Knowing whether a case is good law is elemental to legal research. To do this, lawyers have long relied on citator services such as Shepard’s from LexisNexis and KeyCite from Westlaw. Now, the legal research service Casetext has introduced a citator of its own, called SmartCite, with many of the features you would expect to find in a citator, plus some that make it unique.
Pablo Arredondo, cofounder and chief product officer at Casetext, says that SmartCite is an umbrella name for a number of new features, some common to citators and some new and unique.
Let’s start with those colored flags researchers know so well. Like other citators, SmartCite shows red flags for bad law, green flags for good law, and yellow flags when there may be reason for caution. SmartCite also has orange flags for cases that rely on overruled cases. Orange flags are not found in Shepard’s and were introduced in KeyCite only with last year’s launch of Westlaw Edge.
Another unique feature of SmartCite is its integration with Casetext’s CARA artificial intelligence search. CARA was originally launched as a brief-analysis tool. But last year, Casetext integrated CARA into the standard legal research workflow, as I explained here, meaning that you can upload case documents such as pleadings and memoranda and CARA will analyze those to tailor your legal research results to cases that are more relevant to your facts and issues.
CARA can be used to refine the list of citing cases.
With SmartCite, Casetext extends that capability to the citator. By using CARA with your citation check, the list of citing cases will be ranked according to your factual and legal context. This is particularly helpful when there are hundreds of citing cases. Rather than wade through them all, you can upload a document through
