Collexis' Lawriter Debuts Social Network for Law Students

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 08/12/08

Collexis' Lawriter division has launched a social network for law students. The site, CasemakerX.com, was demonstrated in beta format at the American Association of Law Librarians Conference in Portland in July. A full launch is expected in early fall 2008 to coincide with the incoming class of new law students. Along with the social networking site, CasemakerX will provide free access to the Casemaker Suite of Applications for the American law student community.

"CasemakerX is an exciting new legal information product that law students and faculty will find useful," said Duncan Alford, associate dean and director of the law library at the University of South Carolina School of Law. "The social networking portion of CasemakerX is reminiscent of LinkedIn, but with the electronic content of primary federal and state law. The upcoming introduction of legal thesaurus searching will make the searching capabilities even more sophisticated, and the success of the Collexis search engine and fingerprinting technology in medical research shows exciting promise for legal research."

CasemakerX is a free service for law students supported by the Casemaker Bar Consortium and its 475,000 attorney members across the U.S. Law students, faculty and law librarians can sign up for the site and register from accredited law schools. Once a profile is created, users are networked by areas like corresponding law school, fields of interest, and graduation year. The site provides blogging, instant messaging, photo sharing, job postings, video streaming via YouTube, and iPhone plug-ins. The Casemaker suite of legal discovery products is available on the site and includes a library of 12 million documents in federal and state case law. The site also includes the recently released Casemaker Medical application, with full text search of 15 million biomedical abstracts.