HLS Library Resources for Spring 2025: See what’s new and useful!

The Harvard Law School Library is here for you as you prepare for a new semester! Check out some of our newest resources to help you with your clinic work!  We’ll showcase some old favorites, too.

If you have questions about library services and resources, email us at research@law.harvard.edu. To keep up with news and events, you can follow the HLS Library on social media at @hlslib on Twitter and @hlslibrary on Facebook and Instagram. 

Highlighted Resources: AI in Legal Research

In the last few months, our major research databases introduced AI resources to help with research and drafting.  Each offers different tools, all designed to help with research and writing:

• Lexis Protégé: perform legal research, summarize a case, draft documents, and analyze uploaded documents.
• Westlaw CoCounsel: perform legal research, ask a practical law question, conduct jurisdictional surveys, perform claims checks, analyze uploaded documents, draft documents, and more.
• Bloomberg Law: Summarize and analyze primary source documents.

As with any AI product, these products can make mistakes. They almost never make up information wholesale (like ChatGPT might), but they can misinterpret case holdings and may not focus on the most recent or essential cases.  AI tools can often be a good starting point for research and a way to double-check your work, but they cannot take the place of solid research skills.

New!

• Law database List
  • Search our new list, describing nearly 247 law-focused databases. 
• Lex Machina
  • Lex Machina is a data mining and legal analytics research tool. It captures data by crawling PACER, the International Trade Commission’s Electronic Document Information System (EDIS), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and state court data every 24 hours. Lex Machina provides analytics about judges, motions, attorneys, parties, and venues, along with a timeline linking briefs, motions, orders, opinions, and other filings for every case.  Users can create case alerts.
• BankruptcyData.Com
  • BankruptcyData.com provides instant access to information on thousands of business bankruptcy filings from federal bankruptcy districts. Currently, there are over 400,000 business bankruptcies in the database.

Guides

The Library has over 80 research guides (subject-focused, curated resource lists) that may be of use to you this semester. 

• View our law research guides here.
• The librarians can work with you to create an individual research guide for your clinic’s subject matter, such as this Tax Law research guide. 
• We even have a guide to the clinical library services! Find your clinic’s library liaison, check out the research training calendar, browse a list of selected teaching resources and blogs, and more.

Videos

The Library’s YouTube channel features videos to help improve your legal research.

More Resources

• Law 360
  • Coverage includes every major litigation development in the U.S. federal district courts, lawsuits filed against the world’s 2,000 top companies, opinions handed down in the U.S. federal courts, developments in class actions and multidistrict litigation, transactions involving the top 250 U.S. law firms and initiatives by state, federal and international legislatures. It also provides real-time tracking and reports on 10,000+ companies, firms, and industries. As well as links to some major journals such as the New York Law Journal, National Law Journal, The Recorder (CA), and much more.
• Law.com/ALM
  • Legal news and analysis. Includes information from ALM national and regional publications. Provides access to recent court filings, decisions, and cases. Offers details on jobs, law firms, and law-related information and educational products. Includes legal dictionary and directories.
• PLI Plus
  • Provides you with complete access to Practising Law Institute’s authoritative treatises, course handbooks, legal forms, program transcripts, and answer books.