WestlawNext: It’s About Time
Jan 27th, 2010 | By Laura Bergus | Category: Featured, Law Office SoftwareUpdate 1/28/10: Mike Dahn, Vice President of WestlawNext Product Development, was kind enough to answer some questions about availability and pricing, and we’ve posted some screenshots.
Next week at Legal Tech NY, and at a number of preview breakfasts, Thomson Reuters will publicly showcase its new legal 
research product, WestlawNext. The basis of the new tool, which was reportedly five long years in the making, is a robust search algorithm that returns results based on …wait for it… relevance! Thanks to Rex’s contacts I was able to preview WestlawNext and it is very impressive. Bob Ambrogi and Lisa Solomon are writing about the impact and features, and speculating on pricing. But here are the highlights for law students, who will very much welcome something that finally provides the breadth of Westlaw’s sources with the ease of Google-esque searching.
For my first test of WestlawNext, I used the juice subject of my 1L legal writing class appellate brief: the public policy exception to the at-will employment rule in Oklahoma. Using the current Westlaw and WestlawNext side by side, here were some observations:
- Using a natural language search for “wrongful discharge public policy exception,” in the OK-CS database in the current Westlaw the key case (Burk v. K-Mart Corp, 770 P.2d 24) came up ninth on the list.
- Using a terms and connectors search of (wrong! & discharg!) & (“public policy” /s except!) in the same database, the most-recent-on-top results put the case I needed at 59 out of 69…
- For comparison, I plugged my “wrongful discharge public policy exception” search into Google Scholar (having selected only Oklahoma cases), and Burk v. K-Mart was #1.
- Now, WestlawNext has a single search box. There you plug in whatever you want: a terms and connectors search, natural language search, case citation, database name, party names, you get the idea. Putting my same natural language query here, WestlawNext delivered by top case right on top. Finally!
- Surprisingly, WestlawNext did not seem a whole lot faster than Westlaw (which I find to be unacceptably slow at times), especially on pulling additional information like the Citing References. But of course there are lots of factors that play into the speed of any online activity, and I have high hopes that the production version will be speedy. I tested it in Firefox, as it currently does not support Chrome, which is my default browser.
Of course, there’s much more to what Westlaw (and WestlawNext) delivers than putting that landmark case at your fingertips. Law students all too often focus on the cases and ignore the secondary sources that can give quick and easy access to legal concepts and rules. And this is where WestlawNext blows away the current competition. Based on the same search, there’s a list on the left to jump to many types of sources, including “Secondary Sources.” Once I clicked through, I can limit to Oklahoma (still 12 relevant hits), or get a nationwide overview. Law student research heaven!
The interface, which enables deep filtering of results by many levels of criteria, is intuitive (for me) and clean. Documents and searches can be saved and referenced later via a dashboard-type setup that anyone who uses any kind of online account or file management system will find familiar and straightforward.
Another key feature for law students, ancillary to saving documents, is the ability to highlight and notate as you go. These changes are saved for later, too.
I could go on and on about how much better this product is than the current Westlaw. But I won’t. Because right now it just might make you drool over nothing, as there are some big unanswered questions about WestlawNext availability:
- When will it be implemented in law schools?
- How much will it cost?
(Both for law schools and others, because, frankly, it’s silly to learn a slick, intuitive research system that improves your efficiency by a factor of 20, only to be stuck learning or re-learning the proprietary dinosaur services wherever you end up working.)
So, my closing advice for law students? Listen to the professionals (especially your legal librarians) who tell you what is important in legal research. Know how to connect the dots so you can get results when they aren’t all handed to you in a filterable, searchable, savable, instantly-available format. Get as good as you can using free legal research tools, and be as fearless as possible about learning new things. WestlawNext is a good indicator that certain useful aspects of search and research are becoming standardized, but the paywall between you and easy access as a professional is still high and strong. If you haven’t yet, make good friends with the internet to at least bolster your Wexis searches. Here are some recommendations:
- Legal Information Institute for all things statutory and Supreme Court
- Google Scholar for case law fishing expeditions (also try Public Library of Law and Justia for repositories that include statutes and regulations)
- NoLo’s legal encyclopedia for explanations of legal concepts using language your future clients will appreciate.
- Fastcase for a tool that’s trying hard to compete with Wexis, at prices you won’t believe.
I look forward to hearing readers’ suggestions on other useful legal research tools as well as their willingness to adopt a new product like WestlawNext.
[Disclosure: TR offered to fly me to Eagan, MN, for more in-depth demonstration and a meeting with other practitioners, bloggers, and researchers. I declined the free trip but will happily continue to play with WestlawNext.]
Related posts:
- Fastcase Review
- Update: WestlawNext Screenshots and Pricing Information
- Google Scholar Search Now Includes U.S. Case Law and Legal Journals
- Search Tools
- New Social Networking Site for Law Students: Good Idea, Needs Participants
- Courts Cracking Down on Jurors
- Social Media Best Practices for Law Schools – Join the Discussion!
- Top 20 Blog Posts of All Time
- Social Media Best Practices for Law Schools (Part 3)
- Twitter Categorizes Suggested Users – Omits Legal Category
At the meeting in Eagan, West said that they will be rolling out WestlawNext first to law school faculty and staff, to enable them to become familiar with the product so that they can provide appropriate guidance to law students. They will roll out to law students after that. They didn’t have a date certain for either rollout.
