Introduction to vLex Fastcase

Hi, good afternoon. This is Catherine Sanders Reach. I'm the Director for the Center for Practice Management, and it is my pleasure to welcome TJ Diggins, uh, to be with us today. And he is going to explain all the fancy new things that we can do with what was formerly known as FastCase, which is now VLECS FastCase. And I'm hoping that TJ explains what what that means as well. You are welcome to chat questions, but he's going to take them at the end unless he covers what is going to be happening. So just chat the questions as they come up. If it's something I can answer, I'll answer it. Otherwise, I will feed them to TJ at the end. So TJ is our customer service representative at VLEX FastCase, and I'll let you get started.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Catherine, for the introduction and super excited to be here in front of you all today. We are super happy with the North Carolina Bar Association. They've been great partners with us for, for quite a few years now, and we look forward to continuing our positive relationship going forward with the, with the changes. I know change is not always easy, but they have done a great job of making you all aware of the changes and providing opportunities like today. To educate yourselves on the new platform. So thank you, Catherine, and thank you to the North Carolina Bar for working with us to make sure your members are aware of the changes. So I'll say a little bit more about myself. I am a customer success representative with VLECS, specifically on our alliances team, which means we work— I work with bar partners all across the US in a similar fashion as today, providing training materials and just being a resource to their members, you know, with the changes and access to a new platform, there's inevitably going to be questions and feedback on that platform. So they've added me to the team. I work with some very, very smart people, and I'm excited to be on the team with VLEX because of the, the changes in legal technology and with research in general. So, but I, as I mentioned, I am a resource to you. I want to be a personal resource if you have questions, feedback, I want to be the guy that you reach out to when you need help. So it's my responsibility to be your voice within our company. I can take your feedback and run it up the chain, make sure our team is aware of it, and make sure we can push out changes and fixes for anything that may not be working correctly. And I will be providing my direct contact information at the end of today's presentation, along with our support team's contact information, so you can rest assured any questions or comments will be addressed timely going forward. And now some of you are most likely already familiar with the Fastcase name, and I wanted to provide a little bit of background on the merging of VLEX and Fastcase and what we're providing as what they've come together to provide with the VLEX Fastcase platform. So these are two trailblazing companies, both VLEX and Fastcase, and although they originated from different parts of the world, We share a common mission, and that's to democratize access to the law. And we want to revolutionize how attorneys engage with legal information. And VLEX was actually created in Spain in 1998 and Fastcase here in the US in 1999. But from the very beginning, we recognized that the law should be accessible to everyone and not just those with successful practices or deep pockets. And while our mission was aligned, the challenge still remained for us. How could we bring that vision to life? And the answer we found was in the heart of the legal community, which is bar associations. You know, no matter the type, they are the unifying thread that connects attorneys across the globe. And by partnering with these associations, we found the perfect channel to reach legal professionals everywhere. And now if you fast forward 25 years later, we have over 3 million attorneys worldwide with direct access to their country's legal resources thanks to this strategic partnership. And this is where you as bar members actually come into the story. Our mission is not just about providing you access. We want to empower you by putting the law directly in your hands. And today we invite you to become a part of that journey, a journey that started with a shared vision to democratize the law and continues with you at its center. And speaking of journeys, let's take a look at what journey we will embark upon together today with our agenda here. And we'll first take a look at how you can log into the platform. How do you access VLECS Fast Case? But then once we're on the platform, I'm going to highlight our resource center where you can find additional training materials and helpful content to help you educate yourself in the platform. And then we'll do a deep dive into the search features. We're going to do a general search and an advanced search. And I will highlight the organizational tools along the way. And then even get into a case. We'll break down the document level, the tools that you have available to you there, and tips and tricks along the way as I come across them. And then as Katherine mentioned, we will have some time at the end for some questions. So feel free to go ahead and enter those in the chat at any time when I'm covering something. And then at the end of the presentation, we'll go back and review any of those questions posed and hopefully get through all of them. But rest assured, I'm going to provide the contact information so you can send those questions over to our support team. To me directly via email as well. So with that, let's go ahead and, uh, go over to what should be a familiar web page to you, and that is the North Carolina Bar Association website here. And I first wanted to start our journey with how can we get logged in. So as, uh, same process from FastCase if you're familiar with that, you're going to want to go ahead and log into the North Carolina Bar Association website So that's going to be your first step. Make sure you get logged in with your member credentials here. But then to find the VLEX Fast Case link, what you can do is go over to Explore here and then drop down the Resources button. And then VLEX Fast Case is linked right here up at the top. So very easy to find the link to get to the VLEX Fast Case website or web page., and it may be helpful to you to go ahead and bookmark or favorite this website if you want an even quicker way to log in. However, you will still need to log into the North Carolina Bar website in order to then log into and connect to the legal research benefit here. So if we go ahead and click the login, that'll allow you to link directly over to the VLEX FastCase platform. And as of November 19th, you all should now be seeing a modal window or a pop-up window, which kind of sits over our Fastcase, or which does sit over our Fastcase 7 page or our Fastcase 7 platform. And it looks like the page that I'm on here. And this is just our way to let you know that you now have access to the new platform. It's gonna be a little bit more efficient, provide a little bit better insights to some case information. And all you have to do is click on the Access VLEX Fastcase button to then take you to the new platform. Now, we also understand that learning a new system can be, you know, timely. It can take a little bit of time to get comfortable with that, and as practicing attorneys, your time can be short. So any saved information, we still wanted you to have access to get that information quickly in the FastCase 7 platform. And if you want to jump right back to the FastCase platform, all you have to do is hit the close button here, and then you will go right into Fastcase 7. But you all are a step ahead today. You're learning the new platform with me. So what we're going to do is click on Access VLEX Fastcase here, and that's going to take us to the new platform. And if it is your very first time logging in here, I wanted to mention that, uh, the homepage that we are on currently is not actually going to be the very first thing you see when you log in. Uh, you're actually going to be met with an onboarding screen. Uh, it's just going to ask you for some general information— your name, email address, and maybe your practice area. And this is so we can customize the account to you specifically. Uh, and there's a couple of ways we've personalized the platform here, uh, such as our personalized news feed at the bottom, uh, as well as, uh, case alerts. So if you