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Advanced Search

In the options menu located to the left of the page, you will find the “Advanced search” option. This allows you to make more complex searches when you have more concrete data to search for. For example, if you know the court name or resolution number, you can type them in to the relevant field.

1. Common Search Criteria

Some of the search criteria are:

  • Jurisdiction, indicating the country or countries in which you want to search
  • Content Type (legislation, case law, regulations, etc.)
  • Word(s), indicating whether it is an exact phrase, if you want a specific distance between words, words you don’t want to see etc., and Boolean operators
  • Translation option, if you want to perform a translated search
  • Legal Topic
  • Summary
  • Cited regulations, when searching for content that applies a specific legal topic or provision
  • Title of a document
  • Date of a document
  • vLex document identification code (vLex VID)
Boolean Operators

Boolean operators locate records that contain matching terms in one or all of the specified fields. Use these operators in the field called “Advanced Operators“..

2. Additional Search Criteria

Once you have selected a filter, the advanced search engine will display additional search criteria.

For example: if you select “case law” as the type of content you wish to search, the search engine will offer you the option to select the “Court”. If you select “Supreme Court,” a new search field will appear such as type of decision, writer, appeal number, procedure, resolution number, ruling, type of appeal, etc.

Attention

It is important to remember that additional filters are added as you specify search criteria. The idea is that a search criterion is only shown when you are looking for similar documents. That is why the “Court” field will not appear if you are searching across all of vLex, where there are documents that are contracts or laws, and therefore do not originate from any court.

2. 1 Search within your subscription’s content or include all content

When performing a universal search the system will search within all the available content of that country, by default. Occasionally, content that is not within your subscription may appear in your search results. If you prefer, you can change your settings to only see content within your subscription, as seen in the image below.

In the right-hand column of the results page, you will find a set of recommended documents that are related to your search. The vLex search engine understands the legal concepts related to what you are looking for and suggests Smartopics, books and magazines, forms, news…

4. Search in Vincent

If you click on Search Vincent you can perform an search with the vLex intelligent assistant.

By clicking on this option, you will be directed to Vincent’s menu

More information on how to use Vincent.

5. Save a search as an alert

If you save a search as an alert, vLex will send you a notification each time the search results change. You will find this option at the bottom of the page, after all of the search options.

You will also find this option on the screen to filter search results, after performing the search.

6. Move between search results

Depending on your search, the arrows at the top of  each document allow you to move between results without having to return to the results page:

7. Other vLex search engine options

  • Citations received: the vLex search engine shows you how many times a document has been cited within your search results. To obtain this information, look at the grey number located to the right of each of the search results. This number will only appear if the document in question has actually been cited by another document.
  • Go to the text fragment: for each result you will find a fragment containing the terms you are searching for (legal terms, articles, etc.) With the “go to the fragment” feature, you can directly access the part of each document that contains the terms that you have entered in the search field.

This post is also available in: Español

Updated on August 13, 2020

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