Each year, student lawyers around the country risk their legal careers by plagiarizing the work of others. Sometimes, students realize they are stealing text and passing it to instructors as their own. In other cases, sloppy or non-existent citations produce de facto plagiarism even when students have no malevolent intent.

Law professors and law librarians have several new tools at their fingertips, making detection of plagiarism even easier and making the game of sloppy citation even more dangerous for careless aspiring attorneys.

Several methods of online plagiarism detection are common sense. Expert use of Google, Yahoo, Lexis-Nexis, and WestLaw can reveal the presence of lifted text in law student papers. Similarly, phrase searching of subject-specific databases helps to detect plagiarism in papers with interdisciplinary topics.

In recent years, however, specialized online plagiarism detection services have made the business of intellectual theft even riskier. Two of the most popular detection services are Turnitin www.turnitin.com and Glatt Plagiarism Services www.plagiarism.com. Most of these sites charge for searches, but motivated law professors are using their services to insure high-quality student products.

In addition to their prosecutorial purpose, some of these online services provide instructions and tutorials for law students who wish to improve their writing and who want to avoid inadvertent plagiarism.

Don't make the foolish mistake of plagiarizing text from briefs, opinions, law review articles, or legal websites. Properly credit your sources with appropriate citations, because a silly mistake can lead to embarrassment, academic probation, suspension, or even disbarment.

To learn more about law school plagiarism, explore these suggested readings:

Blackburn, Sharon, and Stephen Good. "Cyberplagiarism and the Law Librarian: Identifying and Confronting Plagiarism from the World Wide Web." AALL Spectrum 8, no. 9 (July 2004): 6-34.

Shaw, Lori E., "Why is Plagiarism Such an Important Issue in Law School?" Student Lawyer 33, no. 4 (December 2004): 12-13.