Westlaw

Last updated

Westlaw
Type Subsidiary
IndustryPublishing
Founded1975;48 years ago (1975)
ProductsCase law, articles, publications, news, court documents, lawyer marketing, law practice management tools
Parent Thomson Reuters
Website www.westlaw.com

Westlaw is an online legal research service and proprietary database for lawyers and legal professionals available in over 60 countries. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 40,000 databases of case law, state and federal statutes, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources.

Contents

Most legal documents on Westlaw are indexed to the West Key Number System, which is West's master classification system of U.S. law. Westlaw supports natural language and Boolean searches. Other significant Westlaw features include KeyCite, a citation checking service, which customers use to determine whether cases or statutes are still good law, and a customizable tabbed interface that lets customers bring their most-used resources to the top. Other tabs organize Westlaw content around the specific work needs of litigators, in-house corporate practitioners, and lawyers who specialize in any of over 150 legal topics. Most customers are attorneys or law students, but other individuals can also obtain accounts.[ citation needed ]

History

Westlaw was created in 1975 by West Publishing, [1] a company whose headquarters have been in Eagan, Minnesota, since 1992; West was acquired by the Thomson Corporation in 1996. Several of Thomson's law-related businesses outside the United States have their own Westlaw sites, and Westlaw's foreign content is available online. [2] For instance, Westlaw Canada from Carswell includes the Canadian Abridgment and KeyCite Canada, [3] and Westlaw UK provides information from Sweet & Maxwell and independent law reports, case analysis and case status icons. More recently, Westlaw China was introduced, with laws and regulations, cases, digests, and status icons (similar to KeyCite flags), for the law of the People's Republic of China. [4] Westlaw Ireland (IE) was established in 2002, covering information found in Round Hall publications as well as legislation, books, cases, current awareness and full-text articles from many of the country's notable legal journals. [5] Westlaw is used in over 68 countries.

Westlaw is descended from QUIC/LAW, a Canadian computer-assisted legal research project operated by Queen's University from 1968 to 1973. [6] The original name stood for "Queen's University Investigation of Computers and Law." [7] It was directed by Hugh Lawford and Richard von Briesen, and the original code was based on an internal IBM text search project called INFORM/360. [6] The IBM code turned out to be incomplete and required substantial modifications. [6] In 1973, the project was commercialized in the form of a new company called QL Systems and a new product name, QL/SEARCH. [6] In 1976, QL Systems licensed the QL/SEARCH software to West Publishing as the original foundation for what would become Westlaw. [6]

West's chief competitor in the legal information retrieval market is LexisNexis. [8] (Ironically, Lawford and von Briesen sold what by then was called QuickLaw to LexisNexis in 2002. [7] ) Both Westlaw and LexisNexis started in the 1970s as dial-up services with dedicated terminals. The earliest versions used acoustic couplers or key phones; then smaller terminals with internal modems. Westlaw's terminal was known as WALT, for West Automatic Law Terminal. [9] [10]

Around 1989, both started offering programs for personal computers that emulated the terminals, and when Internet access became available, an Internet address (such as westlaw.com) became an alternative that could be selected within the "Communications Setup" option in the client program, instead of a dial-up number. West's program was known as Westmate. It was based on Borland C++ around 1997, and then changed to a program compiled on a Microsoft platform that incorporated portions of Internet Explorer. This was the first program to incorporate HTML; prior to that, Westmate had "jumps" indicated by triangles instead of "links." Shortly after that, both publishers started developing web browser interfaces, with Westlaw's being notable for the use of "web dialogs", emulating the piling of open books on a table. Westmate was discontinued on June 30, 2007.

West introduced WestlawNext on February 8, 2010. The main advances are that a user can start a search without first selecting a database, which is helpful because WestLaw has over 40,000 databases, [11] and the search screen allows one to click checkboxes to select the jurisdiction and nature of material wanted. A new search algorithm, referred to as WestSearch, executes a federated search across multiple content types. Users can either enter descriptive terms or Boolean connectors and select a jurisdiction. Documents are ranked by relevance. WestlawNext also supports retrieving documents by citation, party name or KeyCite reference. An overview page enables users to see the top results per content type, or to view all results for a particular content type. Filters can also be applied to refine the result list even further. On the results page, users can also see links to related secondary sources relevant to their research. WestlawNext also provides folders for storing portions of the research selected by the user. [12]

The classic Westlaw.com platform was retired in August 2015. [13] WestlawNext was renamed "Thomson Reuters Westlaw", effective in February 2016. [14]

Features

KeyCite

KeyCite is a case citator used in United States legal research that provides a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority.

