Virtually every tax professional uses at least one of the
dominant case law search engines, commercial or open-source, to
find supporting authority for the position their client is taking
(whether in controversy or for tax planning purposes). All of these
search engines operate with keywords. This can pose enormous
challenges.
Broad keywords are required to ensure that no results are
missed, yet the volume of results the case law search engine
surfaces is often overwhelming, particularly if time is of the
essence. And time usually is an important factor.
This can be particularly acute in the face of a court filing
deadline. But even in the absence of such deadlines, the time spent
researching must always be justified to the client. It can be a
difficult conversation that follows a bill setting out eight hours
of research with sparse results. It's no wonder then that time
spent researching case law will often be written off, resulting in
a concrete loss of revenue.
