text searching more efficient. The resulting algorithm, the "Leading Cases Filter" (also embarrassingly know as the "Leiter Filter"), is open source and freely available to all developers.