Verification of citations is necessary, because lawyers must determine whether a case has been reversed, overruled, or modified by a subsequent case before citing it in court. Further, when interpreting a statute it is necessary to examine previous judicial interpretations. The United States judiciary operates under the principle of stare decisis – a system of legal precedents – to ensure the courts deliver consistent rulings on similar legal issues, regardless of the political or social status of the parties involved. As such, legal professionals must be certain that the legal citations they use to reinforce their arguments are accurate and still "good law."

KeyCite leverages Westlaw technologies, West's attorney-authored case law headnotes and the West Key Number System to determine and immediately alert legal professionals that case law they are reviewing has been either overturned, or may have history that deems the precedential value of the opinion invalid.

KeyCite was introduced to Westlaw in 1997 and was the first citator to seriously challenge Shepard's Citations, on which American legal professionals had relied for generations. [15] Shepard's had become such a necessary part of American legal research that the process of citation checking is still informally referred to as "Shepardizing." [15]

In 2004, KeyCite was the most-used citation checking service in an annual survey of law firm technology use conducted by the American Bar Association.

Associated software and websites

WestCheck is software that extracts citations from a word processing document and submits them to KeyCite or to Westlaw for retrieval of full text documents. The software consists of a standalone program and word processor add-in, either of which may be used, and a web site with the same functionality.

West also provides BriefTools, which replaces West CiteLink, [16] and provides citation checking and file retrieval services within a word processing document. [17] Another version only inserts Westlaw links into documents. [18]

West CiteAdvisor formats citations and creates a table of authorities. Like WestCheck, it is available online at citeadvisor.westlaw.com, or as software for a word processor. [19]

Westlaw CourtExpress allows searching of court docket information.

Westlaw Watch allows users to manage periodic monitoring of news and other databases for topics of interest.

Westlaw WebPlus provides a web search engine with a focus on legal information sites. [20]

The Westlaw Litigator website [21] provides access to legal calendaring and other litigation related applications.

Westlaw Today curates legal news and email alerts written by attorneys and Reuters reporters. [22]

Key Number System

The West Key Number System is a master classification system of U.S. law, and is claimed to be "the only recognized legal taxonomy." [23] The West Key Number System was created by West Publishing Company and can be described as a highly detailed index of over 110,000 legal topics and sub-topics. The index serves as the backbone for legal information published by West, which appears in the company's print publications, and now on Westlaw.

The West Education Network (TWEN)

TWEN is Westlaw's online courseware that is specifically tailored for law schools. It is used as an online extension of the classroom. Teachers use it to post syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, class materials and announcements. TWEN is also used for emailing, forum posting, live chats, polling, linking to CALI Lessons [24] and posting/submitting assignments. [25] (In terms of this range of functionality, TWEN is similar to other educational systems such as Blackboard, marketed by Blackboard Inc.).

Law school professors occasionally use it for their classes, and it is used by librarians and career services offices. Students can also create and manage their own courses for law reviews, journals and any student organization.

Criticism and controversies

Identity theft controversy

In February 2005, after the ChoicePoint identity theft incidents became public, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) publicized the fact that Westlaw has a database containing a large amount of private information on practically all living Americans. Besides widely available information such as addresses and phone numbers, Westlaw also includes Social Security numbers (SSNs), previous addresses, dates of birth, and other information lawyers use to do background checks on behalf of their clients. [26] [27] While there is no known case of identity theft involving Westlaw, the company responded to the controversy by announcing it had eliminated access to full SSNs for 85 percent of its clients who previously could retrieve this information, mostly lawyers and government agencies. [28]

In the mid-1980s, Westlaw sued LexisNexis over copyright infringement. [29] LexisNexis's "star pagination" system, a feature that let users of either research system find the printed page of a case without looking to the actual book, was found to infringe West's copyrights by the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota. After Lexis' appeals were turned down by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, the company entered into an agreement to pay West $50,000 per year to license West's pagination and text corrections. No other publisher was offered similar terms, and the terms of the agreement were kept secret until they came out during discovery in the Matthew Bender / HyperLaw v. West lawsuit.

