PreCYdent is a new, completely free legal research service that uses state-of-the-art search technology similar to that used in Web search to greatly improve the quality and convenience of your legal research.

Yes. All services on PreCYdent are free, not only the research, but also the visualization, printing and generation of pdf documents.

No. You do not need to register to search our legal material.

If you register you will be able to help us in the effort to build a large law library available for free on the Internet. Registered users can upload legal material, links and legal questions. They can rate documents and flag material which is judged as inappropriate. Moreover, we are working to build a Web 2 legal community, and if you register soon you will be able to activate your profile and to contact friends and colleagues over the PreCYdent network.

No, you can search in all of our sections: Opinions, Statutes, Uploaded documents, Links, Legal Questions and Lawyers. We will also have soon a Congressional Records section. Moreover, if you start your search, for example, in the Opinions section, on the results page you will be able to change sections, and your search will be executed automatically in the new section. So for example, if you are looking for opinions related to presidential powers, and then would like to have a look at statutes on the same topic, you only have to click on the Statutes bar at the top of your results page, and you will visualize the statutes matching your query. This is a very effective way to search over all the sections your are interested in.

The basic search is very straightforward. Just put a query with one or more words into the search bar, hit search or enter, and you will get the list of results matching your query, ranked by Authority. You can then if you choose do a more advanced search if you choose in opinions or statutes.

The parameters for the judicial opinions search are the following:

1. Ranking: you can change the search algorithm. Authority is the ranking which ranks highest the most authoritative cases, as judged by our algorithm. Chronological shows the results list of cases ordered in reverse chronological order, with the most recent cases first. Note that in many searches, this will include cases from today or yesterday. Traditional ranks cases like the major for-fee commercial services do, according to the jurisdiction, starting with the US Supreme Court, US Courts of Appeal, Federal District Courts, State Supreme Courts, and so on, and within each jurisdiction, chronologically.
2. Decade after - Decade before: this feature allows you to rank first the cases that were considered as most authoritative in the decade you specify as being of interest. It is useful for historical searches because you can see which cases were most influential in particular periods.
3. Decided after - Decided before: this is a simple temporal filter. You will visualize only the legal opinions decided in the selected temporal range.
4. Last years of importance: this is a powerful parameter in our search algorithm. It allows you to give more importance to cases that received a lot of citations in the selected last number of years. So to give the most weight to cases in the last 10 years, for example, you would set this parameter on 10.
5. Justice: This is a filter for the name of the justice or judge.
6. Only results containing search terms: Our algorithm is able to retrieve even cases without the words of the user query. This option forces the search engine to retrieve only cases where the words of the query occur.
7. Jurisdictions: You can select the macro-jurisdiction of interest, but you can also specify exactly which jurisdiction you want to search by clicking on Detailed Search and then Specify.
8. Boolean operators: We support a large set of Boolean operators to refine your search. The explanation of Boolean operators is available on the advanced search page.

The parameter for the statutes search are the following:

1. Ordering: You can order by textual match, chronological ascending order, or chronological descending order.
2. Temporal parameters: this is a simple temporal parameter. Using it, you will visualize only statutes published in the selected temporal range.
3. Jurisdiction: you can select the jurisdictions available in our database.
4. Boolean operators: You can use the same operators as are available for judicial opinions.

The same parameters available for the statutes with the following adds:

1. Type of Document: the uploaded documents are classified in main categories in the upload phase. You can select in which categories you would like to launch the search.
2. Author: You can filter the retrieved documents by author’s name.

The same parameters are available for the Uploaded Documents section, except the Type of Document selection.

The same parameters are available for the Links section as for the Uploaded Documents section, with the addition of an “Area of law” option that allows you to filter documents by the selected area of law.

It is possible to specify personal information such as the Last Name, geographical information, or professional information, such as the Bar Membership.

If I click on an opinion to visualize the full text, what operations are available to me?
In the full text page of an opinion you have a set of icons and features on the right.
First, you have the following five icons:

1. Set as relevant: you can inform us that you found the selected case relevant to your query. This will help our search engine to learn and improve its quality.
2. Citations: by clicking on this icon you will visualize all the opinions which cite the selected case, and all the opinions cited by the selected case.
3. Export in pdf: clicking on this icon gives you a pdf document of the selected case that you can download and print.
4. Print: clicking on this icon visualizes a printable version of the selected case. You can then print by clicking on Print in the File Menu of your browser.
5. Recommend by email: this icon allows you to recommend the case by email to friends and collegues.

Below these icons you find two buttons:

• More Like This: if you click on this button, the search engine find other documents textually similar to the selected case.
• Discussion page: this button will bring you to a discussion page where people can post comments about the selected case in wiki style.

Below these two buttons you find an useful feature:

Provide a tag: here you can select one or more tags that you think are related with the selected case. Tag generation helps improve the classification of the documents in our database.

Finally you have two other possible operations:

1. Rating opinion importance: this information is used in a completely anonymous way to help our search engine learn and to generate recommendations to users much as Amazon and other companies do with other items, using PreCYdent recommendation technology.
2. Personal Comment: here you can write your personal comments about the case. Your comments are saved so that they will be there the next time you open the case.

These same features are available in the other sections of the PreCYdent portal.
In the Uploaded Documents, Links and Legal Questions sections, you also have the button “Flag as Inappropriate,” so that you can inform us if you see uploaded material that violates copyright law or is illegal, unethical, or otherwise inappropriate.

First you have to register. Once registered, you can login and upload documents, links and legal questions using a user-friendly web interface. You can upload documents in the following formats: .pdf, .doc, .docx, and .rtf.

By adding the code we provide you to the html of your web page, you will give your visitors the opportunity to do searches in the PreCYdent database using PreCYdent’s search engine.

By clicking on our browser widget, you will install a widget in your browser that allows you to launch queries directly from your browser wherever you are.

If you are using one of the fee-charging commercial services, you can still use PreCYdent’s browser widget to visualize and print the selected case, if we have it in our database. Unlike some services, PreCYdent does not charge for visualizing or printing cases. The only thing we charge for is advertising.

The procedure is very simple:

1. You make your queries on the commercial service of your choice.
2. If you find an interesting case, and then using the mouse you copy the title of the selected case.
3. Then you go to the PreCYdent search bar at the top right of your browser and paste in the title of the selected case and hit the search icon or push enter.
4. The PreCYdent widget will launch a query on our search engine, and if we have your case in our database, it will almost certainly be ranked on the first page of results.
5. You can click on the case title to visualize the full text and print it or export it in pdf for free.
6. If you want to go back to the commercial service site, simply use the Back button in your browser.

This simple strategy could save you a lot of money, since some services charge a lot for showing you cases and printing them.