Speaker 1: We're going to shift direction for today's bluebooking video and discuss some of the technology and software available to help you write your briefs and memos. There is a bluebook online, which gives you access to the entire bluebook through your browser. Although it is simply a digital copy of the book, it does have a full text search, so you don't need to flip through the index every time you need to find something. Your print copy of the bluebook may have come with a free trial to the online version, or you can purchase it on the website. The updates to the physical copy of the bluebook are available for free, however. If you click on the Bluebook Updates link, it provides updates listed by each rule. Another thing to know about the bluebook, it's heading towards another revision. The Columbia Law Review began gathering information via survey last year in anticipation of updating the bluebook to the 20th edition. One of the major areas that will likely see changes is in Rule 18 for internet citations. It's something to keep an eye on as you move forward in your legal career. Although the major legal databases have come up with ways to spit out case citations with at least a passing resemblance to Bluebook, we've already highlighted some of the pitfalls of using the automatic citation generators in Westlaw and Lexis, but let's take a closer look at what they've made available. Both of the major databases have created plugins for Microsoft Word. You can download Lexis for Microsoft Office from LexisNexis, or try Westlaw Solutions Drafting Assistant. Both connect your Word documents to the commercial database, and will help you with drafting briefs or memos, including citations. The only drawback is that you are relying on the same citations pulled from the online version of the respective databases. Lexis for Office, here, has a lot of features. It will shepherdize cases for you, and it will check your citations against the information in the database, as well as helping you expand your research. It also has links to sample forms, and it is designed to connect with a firm's document management system. If you end up doing work for a firm that uses Lexis, this may be a piece of software to check out while it is still free to you as a student. Not to be outdone, Westlaw has created Westlaw Solutions. It also ties your citations into the Westlaw database, and it even creates hyperlinks to each case in your brief, attaching a key cite flag to any citation it recognizes. It doesn't have the same number of features as Lexis for Office, but it does a pretty good job of cite checking. Again, it will conform all of your citations to the Westlaw version, so keep that in mind if your brief needs to follow Florida rules. You'll have to make a number of manual changes. For those of you who relied on Purdue's OWL website, or Son of Citation Machine, for your citation to MLA or APA format in your undergraduate studies, it may come as a surprise that there was no equivalent website for the Bluebook until very recently. Citus Legalis was created by a student at Cornell, and it's a very handy tool for creating citations, but it formats everything for law reviews. Keep in mind that you will have to change the format of some text if you are doing basic legal writing. The website handles cases, periodicals, books, statutes and regulations, legislative and administrative materials, and constitutions, basically rules 10 through 16. You can either browse the available sources, or just go directly to manual entry. Some of the fields will try to guess which source you are citing. If you type Florida into the periodical name field, it will give you all of the journals that begin with Florida. After you fill out the required information in the form, you will get a citation like this to copy. As you can see, it has formatted the citation with small caps, the way the white pages would format a citation for academic writing. If you aren't sure whether to include a piece of information on the form, you can mouse over the question mark next to the field, and it will give you a brief explanation of the rule. Citus Legalis has its limits. It doesn't handle every type of source, and doesn't touch on any international sources. When you copy and paste the citation, it will also give you a very strange font size and highlighting, so be prepared to do some extensive formatting. For our last video, we will be discussing citation to the internet and non-legal sources.