Validating legal research can be the most important moment in any process of legal research, and it may be the area of research that the Internet has proven to be the most beneficial in assisting. Validation does this by determining that the research one has, for example, a judicial decision has been referenced elsewhere, and to what effect. legal precedent through judicial review).
The most common means to trace validity historically has been through the use of a citator Though there are other services that also provide a citator indexes, Shepherd’s is so affiliated with the process of determining the validity of research (it was originally published in the 19th century), in this manner is called “shepherdizing.”
Usually, Shepherd’s would consist of a multitude of volumes, published every three years, but since 1999 the service has been associated with LexisNexis, the online legal portal, which has increased its accessibility and allowed the service to be updated daily. There are other minor services that have tried to enter the market, but Shepherd’s and KeyCite dominate the market. Shepherd’s though, has experimented with a per citation rate 0f $4.25, which has opened up the market to validation services substantially, especially to law students.
Due to being such prominent online presences, and enhancing the efficiency by which paralegals and other legal researcher can validate their research, validating has become a viable means of not only substantiating research, but as a fundamental research tool itself. Thus, while validation had once been seen as a means of showing that a reference has been substantiated, or in essence, “validated,”