want to receive case alerts via email, you're also going to want to set up a personal account when you log into the VLEX Fast Case platform. So really quick, takes less than a minute to complete, fill out that information, and then it'll direct you here to the homepage. But now that we are on the platform, I wanted to get started with our big Get Started button here, and this is our Resource Center. So we'll expand this, and it starts with some guided tours. So right here we've got a checklist for you to complete. And these are just great ways to help you start to navigate the platform. As I mentioned, they are guided tours, so it'll be like a click-through tutorial on how to work certain features. But we will be, we will be covering a lot of these today. So if you feel confident whenever you do log into the new platform, you can always hit the dismiss checklist button here at the bottom of this list. And then that'll just leave you with this bottom section here. Now underneath our checklist, we have additional guided tours. So as we add new features and new tools to the platform, we want you to know how to work those. So we will add— we will continue to add guided tours here. So feel free to refer back to these should you wish in the future. But in my opinion, one of the best ways to learn about the features of the platform and how to operate those is going to be the knowledge base section here. So if we follow the knowledge base, that pulls up linked articles where you can then search for specific features. So for example, maybe we wanted to find, find out how to work the advanced search feature. What we can do is use that search bar to find that article and then click on that, which will take you to our knowledge base website. So just be aware that when you do click on these articles,, it will take you to a new tab on your browser here. And as you can see, we've got an article format with some screenshots as well as some other links to other information and clips to help you understand how to work specific features. And over on the left-hand side, we also have a table of contents so you can browse all of the tools and features that are available in the VLEX Fastcase platform. And I'll come back to the Knowledge Base Center in just a moment here, but I'll navigate back over to the platform and continue on here. So underneath our knowledge base, we have some additional training sessions, and currently it only links to an email address, but before the end of the year, we will be linking the actual registration links for additional training sessions. So going into 2025, we are providing some additional training sessions similar to the one that we're doing today, where we'll cover all of the features of the platform. But then we will also be doing some targeted trainings as well on specific features like advanced searching and Vincent AI as well, if you're interested in learning about those other tools. Now underneath the training sessions, we have some video tutorials linked here. And if you're anything like me, I learn really well off of watching video tutorials. So we've got some helpful ones linked here to get you started. But you can access all of our VLEX videos on our Vimeo page down here at the bottom. And navigating back over to our knowledge base website, I wanted to mention that underneath the article formats on the information here, you can also find video walkthroughs as well. So great resource here, provides all the information in a readable format and then in a video format as well. And we'll go back here because, uh, we've got a little bit more information down at the bottom of our Resource Center, and that is, uh, listing ways for you to get in contact with us. So you can do that in a couple of different ways here, one of them being via email. And the support team is— their dedicated email address is the helpdesk-us@velex.com. Uh, you can send us an email with any, uh, content requests, um, if you're having trouble finding certain things in the platform, or you're just not sure how to work a certain aspect of the platform, you can reach out to our support team. They are going to be the most educated on how to find specific legal content in the platform. But I'm also a resource to you and would love to help point you in the right direction. Now, in addition to email, you can also give us a call if you need immediate assistance. I would definitely recommend finding our phone information and giving our support team a, a call here at the 866 number. They are available Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM Eastern. And our support team is local here to the US, so we have members spread out across the US. And if you call in, one of our dedicated US representatives will be able to help assist you efficiently. Now, one additional way you can actually get in contact with us right here on the platform is through our chat feature. So you'll see there's a chat icon here for you to be able to start a conversation with our support team. And I wanted to preface that this will actually start with an automated sequence. So you will have to enter your name, your email address, and a little bit about the issue that you're experiencing or question that you have. And that's so, uh, to assist our support team member. Once they do log into the call, they have all of the information they can quickly, uh, review, and then provide you with immediate assistance. But that does cover the Resource Center here. So again, just the guided tours followed by some additional resources here for you to utilize, and then contact information at the bottom. And moving into the platform now from our Resource Center there, I wanted to highlight some additional features that are going to remain consistent no matter what page you actually navigate to in the platform here.. And that is going to be our left-hand navigational bar and our top bar. So no matter if you're on the document level search results page or any of the different tools, these will remain consistent. So you can quickly jump right back into searching or editing a search that you've already started on. And I'll cover these broadly here and then provide a little bit more detail on these as we go along in the presentation. So starting with our homepage here, you can obviously see we are highlighted there on the homepage. Underneath that, we've got our Vincent AI tool. And although the Vincent AI tool is not included in the North Carolina Bar Association, it is a very powerful tool. And if you have questions about how to work that or start a trial, please reach out to me. I'm happy to connect you with someone from our team or provide additional information. But we will not be covering that today. But then underneath our Vincent AI tool, we have our advanced search page. And this is a form fill search. So we will do a deep dive in the advanced search page, how you can use that to get really granular with your legal research results. And then our browse button. And this is a very easy way to start navigating the content in the platform here. So we'll go ahead and expand on this, right, just so we can see how that works. But when you open the browse menu,, it'll open up this additional window for you to then select either to start browsing by jurisdiction or jump right into the actual content library you're interested in finding. So for example, we can go to statutes and then we can find North Carolina. And then it'll ask for what edition you want to find here. I wanted to highlight that we do have the full statutes in the platform now. There was an issue of me, for a short period of time, but now we have access to all of the statutes here for you to browse through and find information. And a convenient feature of this, say for example, you have a very long list of content you're trying to look through to find, you can also use the search bar up at the top to find specific information in this list as well. So if you wanted to type in there There we go. Then you can easily link right to a specific section. And as you can see, I'm just filtering down into the individual sections here. And at a certain point, I will come across this icon. And I wanted to highlight this because once you get to this icon, that means you're kind of at the end of the road for your browsing. And if you click on that, you will then be taken to one of two places, one to the document level itself or to a list of documents that falls within this criteria. So just be aware of that anytime you see that icon, you will then be directed to the