It sure beats a free T-shirt. Early next year, members of the California Lawyers Association (CLA) will receive complimentary access to Fastcase, a legal research platform chock-full of case laws, statutes and regulations from the federal level on down to all 50 states. As bar associations across the country look for bait to draw young and upcoming lawyers into the fold, dangling a law library that can fit inside the screen of their smartphones might be a good place to start.

Here are the particulars: CLA's Fastcase service will include unlimited research, reference and printing ­(because even in a digital world, paper still has a place). Starting in early 2019, members will be able to log-in via the organization's website using their bar username and password.

CLA took an interest in Fastcase once they found out that other state bar associations had begun offering their members similar research benefits.

“By doing this I think we all just felt that it would be a great tool for young attorneys and solo and small firms in particular. … For the small and solo law firms, they don't have the resources to get a subscription to Lexis,” Tara Burd, head of CLA's Online Research and Publications Service Committee, said.

Fastcase CEO Ed Walters notes that his company is focusing on state bar organizations and the members they are hoping to attract. And it's had some success: Fastcase is already the provider of choice to bar associations in 31 states and the District of Columbia.

“One trend across the country is that bar associations are really competing to offer the highest value to their members, especially voluntary bar associations. You have to win young lawyers; you have to really show that there's a value when you write that check for your dues,” Walters said.

And when it comes to numbers with dollar signs in front of them, “zero” might have the highest value of all to young lawyers—especially in light of the fact that an “Appellate” level membership to Fastcase, for example, costs $695 a year.

Walters understands the gravitational pull that complimentary access to his service could exert on lawyers who may have previously been on the fence about forking over the dues required to join a state bar association in the vein of the CLA.

“There are hundreds of thousands of lawyers in the state of California who are paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year for research, and a simple fact is lots of lawyers would rather spend that money building their business or doing more pro-bono work,” Walters said.

The service was put through a demo testing process alongside several other legal research providers before CLA evaluators would sign-off on the partnership. But Fastcase's holistic approach to the law—they've added 400 new legal treatises in the last year—eventually scored it the gig. Burd pointed out that the service's database didn't just focus on modern casework, but also the history that laid its foundation.

“For a new practitioner, they may not quite understand the value of that, but there's a lot of value in going back and looking at how a statute came to be. You have to be able to research that, and so it was important to us to not give our members, especially our younger members, a false sense of comfort, like they had done all of their due diligence when there's actually a lot more out there,” Burd said.