The index does not contain Superior Court decisions. However, whenever a Board decision is appealed to the Superior Court, the Board's decision is designated as precedential and the subsequent court action is summarized in the abstract. See below for a fuller explanation of the precedent indicator and the abstract field.

To search for a case, simply fill in any or all of the fields on the query form, then hit "enter" or click the "Submit Query" button. Detailed instructions follow.

The system will display up to 300 matches for each search. Ten matches are listed at a time, and you can easily navigate to the next ten or the previous ten. To view a document, click on its Board case number. More complete instructions are listed below.

This system has been tested to work with Netscape Navigator 3.0 or later, and with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or later. Other browsers may also work, but are not supported.

The Board welcomes your comments and questions. You may reach us by phone at (860) 566-3045, by fax at (860) 263-6977, or by e-mail at dol.board@ct.gov

Contents
• Definitions
• Board Case No.
• Staff Attorney
• Decision Date
• Claimant
• Employer
• Precedents Only
• Digest Number(s)
• Digest No. List
• Statute(s) Or Regulation(s)
• Search For Text
• Search Abstracts Only
• Hints for searching decisions
• Using AND, OR, NEAR, and wildcards
• Viewing the decision documents

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Staff Attorney
You may search for decisions drafted by a specific Board staff attorney by selecting the attorney's initials from the pull-down list. This feature is primarily for use by Board staff.
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Decision Date
You may search for cases by the date of the decision. Enter only one date in the first field to search for that date. Enter a second date in the "TO" field to search decisions between the two dates inclusively. Ex: 1/10/99 to 2/8/99. ADLIB accepts most common formats for entering dates. Ex: 12/3/98 or 5/1/2001 or January 20, 1998.

When you enter a date, you may use either two digits or four digits for the year. If you enter only two digits for the year, values between 00 and 29, inclusive, are interpreted as the years 2000-2029. Values between 30 and 99, inclusive, are interpreted as the years 1930-1999. If you do not enter a year at all, the current year is assumed. Ex:12/3/02 is assumed to be 12/3/2002, and 11/21 is assumed to be today, 11/21/2024.
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Claimant
To search for a given claimant, simply enter a first and/or last name. If it is a common name, you may also add a middle name or initial to narrow the search. ADLIB will search for claimants whose name contains ALL of the words you enter in this field. ADLIB will NOT match nicknames or initials with proper names. (Ex: Joe, J. and Joseph will not match each other) The names in the documents sometimes use middle initials and sometimes use full middle names.
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Employer
To search for a given employer, simply enter all or part of the employer's name. ADLIB will search for employer names containing ANY of the words you enter in this field. ADLIB will not match abbreviations with words, such as Inc. and Incorporated. The documents sometimes use abbreviations. Therefore, you may wish to omit Inc. and Incorporated from your search terms.
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Precedents Only
If you check this checkbox, ADLIB will only retrieve those cases which the Board considers important and has designated as precedential. It will not include the form decisions that the Board issues in routine cases. The Board also uses the precedent indicator to indicate that a decision has been appealed to the Superior Court. In the display of search results, precedent decisions are designated by the symbol. Each precedent decision has an abstract that contains a brief explanation of the significance of the decision and indicates any subsequent court activity on the case.
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Digest Numbers
If you are looking for cases on a specific area of the law, and you have access to the Precedent Manual, the easiest way to search is by "Digest No." as defined in the Precedent Manual. Use the digest number format given in the example on the search screen. The hyphen is required. If you do not know the digest numbers, you may look them up in the online Digest No. List. Most form decisions do not contain digest numbers.

If you wish to select all of the cases in a given volume of the Precedent Manual, enter only the two- or three-letter identifier for that topic without any numbers but with the * wildcard indicator, e.g., DD*, VL*, AOB*. You may use this feature to limit a term search. See "Search for Text" below.

Caution: The digest numbers assigned to Board decisions represent the drafters' judgment about the categories under which the decisions belong. Although most digest numbers are properly assigned, a search by digest number is likely to be under-inclusive. Users requiring a complete listing of cases on a particular issue should do an additional key word search using the "Search For Text" field.
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Statute(s) Or Regulation(s)
Use this field to search for citations to state or federal statutes or regulations in Board decisions. Merely enter the numbers that appear after the section symbol. Do not enter the section symbol itself or the word "section." That means for federal statutes and regulations, you will omit the volume number. EX: 41 U.S.C. §2601 becomes 2601; 18 C.F.R. §392.104(h) becomes 392.104(h).

