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Hello and welcome to this video for Paralegals. My name is Alyssa Novak and I am the Associate
Online Librarian. You can see my email address here on the screen
if you need to get in touch with me. You can also find my full contact information on the
library’s website. In this video I’ll talk about how to evaluate
legal websites, and we’ll also take a look at some examples of free websites that are
available for you. [Next slide]
Let’s talk about free websites, and some of their benefits and pitfalls.
Benefits: easy, accessible (no log-in) Pitfalls: sometimes harder to search, not
reliable [Next slide]
Free information can be fantastic! There’s a lot of free information out there published
by federal and state governments, law schools, legal associations and paralegal associations,
and a lot of it can be quite reliable. [Next slide]
There are a few things you can do to make sure the free information you’re looking
at is reliable. You can ask yourself – is it CRAP? And CRAP is our little acronym for
remembering to ask yourself these four things –
Is what you’re looking at Current? This is something that’s really important in
your field. Is it Reliable? Can you trust it? Is it published
by someone you trust, such as one of the organizations I previously mentioned.
Does the organization and/or author have the authority to be writing about the topic they’re
writing about? Finally, purpose. Purpose is a big one. Why
are they publishing this for free? Why aren’t they trying to get your money? Purposes can
vary. Maybe they’re trying to get you to purchase something. Maybe purchase a book
or software, maybe purchase their services, or maybe they simply want to provide accurate
information. For example, a Paralegal Association would want to make sure that paralegal professionals
are adequately informed about the current issues in their field.
If you take a look at the URLs on this slide later on, you’ll see examples of two websites
with varying amounts of credibility. [Next slide]
Findlaw is a great free resource. It doesn’t really have its own content as much as it
serves as a directory that points you to other resources on the web. That means you’ll
be able to find a lot of different types of information. I have a short list here of some
examples. Findlaw looks like this, and as I said it
doesn’t really have its own content as much as it pushes out to other legal websites.
[Next slide] Another helpful website is GPOAccess. It has
official, published e-versions of federal government information from all three branches.
And GPO stands for Government Printing Office. [Next slide]
The next example of free information that I wanted to show you is MN Statutes. If you
don’t live in MN, that’s okay. There’s usually a state legal website for every state
– and we have those listed in the library’s paralegal research guide.
This is usually where you can find things like statutes, law, bills, session info – information
about the branches of the state government. [Next slide]
There’s a lot of great legal websites out there, and as long as you know how to evaluate
them for credibility, they can be very useful. We have a list of recommended websites available
for you on the library’s paralegal research guide.
[Next slide] So that’s the end of this video. If you
have any questions or comments for me later on, feel free to contact me.