Law Firm Intelligence: Seven Research Resources You Need to Know

Researchers are often called upon to provide a great deal of information on a limited budget. While extremely useful and comprehensive, aggregators such as LexisNexis can be expensive and do not always provide the best information. Adding free and low-cost publicly available resources to the researcher's menu of options will not only lower the overall costs of research, but will also enable the researcher to provide answers to a broader range of questions.

The following seven sites are used frequently by CI analysts and others researchers to answer such inquiries as:

What is going on in the biotechnology industry?

Please find the biography of [insert name here] in-house attorney.

What are the legal needs of ABC Company?

Tell me when ABC Company issues a press release or uploads SEC filings to its Web site.

Delicious/Digg

When researchers have no clue where to begin their research, Delicious or Digg (del.icio.us and delicious.com digg.com) are great places to start. The sites were one of the first ' if not the first ' social bookmarking sites. How it works: When an Internet user finds a site that he or she deems interesting, the user bookmarks it in Delicious or Digg and can then share it with others. Each site is tagged and described by the user. Because there is no generally accepted tagging nomenclature or taxonomy, multiple searches are often required. Search results are listed according to the number of people who have bookmarked the site and are thus more tailored than a general Google or Yahoo! search. For example, a search for biotechnology included industry-specific blogs, magazines, the largest membership organization servicing the industry and two biotech news aggregators.

Way Back Machine

Need a biography for an in-house attorney, but its not available on the state bar sites or Martindale? Think it is just not available? Well, actually it is ' if he or she worked at a law firm at one time or another. The bio can be found on the Way Back Machine (www.archive.org), a free archive of the Internet. The database holds entire sites separated by the date that they were archived. Enter a URL into the site's search engine, and you will be given a list of linked dates as a result. Although most downloadable PDFs and other documents are not archived along with the site, the Way Back Machine is a useful tool for historical research.

USPTO

The US Patent & Trademark Office (www.uspto.gov) offers a searchable database of patents, trademarks, and patent applications. Full text patents can be downloaded for a small fee ' or can be found free on Google Patents. A quick search will provide a free summary of the patent, including the correspondent law firm, class, date filed, date approved and assignee. The search feature, while basic, does allow a search for all patents assigned to a certain company or prosecuted by a specific law firm. Usually search results will be accurate; however, some search features, such as the date feature, do have bugs.

PACER

PACER is the U.S. Federal Court's online database. The Index site provides an almost-comprehensive listing of all federal litigation, searchable by such criteria as party, court, date, and nature of suit. The site is updated daily. Courts are not required to upload to the Index, although most do regularly. This is the database from which CourtLink pulls data for Strategic Profiles. Although PACER is much cheaper (most searches cost less than $1) than Strategic Profiles, the data is in raw format. Cases are listed individually and must be mined for actionable intelligence. Where Strategic Profiles give an excellent snapshot of litigation trends and company's preferred legal counsel, PACER provides a deeper dive into specific cases. In many instances, a full list of counsel ' with e-mail addresses ' are available, as are the actual complaints. This is very useful information when you have been tasked with determining a client's needs for legal services; the complaints will tell you exactly issues the company has been facing.

Edgar

Edgar is the Securities & Exchange Commission's (SEC) online database of company filings. Every public company listed on a US exchange has their SEC filings included in this database, and they can be searched by company, date and type of filing. Filings are presented as text or HTML, and are, at times, very difficult to read due to formatting issues. Despite the reading difficulties, Edgar is a time-saver when searching for multiple 10Ks, such as when researching industry happenings.

Investor Relations Sites

When analyzing a single public company, the best, most updated information can be found on the company's Investor Relations site. Usually located in the “About Us” channel, the Investor Relations site will usually provide a link to the company's SEC Filings. Filings can usually be downloaded as an RTF, PDF, or Excel document. Additionally, companies usually post Webcasts, podcasts and seminar and conference materials on the site. While the annual and quarterly SEC filings (10K and 10Q, respectively) will update the researcher on company finances and major developments, the Webcasts and other materials will provide specific, detailed information on strategic initiatives and the company's progress on those initiatives (such as a major restructuring, or a merger). Too, the conference materials ' especially if the CEO presented at a major industry conference ' will provide insight into how the company fits into its industry and compares to similar companies.

Watch That Page

Have a competitor you'd like to keep tabs on? A client whose press releases you'd like ASAP? Watch That Page (www.watchthatpage.com) can keep you in the loop. Watch That Page is a free webpage monitoring service. Users can choose to monitor a number of pages and when a page is updated, Watch That Page will send an e-mail alert. To keep e-mails manageable, the service allows users to categorize pages, select the rate of updates and use keywords to limit updates.

Shannon Sankstone, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is the Marketing Research Analyst at Quarles & Brady, where she is responsible for the marketing and competitive intelligence research function. She can be reached at [email protected] or at 312-715-5251.

