Frank Shepard

Frank Shepard (1848–1902), a salesman for a Chicago legal publisher, invented the Shepard's legal citation system.

Invention of citation system

In September, 1875, a small announcement in the Chicago Legal News reported that Shepard was opening his own shop:

In the same year, he also designed and published the first of his many citation books, Illinois Citations. (Traditionally, the date is given as 1873, but there is evidence that he did not begin until 1875.) Shepard was surely aware of George R. Wendling's citation index, since it was published by the very firm for whom he had worked as a salesman, E.B. Myers & Co. Shepard envisioned and announced in his first publication that he would issue citation books for all the states.

Shepard also began printing gummed labels for each case, listing the cases that cited it. To help the lawyers quickly learn why one case had been cited by another, Shepard’s started including one-letter codes to show that the citing case had overruled, criticized, modified, or applied some other treatment to the cited case. The stickers, or “Adhesive Annotations,” became very popular. While sitting on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, future United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote “I regard Shepard’s Massachusetts Annotations as the most thorough labor-saving device that has even been brought to my attention. No one owning a set of reports can afford to be without one.” The books became so popular that the name became a verb—to Shepardize.