Three New Improvements to My NLRB Research Database

Getting better all the time.

I maintain a free database of NLRB legal documents at NLRBResearch.com. The database is meant to make it possible for union stewards and workers to determine what rights they have under the National Labor Relations Act without having to pay thousands of dollars a year to a service like Westlaw or LexisNexis. It is also an excellent research tool for practicing lawyers. (See my piece introducing the database from earlier this year.)

Over the last couple of months, I have made three significant improvements to the database.

First, the database now has every circuit court decision in which the NLRB was a party from 1936 to present. Like all the other documents in the database, the circuit court decisions are full-text searchable and new circuit court decisions are automatically added during the database’s daily self-update.

As part of this change, I have added a Circuit column that displays which circuit court issued the decision. The Circuit column also displays which circuit court the Board Appellate Briefs are filed in. This allows you to narrow the search to a specific circuit court.

Second, older Published Board Decisions now have both the volume page citation and the slip opinion number in the Citation field. Prior to this change, older Published Board Decisions only had the volume page citation in the Citation field. This meant that, if you tried to search for older decisions using the slip opinion number, it would not work. It also meant that when you clicked on the citation next to a case to see what documents cite to that case, it would only show the documents that cite to the volume page citation, not the documents that cite to the slip opinion number. By putting both citations in the Citation field, all of the functionality that is based on connecting citations across the various documents works exactly as it should with nothing missing.

Third, there is a new AI Summary for every document. Previously, all of the documents had been summarized by Google Gemini 1.5 Flash. Now they are summarized by Google Gemini 2.0 Flash. In addition to the Gemini model getting a lot better, I have figured out better ways to prompt Gemini to generate better summaries. Below is the new AI summary for the Stericycle coercive rules case.

I really do think that this database is quite useful and I have received a lot of feedback to that effect. I am a fairly active NLRB practitioner (I have five open cases at the NLRB right now) and NLRBResearch.com is the only thing I personally use to research NLRB law.

Some users of the database have become recurring donors of it, which you can do by scrolling to the bottom of this page. But I am still looking for more extensive sponsorship for the resource, including potentially from advertisers. So email me at matt@nlrbedge.com if that interests you. Also email me there if you or your organization would like a training about how best to use the database.