Lab 6 will investigate legal news about your company using the Library's largest business database--LexisNexis Academic. Your team will search the LexisNexis Business News File for articles describing litagation against your company.

1. Conduct a LexisNexis search to locate legal news articles about your company.
2. Scan many articles, and identify at least one legal topic described in the articles (select up to three legal topics if possible).
3. Compose a summary in WORD format of one court case involving your company. Save the brief to team work space.

LexisNexis Legal Content and Search Interface

• PRODUCT. LexisNexis is a commercial database product sold on a subscription basis, and delivered over the internet to companies, law firms, financial institutions, government agencies, and university libraries.
• CONTENT. LexisNexis delivers 5,600 full-text publications. News Sources: national and regional newspapers, wire services, broadcast transcripts, international news, and non-English language sources. Business Publications: business news journals, company financial information, SEC filings and reports, and industry and market news. Legal Documents: U.S. Federal and state case law, codes, regulations, legal news, law reviews, international legal information, and Shepard’s Citations for all U.S. Supreme Court cases back to 1789.
• COST. LexisNexis is expensive, priced at more than $40,000 per year for large university libraries. LexisNexis is a division of the giant international publisher Reed Elsevier Inc.
• PRODUCTIVITY. LexisNexis is a research tool that helps organizations collect, manage, and use information more productively.
• STUDENT ADVANTAGE. For college students, LexisNexis enhances the quality of student papers, and provides an opportunity to acquire database research skills - skills that transfer directly to the 21st Century workplace.

Objective 1: Locate Company Legal News in Lexis/Nexis

1. Go to team work space, and click the Team Research URL label. In the Add/Update Team Research URL block, click on the Lexis/Nexis database link.
2. From the Lexis/Nexis front page, click the Select a News Category drop-down menu and choose Business News.
3. Next, click the Select a News Source drop-down menu and choose Business & Finance.
4. Locate the three Search Term boxes. In the first search box, type the company's exact name, and then choose Company Name from the drop-down menu..
5. In the second search box, type this search command as written: subject(litigation or suits) and then choose Full Text from the pull-down menu. Note: no spaces between subject and open parenthesis.
6. Finally, from the Date Range drop-down menu below, select Previous Five Years, then click the red search button to run the search.

Objective 2: Identify Legal Topics in Articles about your Company

Scan your Results List. Select articles with legal implications. Omit articles that describe complicated points of law. Note: Identifying the broader legal topic from a specific case is a subjective task. The broader point of law may not be mentioned in the article. Use your best judgment when naming the topic covered by the case.

Here is an example of a legal news article about the company named AutoNation from the 7/19/2001 Miami Daily Business Review: 4th District Court Action, Class Action against AutoNation can go Forward

Possible Legal Topics in this Article: Motor Vehicles - Fraud; Motor Vehicle Dealers; Consumer Credit; Consumer Protection.

Objective 3: Write a brief describing a court case involving your company

1. After selecting a legal news article about your company, open a Word document and write a one-page summary of the case. Begin your summary with the complete article citation in this format:
   
   Bala, C. (2002, September 3). Salomon, Citigroup sued over AT&T Wireless recommendation. AFX European Focus, Section C, pg. 1, Retrieved September 16, 2002 from the Lexis/Nexis database on the World Wide Web.
   
   
2. Following these guidelines when composing your legal brief:

• Name of the party that filed the suit.
• Name of court that is hearing the case.
• Describe the facts that led to the conflict.
• Summarize the basic legal question, e.g., Did party A commit fraud against party B.
• Compete the summary be noting what your team judges to be the broader legal topic(s). For example, a brokerage firm knowingly recommended the purchase of a stock without regard to the factual basis and without disclosing its conflicts of interest. Possible Legal Topics: Investment Securities; Consumer Protection; Shares and Stockholders; Bank and Banking Fraud
• This summary should be double-spaced, using left and right margins of 1.25 inches, and top and bottom margins of 1 inch. The font for your report should be Times New Roman (12 point). At the very top of your file, list the name of the file on the first line, and team members on the second line. These 2 lines should be placed against the right margin. The rest of your file should be placed against the left margin.
• When you finish the brief, save it to your diskette in the A: drive. Then, using the Add Document option in your team work space, Add the Word file with your brief to your team work space.