Legal Information Center

Legal Search Engines


Findlaw's Lawcrawler
The premiere free legal search engine is powered by Google which returns web pages that contain all the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. The site also includes filters set up to search the US government, every US state, the major US Government agencies and nearly every US law school.

LawGuru
From here you can search on more than 500 legal search engines and tools. A drop-down menu provides selection of the name of the engine you want to search, then click the "Go there!" button and the search form for that engine will appear here. Simple. The list is sorted alphabetically. We have tried to include searchable resources for every state, including cases, court opinions, codes, statutes, bills and more, whenever possible. Federal resources can generally be found alphabetically. There is a lot more.

Internet Legal Resource Guide
One of the most distinguishing features of the ILRG is its highly efficient, customly programmed search engine. When one enters a search term or terms into the ILRG search box, the ILRG will return the URLs from its database of 3100+ web sites that match the specified key words. Of course, titles of pages local to the ILRG will be returned, too, but they are supplemented with the URLs contained within each page that match your query parameters. ILRG's Intelligent URL "Search and Extract" system saves you the time of having to go to each ILRG page and read every single word on it, just to find one link. With the unique ILRG search engine, finding the information you need is not unnecessarily complicated. The average search is completed in 8-10 seconds. Results are categorized and show the search terms in context.

Law.com
The advanced search option includes some unique ways to structure a search. 'Interest area' may be specified as professional, student, business, or public. 'Practice area' options include: corporate law, employment law, intellectual property, litigation or technology. 'Information types' are: news, commentary, practice tools, decisions, profiles, seminars or resources. The researcher is given a variety of display options covering titles and/or summaries and quantity per page.

LLRX.com
The search is of the content of the site, so results may seem small, but the quality of the resources on this site are excellent. Results may be sorted by date. LLRX.com is a unique, free Web journal dedicated to providing legal professionals with the most up-to-date information on a wide range of Internet legal research and technology-related issues.

LawyerExpress
The advanced search option provides the researcher with a meta-search screen that will search all, or selected preferences of, Infoseeek, Excite, HotBot, AltaVista, Lycos, Raging Search, Yahoo, and DirectHit. The search results are displayed in "clusters," not by search engine, but by phraseology of the search terms. Also includes a list of other legal search engines.

Law Research.com
Use this form to search LawResearch's "Just The Law Links" with an index of over 500,000 HYPER-LINKED legal resources. Search specific words or combinations of words by using "and" "or" "but" between each word searched for. The search engine will display best matches first and each listed item is hyper-link to that resource. Phrase searching is not available, but the results display a good cross section of source types.

Meta-Index or U.S. Legal Research
'Fill-in-the-blank' searching for Federal judicial resources and Congressional materials. A convenient location when searching Federal materials. Where possible, the search options include citation searching. Each input area identifies the resource being searched.

WashLaw WEB
'Fill-in-the-blank' searching for Federal Judicial, Congressional, regulatory materials as well as state primary materials and city codes. The researcher may conduct the search in the Circuit or may choose to link directly to the individual lower court or Circuit Court site. Also includes a set of links to other legal search engines.

Yahoo! Government > Law
The directory approach of Yahoo! which includes its search utility provides an easy to use alternative to an unstructured search engine. The 'Categories' are divided into types of law as well as traditional directory segments. 'Site Listings' are divided into "Most Popular" and "Alphabetical."

FirstGov
FirstGov is the only official U.S. Government portal to 30 million pages of government information, services, and online transactions. The site offers a powerful search engine that searches every word of every U.S. government document in a quarter of a second or less. FirstGov also features a topical index, online transactions, links to state and local government, options to contact your government, and other tools so the researcher doesn't have to know the name of the government agency to get the information needed.

GPO Access
A search utility for Federal resources including: legislative materials, executive documents, judicial materials, and regulatory documents, including GAO reports and decisions.

Primary Navigation