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Finding & Researching Your Paper Topic: Keeping Current

Guide on finding and researching your paper topic.

Set up Alerts

Bloomberg Law, Lexis, and Westlaw all provide the ability to set up alerts for legal topics and have those alerts sent to you via email. You can choose how often the alerts are sent. 

Don't forget the power of KeyCite and Shepard's. Use these tools to monitor case developments and pending legislation. 

Bloomberg's In Focus resources keep you up to date with editorially curated pages to find the latest news, commentary, litigation filings, regulatory developments, and practice tools on emerging issues and other topics of note to legal practitioners.

Sign up for Newsletters

Many current awareness tools give you the opportunity to sign up for newsletters, to be delivered daily, weekly or monthly or as breaking news happens.

  • Broad coverage is available through the National Law Journal and Law360, both available from Lexis.
  • Other tools are subject-specific, like E&E Daily and the Environmental Law Reporter for environmental issues, and LawMemo for employment issues. Bloomberg Law has a number of law reports; these vary in topic from class actions and tax to labor and employment and health care. 
  • Blogs are amazing resources for keeping up and knowing who in the field is keeping up. LexBlog provides free email subscriptions to aggregated posts by legal topic.

Apps for Current Awareness

Use Feedly to search for and read blogs and news articles on topics of interest. Available on the web or as an app. 

Listen to podcasts using your favorite podcasting app like Stitcher or the native Podcast app on your phone. Looking for legal-themed podcasts? Start with Legal Talk Network

Research Help

We're here to help. Contact a research librarian for help with an assignment, project, or resource. 

Hours:
Mon-Fri, 11am
-3pm
503-768-6688
lawlib@lclark.edu

Reference Hours