Legal Definitions - LEXIS

LEXIS is a comprehensive, subscription-based online service that provides legal professionals, academics, and students with extensive access to a vast digital library of legal information.

It acts as a powerful research tool, allowing users to quickly find, analyze, and stay updated on legal developments across various jurisdictions. The platform contains an enormous collection of legal documents, including:

• Court decisions (known as caselaw) from federal and state courts.
• Laws passed by legislative bodies (known as statutes).
• Administrative regulations issued by government agencies.
• Secondary legal materials such as law review articles, legal treatises, encyclopedias, and practice guides, which offer analysis and commentary on the law.

Essentially, LEXIS streamlines the process of legal research by centralizing a wealth of legal data into an easily searchable format.

Examples:

• Scenario 1: A trial attorney is preparing for a complex intellectual property lawsuit. They need to find all relevant federal court decisions concerning patent infringement in their specific industry over the past five years to build their legal arguments and anticipate opposing counsel's strategies.

  How it illustrates LEXIS: The attorney would use LEXIS to search its extensive database of federal caselaw, filtering by jurisdiction, date, and keywords, to quickly locate and analyze these crucial precedents, which would be nearly impossible to do efficiently through physical law books alone.

• Scenario 2: A law student is writing a research paper on the evolving interpretations of constitutional privacy rights in the context of emerging technologies. They need to review landmark Supreme Court decisions, examine federal statutes related to data protection, and find scholarly articles that analyze these legal developments.

  How it illustrates LEXIS: LEXIS allows the student to access the full text of Supreme Court opinions, search through federal statutes, and browse a wide array of legal journals and treatises (secondary materials) for scholarly analysis, all from a single, integrated platform.

• Scenario 3: An in-house counsel for a large pharmaceutical company is tasked with ensuring the company's compliance with drug manufacturing regulations across all states where it operates. They need to quickly identify the specific state statutes and administrative rules that govern pharmaceutical production and distribution in multiple jurisdictions.

  How it illustrates LEXIS: Using LEXIS, the in-house counsel can efficiently search and compare state-specific statutes and administrative regulations from various jurisdictions, ensuring the company adheres to the diverse legal requirements without having to consult countless individual government websites or physical law libraries.