Lexis‪®‬ 4+

Look, there are few things about law practice less than doing legal research. Keeping track of billable hours is the only thing that comes to the top of my mind. The Lexis Advance app may not make doing research all sunshine and lollipops, but it sure does a great job making it easier & more effective. I was able tonight to find a case directly on point to rebut an opponent's argument in about 10 minutes, due largely to how much easier this app makes it to hone in on exactly what I was looking for. Kudos to Lexis for getting it right!

Really frustrating that frequently (even more frequently to nearly always recently) when switching between apps and keeping Lexis Advance running in multi-tasking then going back to Lexis, the app resets and you have to choose client again and start search all over. When using a case I want to keep, I view the PDF of the case and open it in a PDF application where I can save it and highlight/take notes on the case as I prefer to do. However, it's extremely frustrating to then go back to the app to look at the next search result or Shepard's result only to find I have to start all over again. It's actually caused me to stop working on a search at times because I don't have time to start over again at that time.

They also need to improve the search results to better sift through results. When I bring up a case in the results in a search or after I Shepardize, they should make it so we can just select the next case and not have to go back to the results and open a new tab.

This app is nearly everything that it needs to simulate the functionality of the desktop experience.

But there are some significant drawbacks. It makes no sense that you can’t edit search terms after executing a search. Because this is a mobile platform, it is more likely that users will make mistakes entering a search string. Yet if you put together a long search string and one part is wrong, you have to go back and rewrite the entire search string. Inputting search strings is already incredibly cumbersome on a mobile device such as a phone or ipad, and requiring perfection the first time is a real annoyance.

One other problem is that once a search is completed, it is difficult to navigate and work with the results. Navigating between different types of content (cases, secondary sources, rules, etc.) is extremely difficult. In addition, finding and locating filters for the content is also difficult. The navigation is not where it should be.