document level or a list of documents. Now underneath our browse button is our folders category, and this is where your organizational tools come into play.. And I will highlight the folders category towards the end of the presentation. But then we have our help button here, and similar to our resource center, we provide you with the ability to submit a feedback survey, access to our knowledge base website, which we already highlighted, and then you can contact our help desk as well. So you can— this is more of like an email message. It's not like a live chat version as it is in the resource center here. This will just send a message to our support team and basically be like an email rather than sending a physical email. And then we've got our phone number here down at the bottom for the support team as well, so you can easily find that information to give us a call. And then underneath Help, we've got the North Carolina Bar Association logo here in our plan level. And I wanted to mention that the North Carolina Bar has provided you with access to a great plan, the VLAX Fastcase United States Core Plan. And what that means is you have access to all 50 states and federal primary materials. So cases, regulations, statutes, a whole wealth of information that you can research here in the platform, not just for North Carolina, but for all of the states and all of the federal content right here in the VLEX FastCase platform. And this is just a way for us to remind you that you are gaining access to this platform because of your membership with the North Carolina Bar Association. And then continuing on here, uh, we'll move to the top bar. And next to the VLEX FastCase logo is our history icon. And this is similar to— if you're familiar with FastCase 7, similar to our FastCase 7 history icon. But if you expand on that, you can see the date and timestamp of when you were accessing certain information in the platform. So you can easily pick up right where you leave off. Say you've got a hearing or deposition you need to get to, you can easily jump right back right back into it and not just to the document that you were searching, to the search results as well. So if you want to continue searching from a search results page, you can just click on the number of results and jump right back into it. Now next to the history icon here, we've got our general search bar, and I know this is a little bit different from Fastcase. Fastcase was kind of right in the middle of the page, but the general search bar is up at the top of the page here on the VLECS Fastcase platform, and you can use normal language here. Or advanced operators or Boolean operators, any, anything you would like to utilize to run a search, you can use those in the general search bar here, but you don't need to. As I mentioned, you can just use normal language searching to pull relevant results from this section as well. Now, to the right of the search bar is our jurisdictional selector. Important aspect of the legal research. You want to make sure you're selecting the correct jurisdiction. So as we expand on this, it'll open up a menu here and it will default. So if it is your first, first time logging in, it will default to United States. But you can easily select the jurisdiction that you want to apply either for a one-off search or for your default jurisdiction you want to search as well. So if you only practice in North Carolina, you can select the North Carolina jurisdiction and hit Apply and Save as Default, and that will select North Carolina jurisdiction as your default jurisdiction any time you run a search. However, you can also select additional— maybe it's nearby states, you practice across state lines, you can select, you know, other states, South Carolina, Georgia, whatever it may be, or the appellate circuit. So you may want to include that information or any of the federal content as well. But for our example today, I'm going to leave North Carolina jurisdiction. And the appellate circuit, and we'll apply that as a one-off search here. And as you can see, it updated from United States now to the North Carolina jurisdiction and Fourth Circuit. And then next to our jurisdictional tool, we've got the search icon. Very easy to click that to run your search. However, you can also use the enter button on your keyboard after you've typed information into the search bar here. To run your search as well. And we've got another Vincent AI button, same as the one over here, just going to take you to the Vincent AI tool. And then we've got our account dropdown menu. So from here you can do a couple of things. You can adjust your language settings. So maybe English isn't your first language. You want to change that to whatever language you prefer. You can do that here. You can manage your account broadly and then you can manage your alerts. And I'll show you how we can create case alerts or create search alerts so that anytime new content is added to our platform, it will send you an email with that alert so you can stay up to date on anything specific to this criteria that you set. And then we have the ability to stop history tracking. This is just an added level of security that we've included on the platform here. For example, if you did not want to populate any of the search results from tracking, you can easily— or excuse me, the history tracking— you can easily click on stop history and that'll omit those from being tracked. And then our terms and conditions and privacy policy as well, followed by the ability to return to FastQ-7. So now that we've gotten to this point, I wanted to mention that although we do provide you the ability to return to FastQ-7, access to that platform will be turned off in the future. We plan to sunset that We don't have a specific date on when that will be, but we will be sure to work with both the North Carolina Bar and make sure you have a notification somewhere here in the platform or on the FastCase platform to make you aware of when that cutoff period or stop date will be. So you have additional time to make sure you're learning the new platform here. But as I mentioned earlier, you all are a step ahead. You're learning the platform with me today. So whenever that date does come, you will be ready to go here in the VLEKS FastCase platform. Case platform. Now underneath that, you can also, uh, just easily log out of the platform. All right, so, uh, that takes us here to the homepage, and I'm going to cover, uh, all of the information here on the homepage, and then we'll get into some searching on the platform. So, uh, starting up at the top, we have our card section, and this is a way for us to push out information and make you aware of some Specific tools that may be helpful that you can add to your tool belt, especially as far as drafting goes. The VLECS for Word plugin tool can be very helpful if you use Microsoft Word. But these are just, and these can actually change over time as well. So you may not always see the same cards populated here, but I wanted to highlight the VLECS for Word tool because I do think this is extremely helpful, especially when you're drafting and citing to cases. Those will allow you to link as long as you have the VLEX for Word plugin downloaded on your Word application. You will be able to navigate to a VLEX tab in your Word plugin or Word application and find a list of all of the citations that are referenced in your document. And this will be helpful if you didn't necessarily draft the document. Someone else may have drafted it and you come across a case or citation that you're not familiar with. That'll easily allow you to link straight through to our VLEX Fastcase platform here reader to read about those as they are in a primary authority listed on the website or on the platform here. And not only do they provide you with a link of the citations, they will also provide you with some insights using our CertCITATOR tool on whether a case may have any sort of negative treatment to it. So really helpful reference tool to see whether or not you may be citing to a case that is no longer considered Good Law. Now underneath our, uh, card section here, we have the featured libraries from the North Carolina Bar Association. They provided you the ability to upgrade access on the account here to include these titles to your account. So if any of those are particular to your practice area, you can add those to the platform here. By subscribing to those. Now, if you already purchased those, maybe you already have access to them in the Fastcase