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[...] a beta preview) hit most of the high points of the new search tool in a post published yesterday. Laura Bergus of Social Media Law Student and David Bilinsky have also posted product [...]
I’ve been looking forward to hearing more thoughts on WestlawNext – thanks for posting your impressions. I have a resource to add to your list of other good alternate legal research sources, and this one is free! I’m an editor at http://www.intellogist.com, an online community with free in-depth reports and interactive resources related to patent and prior art searching. We have done a lot of research on available patent research tools, and we’ve produced a free comparison chart of the major offerings, at http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/Compare:Patent_Search_System. We don’t review legal research systems at this time, but we have reviews of the patent search products from LexisNexis (called TotalPatent http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/Report:TotalPatent) and Thomson Reuters (called Thomson Innovation, http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/Report:Thomson_Innovation). I was just thinking we might be of interest to any of your readers who are interested in going into patent law specifically.
Thanks again!
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[...] Perspective from a Law Student Jump to Comments Great post over at Social Media Law Student by law student Laura Bergus. Laura got access to WestlawNext, and took it for a test run. Here are [...]
My take on #WestlawNext: http://bit.ly/clQrL7 (tag @Rex7) Just in time for Twitter to crash, thanks to #Apple!
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
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WestlawNext: It’s About Time. Social Media Law Student. http://ow.ly/112u9
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I made the point about the balance between older and newer attorneys in my New York Times quote. Frankly, I think that’s largely what held West back from making changes sooner – the fact that many lawyers are stodgy when it comes to new technology. Though I don’t necessarily believe (as we were told) that this launch date was set five years ago, I knew that this was not a reaction to Google Legal. That’s not West’s target market.
This comment was originally posted on legalresearchandwritingpro.com
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A law student compares new West product with old at http://bit.ly/cYB20h. Key advice for law students at the end include learning Fastcase.
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WestlawNext: It’s About Time http://bit.ly/bryIQA
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Coincidentally, apropos your comment about the expert using a free (and we’ll assume less powerful) research program -
NY Review of Books, v. 57, no. 2, Feb 11, 2010
The Chess Master and the Computer
By Garry KasparovIn 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a “freestyle” chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers. …
Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.
The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.(emphasis added by me)Law is analogous to chess in at least this much. A specific legal issue necessarily has a finite number of valid solutions. Need I say what the analogue to “weak human” is?
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Well done, Simon. Thank you for keeping us ahead of the curve!
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Simon, your comment that “the free Google Scholar service might be all that some clients are prepared to pay for,” gives me pause. I’m not sure if your reference to “clients” means West’s clients (i.e., their lawyer-customers) or the clients who those lawyers are representing (who I’ll refer to as Clients with a capital “C”).
In my experience, lawyers do not consult with their Clients concerning which legal research tool they should use, just as surgeons don’t ask their patients which scalpels they should use. This is as it should be, of course, as the vast majority of Clients are not qualified to make that judgment call. Moreover, the whole free vs. pay issue is relevant only to Clients whose lawyers are employing cost recovery (which I’ve previously decried).
If you meant that Google Scholar might be all that some lawyers are prepared to pay for, that raises the thorny issue of whether the free research tools really are “good enough.” I suspect that the first malpractice case against a free-tools-using lawyer who missed relevant authority that he or she would have found using one of the pay services may answer that question.
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Lisa – some large corporate clients state up front in their retainer agreements that they will not pay for any legal research charges – others that they will not pay for flat-rated charges – on the basis that this is part of the firm’s overhead. Sometimes they even say they won’t pay for time spent on legal research on the basis that they hire lawyers who should know this stuff.
If a partner gives a junior a research and then tells the junior that the research time and disbursements will be regarded as non-billable, this may affect the depth and quality of the research carried out.
I think for simple look-ups like ‘get a copy of this statute or that Supreme Court case’, that lawyers increasingly look to the free or discounted services. Why the lawyer needs to know and how central an issue is to a matter will still steer research in particular directions.
There is likely space for all these services.
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From the perspective of one who teaches future lawyers, I’d just like to add that I am continuously reminding my students of this simple fact:
“The editors of Westlaw and CanLii have not sworn an oath to uphold the laws of Ontario; lawyers have.”
In other words, these tools are never perfect. We heavy users come across errors in their content on a daily basis. Regardless of whether it is a free tool, or a fancy commercial tool, it’s the lawyer’s job to make sure they’ve done their research thoroughly. Thus, in the end, neither is “good enough”. The only “good enough” is meticulous legal research conducted by a human being with an ethical obligation to properly inform the courts, their clients, and each other. We should keep this in mind.
Also, on a lighter note! From a teaching perspective – I loathe system migrations! It mostly stems from the endless amount of explaining that law librarians have to do to help their patrons get up to speed with what the IT people are currently concocting!
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Simon,
I posted my summary (http://tinyurl.com/y9q4fj7) late, so I realize that you did not see it when you posted. I agree that for the first category of search – the “get me the Supreme Court case on preemption,” free tools may be all you need (check out the new FastCase iphone app as well). Unfortunately, as a regulatory attorney, I find myself a captive buyer of for-fee legal research because neither Google nor the “second city” providers (FastCase, Casemaker, Versuslaw) cover decisions of federal and state agencies. When I ran regulatory searches on WestLawNext, the relevant cases did come up but I had to sort through an enormous amount of extraneous material to get to them – and I can’t figure out an easy way to limit my searches to just a few libraries rather than all versus none.
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