After 6 years of law school and almost a year and a half working in a law firm I have come across many legal research databases and have found the most useful to be LexisNexis. The thing I like best about it is the filtering system. That is if you search for ‘litigation’ which would give thousands of hits you can narrow it down to exactly what you want by typing in more specific words with out having to go back to the homepage and start search again. AUSTLII doesn’t allow you to do this. Well it says you can but the searching tool on AUSTLII is not reliable and often doesn’t work. Another thing LexisNexis is good for is the reference section which show cases, articles etc which the current document refers to and cases and articles etc that refer to the current document which makes researching a lot easier as you can search for similar documents by only looking at one document. However the lack of a ‘context’ button which is on AUSTLII is a disappointment. You need to scroll down and look for the word whereas clicking on the little arrows in AUSTLII will take to the next one. Also, the Boolean search tool is better on AUSTLII than LexisNexis. However the main problem I find with it is there is often too much information and that you need to subscribe to it and when my firm wanted to purchase the subscription the costs were huge. We are talking over $10,000 which is a lot of money especially for small firms.