South Carolina Bar Selects Fastcase for Legal Research Member Benefit
June 23, 2014
The South Carolina Bar previously had offered the Casemaker legal research service to its members, but it announced today that it would become the seventh state bar association to upgrade from that service to Fastcase. The South Carolina Bar will be the 25th state bar association to offer Fastcase to its members.
In addition to desktop legal research, members of the South Carolina Bar also will be able to sync their member benefit with Fastcase’s industry-leading mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. According to the 2013 ABA Technology Survey, Fastcase is by far the most popular legal app (of any kind) for smartphones.
“The South Carolina Bar is pleased to join other state bar associations by changing our legal research benefit to offer free, unlimited access to Fastcase,” said Cal Watson, President of the South Carolina Bar. “Fastcase is on the cutting edge of legal research services and will provide new and advanced research tools for South Carolina lawyers at no cost to them. Access to these expansive resources will in turn enhance the legal services they provide to South Carolinians.”
With Fastcase, bar members will receive unlimited access to one of the largest law libraries in the world, training webinars and tutorials, industry-leading mobile apps, and live customer support from members of the Fastcase team. The member benefit is unlimited – with no restrictions on time or number of transactions, unlimited printing, unlimited reference assistance, and unlimited customer service included for free.
Fastcase normally costs $995 per year – but will be offered to members of the South Carolina Bar as a benefit of membership.
“Our team is very excited to partner with the South Carolina Bar,” said Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase. “Our mission at Fastcase is to democratize the law and to build smarter legal research tools. By making our suite of legal research tools available for free to members of the South Carolina Bar, we can accomplish both goals.”
In addition to its nationwide legal research database, Fastcase’s South Carolina-specific libraries include judicial opinions from the South Carolina Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals back to 1886, Fourth Circuit decisions starting at 1. F.2d 1, U.S. Supreme Court decisions starting with 1 U.S. 1, statutes, regulations, the South Carolina State Constitution, and much more. The service also includes annotated statutes from other states, Fastcase’s annotated U.S. Code, transactional access to newspaper articles, federal court filings, and legal forms, and transactional access through HeinOnline to the largest collection of law reviews in the world.
After November 1, South Carolina lawyers can access Fastcase through the South Carolina Bar website at www.scbar.org, where they can log in with their bar username and password.
Known for its mission to democratize the law by making it more accessible to more people, Fastcase has been partnering with bar associations since 2005 and steadily transforming the traditional legal research industry. In addition to bar associations, the company provides smarter legal research tools to lawyers around the world, dozens of AmLaw 250 law firms, in-house counsel, and law schools across the United States.
Twenty-five state bar associations have selected Fastcase to provide a similar member benefit. More than 700,000 lawyers now have a subscription to Fastcase, through their firm or through their bar association.
The Fastcase service will be free to South Carolina Bar members, but it is not a discount legal research service. Fastcase has pioneered the smartest legal research tools in the market, with integrated citation analysis tools, data visualization maps of search results, and the first legal research apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. The service also includes Bad Law Bot, the first big data service to identify negative citations to judicial opinions.
Fastcase has gained strong momentum in the legal research market and continues to challenge the norm in legal publishing and legal technology. Fastcase was voted #1 in Law Technology News’s inaugural Customer Satisfaction Survey, finishing first in 7 out of 10 categories over traditional research providers Westlaw and LexisNexis. Fastcase has introduced new opinion summaries, and has been named to the prestigious EContent 100 list of leading digital publishing and media companies alongside Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook for three years in a row.
In 2010, Fastcase was the first company to launch an app for legal research, and later, the first company to launch an app for iPad. The American Association of Law Libraries named Fastcase for iPhone the 2010 New Product of the Year and named its integration of HeinOnline its 2014 New Product of the Year. In 2011, Rocket Matter named Fastcase’s apps for iPhone and iPad the Legal Productivity App of the Year and the company furthered its mobile market presence by debuting the Fastcase for Android app in 2012.
About the South Carolina Bar
The South Carolina Bar began in 1884 as the South Carolina Bar Association, a voluntary organization of approximately 200 lawyers. The South Carolina State Bar was created in 1968. The two organizations were merged in 1975. Currently the Bar has a membership of more than 15,000. The South Carolina Bar is dedicated to advancing justice, professionalism, and understanding of the law.
About Fastcase
Fastcase is a leading legal publisher focused on smarter legal software that democratizes the law, making it more accessible to more people. Using patented software that combines the best of legal research with the best of Web search, Fastcase helps busy users sift through the clutter, ranking the best cases first and enabling the re-sorting of results to find answers fast. Founded in 1999, Fastcase has more than 700,000 subscribers from around the world. Fastcase is an American company based in Washington, D.C. For more information, follow Fastcase on Twitter at @Fastcase or visit www.fastcase.com.
