Although the three years law students spend in law school may seem interminable (especially if you are a law student in the middle of it), at some point you will graduate and have to apply the skills you are learning here in the real world. Or perhaps you already are applying those skills, through clinics, internships, or jobs.  If so, the Law Library has recently acquired a new legal research tool, Trellis, that can help you in your real world endeavors,

provided they involve state courts and the judges who sit within them.

Trellis is described by its creator, Nicole Clark, as a state trial court legal research and analytics platform.  Current states covered by Trellis are Texas, California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, and New York. Clark calls it “Google for state court data”-- it allows you to use natural language searching to find data on judges, opposing counsel, motions, dockets, and legal issues.

You can enter a judge’s name and find their biography and important practice information, look at their decisions to see how they rule on particular issues (an invaluable tool if you’re trying to determine how a judge might rule on your client’s particular issue), and find out the breakdown of the cases pending before specific judges. All of this can be seen in graphic form in the judge analytics dashboard, shown below.

Trellis’ trademarked Smart Search Technology also allows you to use natural language searching to access state court dockets, documents, and rulings in one single interface. You can learn how often your opposing counsel is in court, and determine how courts, judges, and opposing counsel have handled similar legal issues in the past.

There’s also a useful (and growing) Motions and Legal Issues Library, which has searchable examples of many types of motion for each specific jurisdiction: the Motion Types for Texas include numerous topics, such as Administrative, Arbitration, Class Action, Damages, Discovery, Dispositive, Fees/Costs/Sanctions, General, Pre-Trial, Trial, and Post-Trial. Each topic includes a brief practice guide to help litigators quickly determine the steps involved in filing a particular motion, and there are numerous examples of filed pleadings containing various types of motions.

Trellis is an extremely useful state trial court tool for law students, faculty, and practicing attorneys.   Although it is not yet officially operational on the Law Library’s website, if you are a current UNT Dallas College of Law student or faculty member, you can contact Dean Hart at Edward.Hart@untdallas.edu to get access to it now. It’s a great opportunity to get some experience with it while the Law Library pays for it, not you or your client. You can also check out Trellis’ website and Twitter feed, respectively here and here .

- Mary Ritter, MS-LS Candidate 2022