Using Keycite and Shepard's for Court Rules

Researching a court rule and looking for cases? Shepardize or Keycite the rule. Take as an example PARCP 402 which deals with manner and acceptance of service. When you pull up this rule on Westlaw, you get over 2,000 citing references:

These citing references can then be filtered by cases, statutes, secondary material, etc. Within each category, additional filters appear - your options vary depending upon which type of material you are viewing. Cases, for example, allow you to filter by jurisdiction, date, reported status, keyword (search within results) and more. Check out also the Notes of Decisions and Context and Analysis tabs, which provide the annotations from the annotated version of the rule in Purdon's.

Pull up the same rule in Lexis (also annotated) and select Shepardize this Document. Lexis easily allows you to focus on the citations by sub-part, as you can see from this snippet of the results break-down:

Be cautious when selecting the sub-part of interest.  Just because you are interested in 402(a), it doesn't mean there isn't also something relevant being discussed under 402. Once you have selected a sub-part, you may then filter by Citing Decisions and Other Citing Sources. Citing Decisions allows you to filter further by analysis, court, keyword (search within results), publication status or date.

Westlaw and Lexis are available here at Jenkins as part of our in-house database collection. Searching is free!

Want more tips for finding cases related to court rules? Ask us!