platform, they will migrate here to the VLEX Fastcase platform. So if you don't see something that you've already subscribed to from Fastcase as accessible here in the new platform, please let us know so we can correct that and make sure you have access to that information. Going forward. But then underneath our featured libraries here from the North Carolina Bar, we also have a personalized news feed. And as I mentioned, we do want you to stay up to date on things specific to your practice area and your interests. So what we have allowed you the ability to do here is follow smart topics. And these are very similar to hashtags on social media, but they are— we refer to them as smart topics. So you can stay up to date on anything in your specific practice or interests. And to update this or add additional Smart Topics, what you can do is click on the Edit Your VLECS button, which will take you to a list of Smart Topics. It lists all of the state jurisdictions that you can follow. So maybe you want— you practice across state lines. You can add other states to your Smart Topics, but you can also add specific practice areas. So maybe it's patent law that we're interested in. We can select that. All you have to do is hit the slider and that will add that to your Smart Topics category. Or maybe it's environmental law. You can easily search for those and add any of them to your Smart Topics page. Now, I wanted to point out that you will— if you have the ability to receive a weekly digest or daily digest via email with that news content as well. So if you want to adjust any of your preferences on how that is sent, or how if you want to turn that off, you can do so here on the right-hand side. Just select your preference and then click on the Update Preferences button down here at the bottom. And then you do have the ability to follow specific documents and journals throughout the platform here. And as you follow those documents or journals, they will live in these sections next to the Smart Topics categories. All right, so that covers the personalized news feed there and the rest of the homepage. And now I think we'll go ahead and jump into a general search. And I'm going to start with a pretty broad search. And from there, I'm going to show you how we can start broadly, but then narrow our search down a little bit further. So here in the general search bar, I'm going to start typing for information. And as you can see, once I start typing, it is going to provide me with some suggested searches and some suggested documents that may be relevant to the search you're trying to run. And if you see something that may be linked to what you're looking for, you can easily click on these, and the suggested searches will take you to a search results page, while the documents will take you to the actual document itself. However, I don't see what I'm looking for here, so I'm going to continue to type and we're just going to run a broad search for statute of limitations in the North Carolina and Fourth Circuit and see what information we can populate. So right away, now that we're on the search results page, I wanted to highlight the number of results that we've returned with this. So statute of limitations, very broad search topic here, but You can see 45,000 results. I don't want to go through that many results when I'm researching. So what we can start to do is start to narrow this down a little bit. And to do that, you can start by searching in the results. So out of the results that you've already populated here, out of those 45,000, you can also add additional terms to refine your search and search within the results you've already populated. So if you wanted to add additional terms, maybe you have— you want to look for information specific to torts, you can add the word tort here, and you can even put in Boolean operators here as well. So maybe you wanted to find the additional information to include the word tort. You can use AND, which is a Boolean operator, followed by the term, and then that'll refine your search results. Now, a couple of other ways you can start to narrow the content a little bit further is right now you can see we're listed on all content, so that's providing us with all list of all of the, the content cases, statutes, you know, secondary sources. But you have the ability to select what content library you want to search in as well. So maybe it's cases specifically that we're interested in researching. You can select cases or statutes or any of the secondary materials, and you have the ability to adjust and click on any of these. But as we continue on, I'll leave it on cases selected. And as we scroll down here, you do have the ability to adjust your jurisdiction. So if you wanted to tweak that for any reason, maybe you didn't have the correct jurisdiction selected when you first ran, or you just wanted to change your jurisdiction or deselect any of the ones you already have selected, you can easily do that here by clicking on the Select More Jurisdictions or just clicking the checkbox next to the jurisdiction you already have selected. But since we are highlighted on cases, it will also ask you, do you have the court specifically that you want to find cases out of as well? So what we can do is click into here and search for specific courts. You know, it's suggesting a few that may be relevant to what you're looking for, and you can select that and add the court, or you can even add specific cited authorities. To pull your research from as well if you only, only want to rely on specific cited authorities. And then down here we have at the bottom the ability to search, refine your date range. So what we can do is use these sliders here to adjust that to your specific range or era. But be careful whenever you're using the sliders here because as soon as you move this and release your click,, it will automatically update your search results. So just be aware of that whenever you're moving the sliders, it'll, it'll update the search results listed. All right. So if we wanted to get any more granular with our research, what we would recommend is navigating to our advanced search page. And this is a convenient feature down here at the bottom because say you've already taken the time to start putting this search together. As you can see, we've got our cases library selected, a date range, and the key criteria that we're looking for, and even the jurisdiction. If you want to take that information and move it all into an advanced search, you can do that here at the bottom. So by clicking on the more search options in advanced search, that takes you to the advanced search page. As you can see, we're now highlighted on this page. Feature of the platform. And I'll scroll up to the top so you can see what this looks like. But we, again, we've got the jurisdiction. So that jurisdiction migrated over with us, the content library that we had selected migrated, and even the advanced operators that we used in our search as well. Now I want to highlight here the content library. So as you, as you change different content libraries, that will affect the bottom section of this advanced search page. So right now, since we're on cases, it will allow us to search— or excuse me, yes, we're on cases. It'll allow us to search by case name if we have the name for it, or court, or any of these different key criteria that we can enter to help us find specific results. But if we change that, say from cases to statutes, That will then adjust the bottom section here to allow us to enter key criteria based off of the content library we have selected. Now I do want to mention that these are not required, so don't feel like you have to enter any information here to run a search from the advanced search page. You can just leave it with the content library and the word section here, which I will break these down momentarily for us., but you do not have to enter any of that key criteria to run a search. And so that takes us to the word section here, and I'm going to take our search and start with all the words. So these are advanced operators or just, or just easier way for you to use advanced search tools to find granular content. And the all the words section is going to be an AND search. So if you're familiar with Boolean operators, AND search is just going to allow you to find specific results that have all of the words included. So for our example, say statute of limitations, that's going to make sure our relevant search results that populate include the word statute and the word limitations