Researchers are often called upon to provide a great deal of information on a limited budget. While extremely useful and comprehensive, aggregators such as LexisNexis can be expensive and do not always provide the best information. Adding free and low-cost publicly available resources to the researcher's menu of options will not only lower the overall costs of research, but will also enable the researcher to provide answers to a broader range of questions.

The following seven sites are used frequently by CI analysts and others researchers to answer such inquiries as:

What is going on in the biotechnology industry?

Please find the biography of [insert name here] in-house attorney.

What are the legal needs of ABC Company?

Tell me when ABC Company issues a press release or uploads SEC filings to its Web site.

Delicious/Digg

When researchers have no clue where to begin their research, Delicious or Digg (del.icio.us and delicious.com digg.com) are great places to start. The sites were one of the first ' if not the first ' social bookmarking sites. How it works: When an Internet user finds a site that he or she deems interesting, the user bookmarks it in Delicious or Digg and can then share it with others. Each site is tagged and described by the user. Because there is no generally accepted tagging nomenclature or taxonomy, multiple searches are often required. Search results are listed according to the number of people who have bookmarked the site and are thus more tailored than a general Google or Yahoo! search. For example, a search for biotechnology included industry-specific blogs, magazines, the largest membership organization servicing the industry and two biotech news aggregators.

Way Back Machine

Need a biography for an in-house attorney, but its not available on the state bar sites or Martindale? Think it is just not available? Well, actually it is ' if he or she worked at a law firm at one time or another. The bio can be found on the Way Back Machine (www.archive.org), a free archive of the Internet. The database holds entire sites separated by the date that they were archived. Enter a URL into the site's search engine, and you will be given a list of linked dates as a result. Although most downloadable PDFs and other documents are not archived along with the site, the Way Back Machine is a useful tool for historical research.

USPTO

The US Patent & Trademark Office (www.uspto.gov) offers a searchable database of patents, trademarks, and patent applications. Full text patents can be downloaded for a small fee ' or can be found free on Google Patents. A quick search will provide a free summary of the patent, including the correspondent law firm, class, date filed, date approved and assignee. The search feature, while basic, does allow a search for all patents assigned to a certain company or prosecuted by a specific law firm. Usually search results will be accurate; however, some search features, such as the date feature, do have bugs.

PACER

PACER is the U.S. Federal Court's online database. The Index site provides an almost-comprehensive listing of all federal litigation, searchable by such criteria as party, court, date, and nature of suit. The site is updated daily. Courts are not required to upload to the Index, although most do regularly. This is the database from which CourtLink pulls data for Strategic Profiles. Although PACER is much cheaper (most searches cost less than $1) than Strategic Profiles, the data is in raw format. Cases are listed individually and must be mined for actionable intelligence. Where Strategic Profiles give an excellent snapshot of litigation trends and company's preferred legal counsel, PACER provides a deeper dive into specific cases. In many instances, a full list of counsel ' with e-mail addresses ' are available, as are the actual complaints. This is very useful information when you have been tasked with determining a client's needs for legal services; the complaints will tell you exactly issues the company has been facing.

Edgar

Edgar is the Securities & Exchange Commission's (SEC) online database of company filings. Every public company listed on a US exchange has their SEC filings included in this database, and they can be searched by company, date and type of filing. Filings are presented as text or HTML, and are, at times, very difficult to read due to formatting issues. Despite the reading difficulties, Edgar is a time-saver when searching for multiple 10Ks, such as when researching industry happenings.

Investor Relations Sites

When analyzing a single public company, the best, most updated information can be found on the company's Investor Relations site. Usually located in the “About Us” channel, the Investor Relations site will usually provide a link to the company's SEC Filings. Filings can usually be downloaded as an RTF, PDF, or Excel document. Additionally, companies usually post Webcasts, podcasts and seminar and conference materials on the site. While the annual and quarterly SEC filings (10K and 10Q, respectively) will update the researcher on company finances and major developments, the Webcasts and other materials will provide specific, detailed information on strategic initiatives and the company's progress on those initiatives (such as a major restructuring, or a merger). Too, the conference materials ' especially if the CEO presented at a major industry conference ' will provide insight into how the company fits into its industry and compares to similar companies.

Watch That Page

Have a competitor you'd like to keep tabs on? A client whose press releases you'd like ASAP? Watch That Page (www.watchthatpage.com) can keep you in the loop. Watch That Page is a free webpage monitoring service. Users can choose to monitor a number of pages and when a page is updated, Watch That Page will send an e-mail alert. To keep e-mails manageable, the service allows users to categorize pages, select the rate of updates and use keywords to limit updates.

Shannon Sankstone, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is the Marketing Research Analyst at Quarles & Brady, where she is responsible for the marketing and competitive intelligence research function. She can be reached at [email protected] or at 312-715-5251.