Texas Bar Journal • December 2024

State Bar of Texas Offers Upgrade to Free Legal Research Benefit

A Look at vLex Fastcase.

Written by Ed Walters

The State Bar of Texas has partnered with Fastcase since 2014 to offer complimentary legal research to its members. If you’re a member of the State Bar of Texas, you get free access to Fastcase’s nationwide legal research service—cases, statutes, regulations, court rules, constitutions, all 50 states plus federal—in addition to free reference attorney support by phone or chat, unlimited searching, and printing.

A free legal research benefit almost sounds too good to be true, but Fastcase was founded in 1999 with the mission to democratize the law and to make the practice of law smarter. Working with bar associations in nearly every state in the country, the company has made legal research available to more than 1.1 million U.S. lawyers.

A MERGER OF STRENGTH ON STRENGTH
In 2023, Fastcase merged with vLex. The two companies shared a common mission, and both are veterans of legal. But while Fastcase was building a deep library of legal materials in the U.S., vLex was founded in Spain and worked to democratize the law in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The combination formed one of the world’s largest law libraries, with more than 1 billion documents in the combined library from more than 100 countries and more than 3 million subscribers.

The combined company continues its mission to work with state bar associations to make legal research an included part of bar dues for lawyers. The Fastcase legal research service is called vLex Fastcase in the U.S., and the global corporate name remains vLex. The mission for both companies remains the same: to ensure that people win or lose cases based on who has the law on their side, not based on who can afford to find out whether the law is on their side.

A BIG UPGRADE FOR STATE BAR OF TEXAS MEMBERS
The State Bar of Texas legal research benefit (valued at $1,145 a year) remains free but is better than ever. The new version from vLex Fastcase offers some significant upgrades to members.

1. Cert citator. Is your case still good law? vLex Fastcase includes the robust cert citator, a combination of AI and human editorial review of more than 700,000 citations.

2. Vincent AI. vLex Fastcase includes some features of the Vincent AI platform from vLex. Vincent uses artificial intelligence to create headnotes for judicial opinions, find references similar to the document you’re reading, as well as tools to translate research into other languages, which can be helpful for advising clients for whom English is not their native language. In addition, some of the power tools from Vincent AI will be available for an additional monthly subscription, such as AI-powered research, draft memos, redlines, reviewing contracts, drafting briefs, and M&A due diligence.

3. Sleek new interface. The new vLex Fastcase features a more streamlined, easier-to-read design to make research simpler and more accessible.

4. The same benefit, but better. The benefit still includes the same free access to up-to-date judicial opinions, statutes, regulations, and more for Texas and the other 49 states, as well as federal. If you subscribe to secondary publications, those subscriptions move with you to the new platform.

5. Stay informed. Texas Case Alerts, a subscription email service to keep you on top of new opinions released by the Texas courts, is also included in your benefit provided by vLex Fastcase. Go to https://law.vlex.com/texascasealerts to sign up!

6. Greater insight. The research benefit now provides members with direct access to a collection of over 60 million case filings across state and federal trial courts with the addition of briefs, pleadings, motions, and order content, available to members right in the vLex Fastcase platform.

Logging in to the research benefit works the same way. Go to texasbar.com. Log in to your My Bar Page. Scroll down to “Online Legal Research” and then you’ll see the “vLex Fastcase” tab.

The State Bar of Texas has offered legal research as a free member benefit for many years, and as time goes on, the research software offered by the bar gets better and better. The release of vLex Fastcase is an important step forward in this continuing process of improvement.

ED WALTERS is chief strategy officer at vLex and co-founder of Fastcase.