Low-Cost or Free Online Legal Research Resources

Often in small firms, corporate counsels have to handle a multitude of tasks and not all businesses can afford the costs of WestLaw or Lexis-Nexis. Such a situation leaves corporate counsel constrained to do research at their own cost and fumbling to manage. Many a time, only a single account is arranged by the company making it difficult to allow concurrent access of online research to other staff and reducing productivity. Since the responsibility of doing the legal research is ultimately that of the corporate counsel it is immensely helpful to be aware of certain online resources that are truly useful and mostly free. This article mentions a few of the online resources and tools we have found useful when unable to access commercial databases.
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Google Patents: (http://www.google.com/?tbm=pts&hl=en) For those in Intellectual property law, Google Patents is an excellent resource for finding information. To narrow down your search, try the Advanced Patent Search at http://www.google.com/advanced_patent_search.

The Federal Register (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collection.action?collectionCode=FR): Run by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), this is the official publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations. The Federal Register provides access to all executive orders and presidential documents on top of bare Acts and Statutes.

Google Scholar and Google Books: No need to consider these resources separately, both the Google Scholar and Google Books provide excellent search facilities and access to documents and books of various types on relevant subjects. You can find court cases just by entering the name of the lawsuit in most cases.

Cornell Legal Information Institute (http://www.law.conell.edu): A treasure house on Federal law, including Federal Rules, Code of Federal Regulations, the U.S. Code, uniform model laws etcetera. There are topical sections and blogs on particular subjects as well as scholarly documents. Cornell also provides state-specific information including state-wise judicial and legislative documents.

PACER (http://www.pacer.gov/): The Public Access to Court Electronic Records has recently increased fees to $.10 per page of access. Though this rate is many times higher than the actual costs to run the system, it is still many times lower than commercial alternatives.

Resource.org: This non-profit works with other organizations and Princeton to make legal documents and court records available to the public. The website also has services like streaming media access to the House of Representatives, and other facilities that would charm you.

This list would hardly be complete without mention of The Internet Archive which is a non-profit and the people who conceived The Wayback Machine. Unless you use it, you wouldn't know what you had been missing.
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There is a great chance that you already know of these resources, but there is a greater chance that as a corporate counsel, you have never felt the need to use free and independent resources. Giving them a try and learning your way around can sometimes yield better results than relying solely on commercial law databases. Anyway cross-verification of information is written into the bones of every good lawyer and familiarity with alternative resources of information can always come in handy.