Like the original Fastcase app, Fastcase for the iPad is available as a free download in the iTunes store, allowing you to search our comprehensive library of state and federal primary law for free.

Fastcase for the iPad gives you instant access to an entire set of case law reporters and statute books wherever you are, making the iPad the only legal pad you need in your briefcase.

What’s New:

- Even cleaner and sleeker navigation in high definition.

- Access your complete list of search results when viewing the full text of a document.

- Choose from 5 different font sizes using the font slider.

- Easily search within a document using the “Find” bar.

- Manage (and delete) your save documents using an improved saving feature.

Press and Reviews

- Click here for the official press release.
- Review by Josh Auriemma of Legal Geekery.
- Review by Jeff Richardson of  iPhone JD.
- Review by Greg Lambert of 3 Geeks Law Blog
- Review by Christi of PadGadget
- Review by Bonnie Shucha of WisBlawg

For more information, visit www.fastcase.com/ipad.

Download the app here.

If that weren’t already enough, we have a new addition to our suite of smarter legal research tools: Fastcase Forecite®.

What Does Forecite Do?

Forecite, a new addition to our suite of smarter legal research tools, is the perfect backstop to your case law research. When you perform a keyword search on Fastcase, Forecite goes the extra mile and identifies seminal cases that can easily be missed by ordinary keyword searches.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you were researching the Miranda Doctrine under the Fifth Amendment. Can you imagine concluding your research without reading the Supreme Court’s seminal decision, Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966)? We can’t either. The trouble is, if you search for “Miranda doctrine” using most legal research engines, the Miranda decision will not be in your search results, because those words do not appear anywhere in the decision.

This is where Forecite comes in. Run the same search on Fastcase, and Forecite has you covered.

- At the top of your search results screen, you will see a salmon-colored banner indicating that Forecite has identified additional decisions that may be relevant to your research topic, but do not contain your search terms.

- Click the orange View Results button and the first suggested case is Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966).  It is that simple.

How Does Forecite Work?

Like Authority Check, Forecite carefully and comprehensively analyzes the citation structure of your search results. Forecite looks for cases that are frequently cited by other cases in your search results that do not contain all of your search terms.

Seeing Is Believing.

But don’t take our word for it, see for yourself.  Sign up for a free, no-strings 24-hr trial of Fastcase to test drive Forecite and the rest of our smarter research tools by visiting www.fastcase.com/subscription.  (Current subscribers to our web-based legal research service already have access to Forecite.  This feature is not currently available on our mobile apps.)

Questions? 1-866-773-2782 or support@fastcase.com.

We recently heard about a fantastic research project headed up by geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.  Her project called, Quake-Catcher Network, harnesses the power of a little device that resides in most new laptops called an “accelerometer.”

cc licensed flickr photo shared by the_tahoe_guy

The accelerometer is a type of motion sensor that is intended to help protect laptops by detecting when the machine has been dropped and turning off the hard drive.  When Cochran learned that these devices were being placed in laptops, she came up with the idea of using them to create a network that could record earthquakes.

So with some help from Stanford geophysics professor Jesse Lawrence, Quake-Catcher Network was born.  The concept is simple:  members of the public can download a free software program that runs silently in the background of their laptops detecting tremors and collecting data from the accelerometer in their machine.  The data that is collected is transmitted to researchers who can analyze it and use it to (hopefully) predict an earthquake.

For more information on the project, click here.

(As awesome as this project is, it is almost begging for an iPhone app. Smartphones have accelerometers too! We were not able to find any solid information on a mobile app related to the project, but let us know if you do).

A month ago, we were so excited about the release of a new iPhone App, BarMax CA, we just had to write about it. While it grabbed headlines for being the most expensive app in the iTunes store ($999), we were more excited about its potential for disrupting the bar prep market.

It appears the little-app-that-could has done just that.  As TechCrunch just reported, the bar prep giant BarBri, a live bar prep course that costs few thousand dollars more than BarMax, has responded with two major changes that poor, stressed-out, potential attorneys should really like.

For one, BarBri is now giving users “unlimited online access” to users.  The second, more substantial change is that BarBri will now allow folks who didn’t pass the bar to re-take the course, instead of paying a couple thousand dollars more (talk about kicking you when you’re down).  Of course, these are two things that BarMax could already boast—you bought the app, you keep the app.

Coolest of all, BarMax has responded with genuine excitement about these changes.  While this response is probably a good PR move either way, you get the feeling that BarMax isn’t only trying to provide a valuable product and make a profit, they truly want to improve the bar prep market by disrupting it.

As we noted last time, we’re all for tech-savvy alternatives that make your research easier and more affordable, plus add competition to a market that needs it.  Don’t have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch? No problem—you can rent an iPod Touch from BarMax.  Now that’s lowering the bar.

From the few reviews on the iTunes Store, it sounds like BarMax CA is an intuitive, functional app.  Of course, we’ll know more after folks take the CA Bar exam next week.  And while the bar prep app is only for the CA Bar right now, they’ve also just released a $500 MBE app. Sounds like they’re expanding.  With BarBri already a bit spooked, it will be interesting to see just how competitive this market can become.

What’s more, it’s completely free to download and use as much as you’d like.  It harnesses the full power, functionality, and extensive database of the Web-based Fastcase platform that our users depend on (click here for more information about our Web-based platform).   Full functionality means searching cases and statutes with Fastcase’s smarter tools and intuitive interface.

When searching cases, you can specify the jurisdiction, narrow the date range, limit the number of results, and choose to sort your results by relevance, date, short name, or by the number of times a case has been cited by others.  In addition to sorting results, you’ll also be able to choose how your results appear with three options—display ‘Title’ only for quick browsing, ‘Title + First Paragraph’ to see the beginning of the case, or ‘Title + Most Relevant Paragraph’ to see the portion of the case that refers to your keywords most often.

Other features include the ability to browse statutes, pull up a list of later citing cases with Authority Check, save a case for later, view recent searches, and change a document’s font size to small, medium, or large.

We’re proud to offer Fastcase for the iPhone with no strings attached.  If you are already a Fastcase subscriber or have signed up for a free trial with us in the past, then you are already registered to use Fastcase for iPhone.  Just click here to download the App from the App Store.  If you have forgotten your password, click here to retrieve it and have it sent to the e-mail address you used to register with Fastcase.

We are also proud to report that so far, the reviews have been very positive.  But we are eager to hear your impressions.  So check out Fastcase for the iPhone today and send us your comments via Twitter or e-mail.