and any other word that we include in this section as well. Now, maybe we're looking to get a little bit more granular than that. Maybe we're looking to pull information that only includes the exact phrase statute of limitations, we can use this next section here, the exact phrase search, and that pulls only relevant results that include the specific phrase that we've included. So make sure your spelling is correct here before you run a search with that exact phrase. And then for the next example, words in proximity, this is particularly helpful if you may want to find additional content that is near other terms in a document. So for this example, we could leave the exact phrase statute of limitations, but maybe we wanted to find the word fraud somewhere within proximity of that phrase. The search words and proximity search will allow us to search up to 20 words either before or after the exact phrase that we have entered here. So that'll allow us to search for the word fraud. Maybe it's in the same paragraph or the same passage, but it's not directly in the phrase that we've included here. That'll populate results that include that word nearby. And you do have the ability to limit that as well. So you can go up to 20 terms, but you can also limit that as well. So any number between 1 through 20, if you wanted to limit that, all you have to do is use the backslash button on your keyboard. And then choose a number. So we could search within 5 words of the statute of limitations phrase as well. Now, for this next example, the any word, this is going to be an OR search. So OR searches will allow you to find content like synonyms with content. So maybe you're not sure if a document lists maybe gun or firearm as it is in the document, that will pull the results that— and allow you to find them either listed as gun or firearm. And then here we've got an exclusionary search. So none of the words— if you wanted to omit specific results from populating in your search results page, you can add those terms here. So maybe we didn't want to find anything to do with torts or tort. You can omit that information from populating in the document results by adding those to the None of the Words section. And then down here at the bottom, we've got our Advanced Operators page or section. Excuse me. And you can— I'm just going to highlight my mouse here on the question marks because this provides you with a cheat sheet or a quick reference list of all of the advanced operators that you can utilize in the platform. And these are a little bit different from Fastcase. So make sure you reference this list before you try to use any of those in the general search bar to run your search results. But again, easy enough to find relevant results using these advanced operators here in the platform. And if I did not do a good enough job explaining these, you can also cover hover your mouse over these question marks and find out a little bit more about how to use those right here next to the section as well. All right. So we will leave that back on cases. And before I run this search, the advanced search, I wanted to highlight one additional tool here on the advanced search page, and that is the save as an alert function. So as I mentioned earlier, you do have the ability to create search alerts. And if we select that— apologies, you can't see the full button here, but that says Save as an Alert. And once you click on it, it will turn green and then say Alert Saved here. And if you recall from earlier in our training, we have the ability to manage our alerts right here, and that'll take us to our Search Alerts page. So again, I went to the Account dropdown menu and then clicked on Manage Your Alerts, which took us to the search alerts page. And from here you can see the description, jurisdiction, content library, and when you created a specific search alert and adjust those preferences as well. So you can hit the edit button here to adjust how frequently you want to receive that information. Do you want it to pause it for any reason or include any historical results as well? So you get a full list of all of the information fitting within that search criteria. Anytime a new result is added. But then you can also delete that as well or create new alerts right here from the search alerts page. All right. So we'll go back to our advanced search, make sure this is all set up correctly. We've got the jurisdiction selected, our content library, our exact phrase, statute of limitations. And I'm going to leave all of this blank and just go ahead and run our search to see what we can populate. So we're doing a little bit better than the initial search we, we had from 45,000 down to 21,000. Still a little bit more than I would want to look through, but let's go ahead and jump into some of the tools here on the search results page now that we've gone through the general search and the advanced search functions. So starting with the tools here up at the top, we've got the ability to visualize the top 50 results populated in this list. And that's going to take the cases that we have listed here and put it in a graph that is scaled by date and importance or number of citations to a specific case. But then to the right of that, we have the ability to add specific cases or documents to a folder, and you can easily select the documents or cases you want to add to a folder on the right-hand side of the cases here. We can just click Add to Folder. And if you don't already have folders created, you can easily add those here. And that'll take those search results and put them into the folder that we just created. But then we can also create an alert right from this page as well. So that'll take the search criteria that we've had, we have selected and create an alert for us just how we did in the advanced search page. And then the ability to download our selected documents or our top 50 results from this search results as well. And we also provide you the ability to select whether or not you want to download the full document or just the search listings. And the search listings may be convenient for you if you're working with an associate or someone else who's helping with your legal research. You can easily send them a list of search results that may be close to what you're, you're looking for, for your specific use case as a starting point. Then moving into our documents that we've populated here, to sort these, you do have the ability to sort by relevance, which is the default, but you can also sort by the most recent information, the oldest information, and the most cited information as well. Now, getting into the cases here, I wanted to highlight this indicator. So next to the case name, you can see we've got a little bit of information listed here, and this is our CertCITATOR tool. And this will let you know whether or not a case may have any sort of negative treatment to it. So as you can see, the U.S. v. Wheeler case here, it was overruled. And if you wanted to expand on that and find a little bit more information,. You can click the dropdown button there or just click on the cert tool and it'll tell you exactly where that case may have been overruled. And it provides a little bit of additional information there, like the number of times the case has been cited to and the last time it was cited as well. We have a few different treatment types. We've got a red one here, which is our negative treatment type. Let me see if we've got some other ones listed. I don't see any additional ones listed. There's another negative, abbreviated. And then we— oh, so here's one. So this is a positive treatment notification. If a case has been determined as distinguished, it'll let you know if that case has been distinguished and where it was considered distinguished in. So we've got red, which is negative, yellow, which is positive, and then we've also got an orange treatment type which is a questioned treatment. So maybe someone has disagreed with an opinion or something along those lines. But then to the right of that, we've also got a little bit more information about the number of citations and if they've been treated positively or negatively. So for our example, we're going to jump into the U.S. v. Wheeler case here. And now we're getting into the document level. And from here, you have the ability, so similar to the search results, search in results, you can also search in the document. So if you've got a really large document such as this one, you can easily search for any of those key terms or phrases in the document