Embodiments of the present disclosure are directed to systems, methods, and computer product programs to identify one or more seminal cases within a database containing legal case data. The disclosed systems and methods provide an approach to identify one or more seminal cases for particular legal issues by mining a text database containing electronic legal documents for the reasons for citing and mining the text within to determine whether the legal issue addressed in the reasons for citing is directed to a seminal case. The data is created through data mining and obtained from the plurality the reasons for citing identifying the seminal cases for a particular legal issue such that the output data corresponding to the seminal cases causes an external device to distinguish the seminal cases when one or more of the seminal cases are returned as the result of a search.