Update 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.

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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.]

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