using the search bar here to find all of those throughout the document. So then you can jump right to that passage. It provides you with the paragraph that it's in. You can read about it and see if that may be more of where you want to find or research a little bit further into the document level without having to read that full document. And then underneath our search bar there, we've got the table of contents. You can easily jump to any of the different sections of a case or document. We'll scroll back up to the top here and move on into the middle category. And this has some helpful information up at the top, like our decision date, the citation that we can copy and paste, the court that this was heard in, docket number, and party information. But then underneath that, we've got our case analysis section. And this is an example of how we're harnessing the powers of our Vincent AI tool and including that as part of your benefit with the North Carolina Bar Association. So no matter what case you navigate to in the platform, you should have a case analysis section listed up at the top. And what that does is it saves you a little bit of time because it's providing you with the legal issue that's being discussed, uh, as well as some headnotes, and even highlights the key paragraphs and phrases in the document as well. And speaking of key paragraphs here, I wanted to show you that you do have the ability to turn these on and off. And over on the right-hand side next to your scroll bar, you'll see that when I turn these off, the blue bars will disappear from view. I know they're a little bit hard to see. We're actually working on adjusting the visibility of that, but the darker the blue or the darker the color means the more times that that paragraph or passage has been cited to in other cases. So that lets us know that's an important passage and you may you want to explore that, and if you're looking at this document, so what you can do is click on that. It'll take you down to the specific paragraph that's highlighted here. And what you'll notice is you can actually click on this passage here as well. So if you're interested in where this paragraph may be cited across the platform or in other primary sources, you can find subsequent quotations of this passage by clicking on that. And then I'll populate a list here. So this has been cited over 224 times to other cases. And this is helpful to expand your knowledge on a specific subject that may be interesting to you. And it doesn't limit it to just primary materials. If it's— if this passage is cited in a secondary source, it'll also list that in the subsequent quotations as well. And I know we're getting a little short on time, so I'm going to try and breeze through this last little section, but let's talk about organizational tools on the document level here. So to highlight or make notes, you can easily just use your mouse to left-click and drag over a specific section. And then once you have done that and release your mouse click, it'll ask you, okay, what do you want to do? Do you want to highlight this? Do you want to make a note on this? Maybe we want to make an important note here. When we save that, all of our notes and highlights actually live under our table of contents section here on the left-hand side of the document. So anytime you go back to this document, you can reference any of notes or highlights that you've made throughout the document. And then lastly, you also have the ability to copy with the citation similar to Fastcase 7. And if you're using Word or other text documents to draft, you can copy with the citation and paste that over to the other document. But we'll go up to the top here and quickly go over these. You've got the favorite button here, so you can save favorites in the platform. If you refer to a document or cite to a document often, I would recommend adding that as a favorite. 'cause then that'll add to your favorites folder. You have the ability to add documents right from the document level to folders. You have some printing options. You can share the document as well as copy the, the ID, the VLEX ID, or the link to the page if you're sending to another North Carolina Bar member, and even download as well. So you can download the PDF or Word version of the document. And then lastly, I'm just going to highlight this middle section here, starting with our cited authorities. So the cited authorities are obviously going to be any of the legislation or case law that is being cited in our specific case that we're on here. So we can find all of those additional sources that have been cited to, which also provides you with some treatment information. And then the cited in, which is all of those cases that are citing to the United States v. Wheeler case or the document that you're on. And the precedent map takes those two sections, so the cited authorities and cited in, and puts them in a visual representation for you so you can see how certain cases cite to one another, how these are interacting, as well as if they have any sort of treatment information known, such as negative or neutral treatment. But to explain this, the middle circle here is our case. So that's the U.S. v. Wheeler case. And anything on the inside of that circle is going to be our cited authorities. Meaning anything on the outside is going to be our cited in information. So all of those cases citing to the US v. Wheeler case. And then lastly, we've got the related tab here. And this, this should work for you and on your account you shouldn't be getting this message. So I'm on a test account, test bar account. But if you do see this or any other weird message here, let us know. But the related tab is also harnessing the powers of our Vincent AI tool and it is basically providing you with a list of suggested documents based on the document that you are reviewing or looking at here. So some suggested reading materials, some suggested documents that may fit within the criteria that you're searching. But we'll go back here to the homepage and end with the folders here, starting with our favorites. So as I mentioned, any favorites that you add, they will be listed under our favorites section. So you can easily jump right into that document rather than having to search for that every time. And then we've got documents with marks. So any notes that we've created in the platform on the document level, you can find those under the documents with marks section. And then the folder that we created earlier, you can rename this, create a subfolder in this, or even delete the folder. And then if you wanted to delete specific documents out of a folder, you can just select that., and you'll be able to delete those, which moves them to your trash folder. But maybe you mistakenly delete that, you want to recycle it back into the folder it was in. We'll easily allow you to do that by selecting it and then hitting the recycle button to put it back into your demo folder or whatever folder it was in previously. All right, so I've talked enough here. Let me, uh, go ahead and move back to our slideshow to provide our contact information.. And then we will go ahead and open it up to some questions here. But before we do that, I just wanted to highlight again, if you have questions, if you have feedback, we want to hear from you. So if you would please reach out to our support team, you can do so at helpdesk-us@velex.com or via phone at the 866 number. Again, Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 9 PM Eastern, as well as myself. I want to be a resource. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me directly if I can provide some assistance to you. As you navigate through the new platform. I'm happy to provide additional training resources or answer questions. I'll do my best. I'm not the most efficient with legal research, but I'm happy to help you get started or point you in the right direction. And then any of those additional tools that I kind of briefly highlighted, like, like our Vincent AI tool, and I didn't actually mention, but we also have the ability to access briefs, pleadings, motions, and order content in our platform. If you want to upgrade your account at any time, reach out to our sales team. Or to me, and I can forward you on to the appropriate person on our team to discuss that with you. But with that, I'm going to open it up to some questions here. So, Katherine, if you want to jump back in and you can start reading those off to me, or if you have any remarks to make, you can go ahead and do so.

