Systems, Methods, Software, and Interfaces for Formatting Legal Citations

摘要

The present disclosure is directed towards a citation formatting system and a method for operating an online research service for providing legal citations. The exemplary system provides the citation formatting function in a client-server architecture, receiving citations from a user's client access device over a computer network and communicating citation format suggestions back to the client access device for possible insertion into a document on the access device.

主权项

1. A citation formatting system associated with facilitating legal research, the system comprising:
a database including a plurality of law-related documents associated with legal research; a citation data structure including one or more formatted citations associated with at least one of the law-related documents, the citation data structure being indexed and including a document identifier logically associated with at least a first citation formatted according to a citation standard, the citation standard being based on one or more of a bluebook standard, ALWD standard, and citation format preference associated with a user; and a server coupled to the database and to the data structure, the server configured to:
retrieve a citation using a citation-finder module, from a word-processing document of a client access device, the retrieved citation associated with a specific law-related document;determine whether the specific law-related document represented by the retrieved citation exists in the database using a citation-identifier module which parses at least a portion of the formatted citation, the citation-identifier module integrating with the word-processing document;transmit at least a portion of the formatted citation to a citation-formatter module for retrieving citation data from law-related documents corresponding to at least one of the retrieved citations;determine, using the citation-formatter module, whether the specific law-related document represented by the formatted citation matches an existing law-related document in the database;transmit an error message to the client access device if the formatted citation does not match an existing law-related document in the database;identify at least one formatted citation using the citation-identifier module which processes the citation data structure text including the document identifier corresponding to the law-related document in the database represented by the retrieved citation; andtransmit the identified at least one formatted citation to the client access device for optional substitution of the retrieved citation in the word-processing document with one of the transmitted at least one formatted citation, the client access device including at least a word-processing interface region for editing the retrieved citation.