In 2006, PreCYdent joined the ranks of web tools intended to cut a path through the labyrinth of US legal material. It is designed not only to give both Joe Doe and the trained lawyer a natural language search engine for authoritative, free e-resources – with results ranked according to relevance (see an early enthusiastic review suggesting that its algorithem is indeed impressive) – but also to be a social networking tool for an online legal community. One of Precydent’s creators is on YouTube with an animated introduction to the alpha version and, if you are interested in bibliometrics and their application to law, Tom Smith (the other creator) has a paper on Web of Law and has been interviewed on Law Librarian Blog.
PreCYdent is now in BETA release, and at present (8 May 2008) searches across some 923,211 US opinions ( and 51,583 US statutes, as well as a growing library of uploaded documents. You are not required to register to use it – but if you do register as a professional (also free), your role within the “social community environment” will be enhanced.
The homepage is the basic search screen – and it is just that simple and straightforward, just type and go! Clicking the Jurisdictions & options button on this screen takes you to an advanced search screen- 
which is also fairly self-explanatory. Note the facility in the left column to change the way the returns are ranked: “authority” here is used in its web-searching sense – hover the mouse over it for an explanation. Once again, the advanced search screen is designed to be intuitive – the F.A.Q. section gives instructions if required. A quick way to check current court coverage, tick choose specific jurisdictions and click Specify.
Once you have brought up the full-text of a result, as well as usual expected operations (eg exporting in pdf etc), you can also indicate whether the result was relevant, rate its importance and add tags (thereby improving the search engine), go through to a community discussion page and post comments (wiki style), or leave a personal comment for next time you look at the result.
At the moment, it looks as if the social network side has yet to take off – but it may be worth monitoring it: if it were to become popular, and you expect to have an American dimension to your career, it might be one way of getting into the loop.