Thanks, TJ. A couple of questions, and I've been trying to keep up with people's questions. One of our participants is a— he is a very sophisticated user and has been playing around been around with the system for a while, and some of the things that he's noted, that the words in proximity using brackets, it's not clear if that's the words in physical proximity or semantic proximity.

I'm going to guess it is physical proximity. It is. Okay, so that's the intended use of that feature. So if you're finding that that's not the case, please let us know so I can get that over to our team. But yes, it is physical proximity, as I explained.

So it should be within a set number of terms to whatever word or phrase that you've entered there. And then he also noted that the copy cite function only copies the book and page number, not the actual name of the case.

Yes. So we are aware of that. And I've raised this with our product team to make sure we are working to improve that. I am under I know that the Fastcase 7 platform would allow you to pull the full case name, plaintiff v. defendant, and then the, the actual citation there. So we are working to improve that going forward. I know it's on our list of things to get to with the new platform, but we are working on making that a little bit better and more efficient for you all, especially if you're copying with the citation there. Someone asked, how do you link VLEKS to Word? So in the Word application, you do have the ability to add plugins. So when you're on the Word document, you have your Word application pulled up, you can search for those as, I believe it's plugins, but I'll have to do some research on that. You should be able to search for those to add the plugin. Directly to the Word application through Microsoft Word. They allow you to add a bunch of different plugins to the Microsoft Word application, but there is one specifically for VLECS. So you can search VLECS, and that'll allow you to download that and add it to your Word document. If you have specific— if you need help with adding that, shoot me an email, and I'd be happy to provide you with a step-by-step way to, to add that.