You must be careful to enter subsections and subdivisions without any spaces between parentheses. Ex: 31-237g-40(e); 31-236(a)(2)(A). Because of typographic differences in citations in the original documents, ADLIB may not return all matches. To ensure that you have found all relevent citations, you may wish to broaden your search by replacing the last one or two sets of parentheses with the * wildcard. EX: 31-237g-40*. See below for wildcards.

You may search for multiple citations by separating them with a comma. ADLIB will search for decisions that contain all of the listed citations.
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Search For Text
This field searches the complete text of the Board's decision. Simply enter the words or phrases you wish to search for, separated by commas. By default, ADLIB will search for documents containing ALL of the words, except for certain common words like the, an, and in. Such common words act as wildcard placeholders in a phrase which will match any word. For example, because the is a wildcard placeholder, the query phrase under the influence matches any three-word phrase that begins with under and ends with influence, such as under undue influence. If you put quotes around a phrase, ADLIB will search for that exact phrase, including common words.
Ex: Entering the text smoking, wilful misconduct, "under the influence," driving over the limit would cause ADLIB to search for documents which contain the word "smoking," and the phrases "wilful misconduct" and "under the influence," and a four-word phrase that begins with "driving" and ends with "limit."

You can use the Search For Text field to determine if a Board precedent is still good law. Simply enter the name of the case -- claimant v. employer -- and ADLIB will give you the original decision along with every subsequent decision that cites the case.

You can control ADLIB's search by using parenthesis and the logic words AND, OR, AND NOT, or NEAR to form a more specific query.
Ex: (misconduct OR violation) AND (smoking NEAR workplace)

• Use the * wildcard in a query. For example, in the query form type key* to find key, keying, keyhole, keyboard, and so on.

• Search for all forms of a word. For example, in the query form type sink** to find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.

• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these queries, system and manager and system near manager, look for the words system and manager on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank.

Details on using these logic words and others may be found in Tips For Searching, or the Query Language manual.

You may limit a term search by also selecting a volume of the Precedent Manual in the Digest Number field. For example, if you enter drug testing in the Search for Text field and VL* in the Digest Number field, you will only retrieve those decisions that contain the words "drug testing" and were coded as voluntary leaving (as opposed to discharge) cases.

A word of warning: formulate your search as narrowly as you can. If you search on a general topic, such as wilful misconduct, you will have too many hits to be useful. A better search would be: wilful misconduct or rule violation and smoking in the workplace.

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Search Abstracts Only
If you check this checkbox, ADLIB will only search for your specified terms within the abstract and will not search the text of the decision itself. By entering the word "court" in the Search for Text field, you will be able to identify Board decisions in which there has been subsequent court activity. To narrow your search, you can use the Decision Date and Digest Number(s) fields. For example, if you check the checkbox for Search Abstracts Only, enter "court" in the Search for Text Field, and enter DD 5-15 in the Digest Number(s) field, you will retrieve all Board decisions that were coded DD 5-15 (sleeping on the job) and were appealed to court. This is obviously a small subset of all Board cases involving sleeping on the job and it may not include the most important cases. Nonetheless, it will show you those cases in which the court agreed or disagreed with the Board.
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Viewing the decision documents
After you click the "Submit Query" button, a list of matching decision documents is displayed. Those documents most closely matching your search criteria are listed first. The number of stars () provides a visual clue as to how closely they match.

For each matching document, ADLIB displays the case name (claimant v. employer), the Board case number, and the date decided. ADLIB will also display the digest numbers assigned to the case. A key symbol () indicates the case is a precedent. Precedent cases will also display an abstract. The abstract contains a brief explanation of the significance of the decision. It also indicates any subsequent court activity on the case.

ADLIB will retrieve up to 300 documents per query. It will list those documents 10 at a time on a page. A button at the bottom of the page will display the next 10 or previous 10, if applicable.

There are three ways to view a document:

• Excerpts: Presents excerpted sentences which contain the matching words each time they appear in the decision. Click "Excerpts" beside the case.
• Highlights: Presents the entire document with matching words highlighted. Click "Highlights" beside the case. While viewing a highlighted document, you can navigate between the matching words using the "<<" and ">>" tags around each matching word.
• Normally Formatted: Presents the entire document, formatted normally. Click on the case name or number.

THE BOARD WISHES TO THANK RICHARD CHIOSTRI OF THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT CENTER FOR THE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THIS INDEX.
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