How to Find Legal Cases on Westlaw and LexisNexis: A Step-by-Step Guide (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Now I'm going to show you how to find your case on Westlaw or LexisNexis. If you have a case citation, you'll go to the find by citation box and enter in the citation and click go. This brings you to the full case decision. In LexisNexis, it's a little different. You'll have to click the get a document tab. From here, you will click by citation and enter in the citation. Below, you can see you can get the full text or a case brief. I'm going to do the full text and you click get. This brings you to the full text of the decision. If you do not have a citation, you can search by party name. In LexisNexis, you click again on the get a document tab and then by party name. To enter in the party name, click which jurisdiction or court and click search. This brings you to the full text of the decision. In Westlaw, I'll have to go back out to the main page. From the main page, we click find a case by party name, populate the field. Once again, you can choose by jurisdiction. I'll just do all. You click go and here are all the cases from the different courts. If I were to click just the Supreme Court button, this would be the only case. Sometimes, you won't have a citation or a case name. Events like that do things a little differently. I'm going to just pick a new Supreme Court opinion to get the docket number. Choose their newest case. In Westlaw, what we'll have to do from the main page is come here to the Supreme Court cases. We'll do a terms and connectors search, putting the docket number in parentheses and click search Westlaw. Here is the case. In LexisNexis, you go back to get a document tab, click on by docket number, enter in the docket number. I'm going to click the U.S. Supreme Court, click search, and here is the case.