Although I have a very broad Westlaw subscription, I occasionally need access to materials that are outside my subscription plan. Whenever that’s the case, I always determine beforehand how much it will cost me to obtain the materials I’m after.

Yesterday, while working on a project for Ben Glass (a successful Virginia personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer, and the founder of Great Legal Marketing), I realized that it would be helpful to be able to poke around the American Law Reports (ALR) database. So I typed “ALR” in the “Search for a Database” field on my Westlaw homepage. I was pleasantly surprised to see, on the very next screen, an offer for two weeks’ free access to the ALR database. Of course, I accepted.

As I got deeper into the project, I decided it was necessary to see the parties’ briefs in two Virginia Supreme Court cases. So I called Westlaw for information about the cost of a “find” request in the Briefs database. After I explained my inquiry to the reference attorney, she told me that West would give me a password entitling me to two hours’ complimentary access to the Briefs databases in both New York (where I live and where most of my clients are) and Virginia, as well as free printing (up to 5,000 lines). Score!

The reference attorney also explained that, after I’ve used my two hours (which I can do any time within the next month), my Westlaw representative will contact me to see if I’m interested in subscribing to the Briefs database. I figure that’s a pretty fair trade.

Just to be clear, I didn’t ask for free access to any of these materials: Westlaw took the initiative, offering these promotions to me after it learned about my interest in the materials.

So, if you’d like to test-drive any materials not included in your current subscription, you might want to try simply searching on Westlaw for a database that’s outside your plan, or calling the reference attorneys (at 800-REF-ATTY) to find out what the cost will be to access specific documents that are outside your plan. While I can’t promise that you’ll have the same results that I had, it’ll take very little time, and almost no effort, to test this yourself.

How to get the best deal on your subscription plan from Lexis and Westlaw is just one of the topics that I’ll be covering in next week’s teleseminar, Freelance Freedom (2009): How to Get Started as a Contract Lawyer.