Making the Right Motions

A delicious lunch at the Delta King, and a demonstration by Garrett C. Dailey, Esquire, took Sacramento Lawyer Computer Users Group (SLUG) members' minds off the taxes that came due this April 15. Dailey showed off the latest in his twelve-year series of Attorney's BriefCase legal research products: California Law and Motion, version 98.1.

Attorney's BriefCase gives you fast, compact, accurate legal research focused on particular areas of California law. BriefCase's other areas, besides Law and Motion, are Evidence, Family Law, and Juvenile Law.

Unpacking BriefCase

BriefCase Law and Motion took a bit over a minute to copy its files from a CD-ROM to my hard disk. To get started using BriefCase, I consulted a so-called "Un-Manual" of only 11 pages!

The installed package occupied less than 24 megabytes. In the early days of personal computing, that was more than a hard disk's capacity; now it's minimal. Although BriefCase can look up its research data from a CD-ROM drive, its preferred install mode puts it all on your hard disk.

Saving Time

BriefCase makes most any Windows computer into a quick, self-contained source of legal authority. That's one reason it saves time: no waiting for Lexis or Westlaw to search and display cases online. Dailey tells many stories of BriefCase's real-time answers--not just in the office, but at the negotiating table and in the courtroom.

Another source of BriefCase's time savings is its compact, index-card-like format. For each issue, a card gives a succinct "holding" on the card's left side; factual recitations, quotations and supporting citations on the right; and the authority's citation (and judicial author) at the bottom. Most citations are hypertext links that let you jump instantly to the cited source.

Is It Accurate?

So, how does BriefCase guarantee the accuracy of your law and motion research? By getting Paul Turner, Presiding Justice of the California Court of Appeal, Second District, to write it.

BriefCase also prides itself on making explicit what most points and authorities do not: Is the case a good one to cite for the legal proposition? Those who ignore their law professors' warnings by relying solely on a publisher's case headnotes may, for example, cite a case for a point without realizing that the point is dicta, or that the case recited the point but reached a contrary result.

To avoid such embarrassments, BriefCase cards give the case's facts and result. The cards also include quotes that illuminate the court's thinking on the issue. The BriefCase software makes it a snap to save the quote (and its proper citation) for insertion into your written product.

Is It Complete?

Of course, you want to know how useful and complete the package's legal content is. As a federal (not state) court practitioner, I do not venture an opinion on this question.

I did, however, find one topic in California Law and Motion useful to my federal practice. A Federal Rule (Fed. R. Civ. P. 16(c)(5)) and the Eastern District's local rules both refer in places to "summary adjudication," an idea borrowed from state law. It took just a quick look through BriefCase's "summary adjudication" cards to find and understand the state rules that underlie the federal courts' language.

California Law and Motion can resolve myriad issues beyond my summary adjudication query. For example, it covers various procedures, burdens, presumptions--and motions: to strike, to amend, for default judgment, and (of course) for summary adjudication and summary judgment.

BriefCase's screens are laid out in a consistent fashion, and they are logically arranged according to an easily-accessible map. It takes little time to learn the system. It could take even less learning time for Web-surfing lawyers were BriefCase to adopt the metaphor of a Web browser for its screens.

Reference

California Law and Motion, version 98.1, $129 plus tax and shipping, Attorney's BriefCase, Inc., 519 17th St., 7th Fl., Oakland 94612, 510-836-2743, fax 510-465-7348, www.atybriefcase.com