So another person said he'd like to discuss about how to easily print or save cases because his office has found that cumbersome.

Okay. If they, if they want to reach out to me, I'm happy to highlight a couple of ways that they can do that in the platform. But if they have suggestions on changing that or they want to see it a different you know, a little bit differently, definitely reach out to me so I can provide that feedback. As I mentioned, you know, please reach out and I'll connect you with the best person on our team or provide you with additional resources so you can easily integrate that into your practice. And then another question: if I download or print a case, will my notes or highlights also download or print? Yes, great question. You actually do have the ability to include your notes. Let's go back to our document here and I'll show you exactly where. So once you expand on the print button here, you can just select include highlights and notes and then print from there.

Someone made the observation that it would be great to have actual spot site to the page as well.

I think he's talking about pen sites. Okay. Again, if they want to send that to me in an email, I'd be more than happy to forward that on to the appropriate person on the team so we can add that to our list.

Great. And because I am recording this, I'm also recording the chat. So don't worry, I've captured all this for y'all. So someone mentioned that in a prior presentation, Ed was showing VLEX and had an upcoming feature to translate Spanish to English and back. That's not part of the VLEX Fast Case. That is part of Vincent, which is the AI add-on that you can subscribe to that becomes part of it, but I don't think it's built into Felix, best case.

So yes, you actually can translate documents. So if you've got, so if you've got clients who, you know, their primary language is not English, if you want to send something to them, we do provide the ability to translate the document here into a couple of languages. So should be able to use that feature right on the document level here. And again, I just, this is the icon for that. So next to the text size option here, it's translate, and then you can just easily copy that over to whoever it needs to go to.

Well, okay, so I haven't taken enough time to explore these things. I had another question, so I'm not even going to attempt to think that I know the answer to this.

Can you upload from Word or WordPerfect, e.g., a memo or brief to the folder section? I don't think that is a current option, um, on VLEX. Now, if you have the Vincent tool, you can upload documents to Vincent and start to manipulate those and pull from that resource library, but I don't believe you have the ability to pull documents directly into the VLEX Fastcase platform currently. But now that I said that, I am going to go back and check just to make sure that is factual and I didn't just lie to you.

So I'll make a note for myself on that.

Okay. Thank you. All right. And I know we're a little bit over. If you— I'm good to keep going, but I just wanted to make you aware, Katherine, in case you guys want to stop it here.

Well, and I have one more question because Vincent's been brought up a couple of times. I can send you all the link that it was— Ed Walters did an overview of Generative AI and Legal Research, and he did show the Vincent platform, and I will send you all a link to that just so you can see if someone was interested in subscribing to Vincent.

Now, do you have a sense of how much that costs? Yeah. So we do provide a discount to the North Carolina Bar Association and anyone who is accessing the trial period, if you haven't already. Done the trial, this will start with a 3-day trial here for you to incorporate right, right into your own platform. But then it'll be $360 per month going forward. And that is, you know, as far as in the competition of that field of Vincent AI versus the other competitors out there, we were well within the, the price range line. But we also understand that it's not the same for everybody. So if you have a specific unique scenario, reach out to our sales team.

You know, we can work with a lot of you to create a custom, you know, plan level. Thank you. And like I said, I want— I'll send out the recording that we did with Ed a couple of months ago. Additionally, Ed is doing some LinkedIn Live programming that I'm sure they're recording around the, the Vincent AI capabilities. It's, it's, it's pretty amazing. And the someone said, do I just use my NCBI login and password with the VLECS Word add-in? My experience with the VLECS Word add-in has been once I installed it, it, it, I had to go back and re-login, but then it seemed to remember it.

So, yeah, unfortunately you would need to. Yeah. You need to be logged into the platform and then open up the Word application just because of the way you're accessing VLEKS FastCase through the BAR website. It's not like a direct link to your specific account. So just make sure you're logged into the platform and then you should be able to go right into that access of the Word plugin. And I also wanted to mention that, you know, at the beginning I highlighted the additional trainings that we're going to be doing. Vincent is going to be one of them. So be on the lookout for additional training sessions. And these are going to be general for all U.S. Bar members. I'm going to be highlighting the advantages of some of the add-on tools you can incorporate into the plan, your existing plan. And then my— another member of my team is going to highlight the Vincent AI tool. So we'll do some in-depth workflows you can take a look at., like a demo, and those will be highlighted in our training sessions here, hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

Okay, well, thank you so much, TJ. I'm going to let everybody get going. Um, you could always submit questions to TJ. You can also submit questions to me, and I'll get them over to him. Um, if you— it's easier for you to, uh, email me because I email y'all a lot., and I will send you the recording, the slides if TJ is willing to save them and send them to me, and, anything else that I've got, regarding this new platform. Again, please reach out with questions. Let us know how it's going.

Um, thanks for coming today and, um, have a wonderful holiday season. Yes, thank you all so much. Thank you, Katherine, again for allowing us to get in front of the members, and we look forward to doing it again soon.