In the mid-1990s, Alan Sugarman, who runs HyperLaw, sued West. The District Court in New York and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that West did not have copyright on the corrections it made on opinions or on the internal pagination. [30]

See also

Related Research Articles

Wexis is a humorous portmanteau used to refer to the alleged duopoly of publishing conglomerates that dominate the U.S. legal information services industry – namely, West Publishing and LexisNexis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Case citation</span> System for uniquely identifying individual rulings of a court

Case citation is a system used by legal professionals to identify past court case decisions, either in series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a neutral style that identifies a decision regardless of where it is reported. Case citations are formatted differently in different jurisdictions, but generally contain the same key information.

LexisNexis is a company operating as an independent subsidiary of the RELX corporation.It sells data analytics products and various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer information.information.It is headquartered in New York and incorporated in Delaware with its own executive leadership team During the 1970s, LexisNexis began to make legal and journalistic documents more accessible electronically. As of 2006, the company had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records–related information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HeinOnline</span> Online database for legal materials

HeinOnline (HOL) is a commercial internet database service launched in 2000 by William S. Hein & Co., Inc., a Buffalo, New York publisher specializing in legal materials. The company began in Buffalo, New York, in 1961, and is currently based in nearby Getzville, NY. In 2013, WSH Co. was the 33rd largest private company in western New York, with revenues of around $33 million and more than seventy employees.

American Jurisprudence is an encyclopedia of the United States law, published by West. It was originated by Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, which was subsequently acquired by the Thomson Corporation. The series is now in its second edition, launched in 1962. It is a staple of law libraries, and the current edition is over 140 volumes, updated with replacement volumes, annual pocket supplements, and a New Topic Service binder. The discussion has extensive research references to other Thomson West publications, including sister publications Am. Jur. Trials, Am. Jur. Proof of Facts, Am. Jur. Pleading and Practice Forms, and Am. Jur. Legal Forms. Before Thomson's acquisition of West Publishing, it was a competitor to Corpus Juris Secundum. Am. Jur. is available online through both Westlaw, and LexisNexis.

A casebook is a type of textbook used primarily by students in law schools. Rather than simply laying out the legal doctrine in a particular area of study, a casebook contains excerpts from legal cases in which the law of that area was applied. It is then up to the student to analyze the language of the case in order to determine what rule was applied and how the court applied it. Casebooks sometimes also contain excerpts from law review articles and legal treatises, historical notes, editorial commentary, and other related materials to provide background for the cases.

Shepard's Citations is a citator used in United States legal research that provides a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. The verb Shepardizing refers to the process of consulting Shepard's to see if a case has been overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by later cases. Prior to the development of electronic citators like Westlaw's KeyCite during the 1990s, Shepard's was the only legal citation service that attempted to provide comprehensive coverage of U.S. law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">West (publisher)</span> American publisher of legal materials

West is a business owned by Thomson Reuters that publishes legal, business, and regulatory information in print, and on electronic services such as Westlaw. Since the late 19th century, West has been one of the most prominent publishers of legal materials in the United States. Its headquarters is in Eagan, Minnesota; it also had an office in Rochester, New York, until it closed in 2019, and it had an office in Cleveland, Ohio, until it closed in 2010. Organizationally, West is part of the global legal division of Thomson Reuters.

<i>Federal Reporter</i> Case law reporting in US courts

The Federal Reporter is a case law reporter in the United States that is published by West Publishing and a part of the National Reporter System. It begins with cases decided in 1880; pre-1880 cases were later retroactively compiled by West Publishing into a separate reporter, Federal Cases. The fourth and current Federal Reporter series publishes decisions of the United States courts of appeals and the United States Court of Federal Claims; prior series had varying scopes that covered decisions of other federal courts as well. Though the Federal Reporter is an unofficial reporter and West is a private company that does not have a legal monopoly over the court opinions it publishes, it has so dominated the industry in the United States that legal professionals, including judges, uniformly cite to the Federal Reporter for included decisions. Approximately 30 new volumes are published each year.

In legal research, a citator is a citation index of legal resources, one of the best-known of which in the United States is Shepard's Citations. Given a reference of a legal decision, a citator allows the researcher to find newer documents which cite the original document and thus to reconstruct the judicial history of cases and statutes. Using a citator in this way is colloquially referred to as "Shepardizing".

<i>Federal Supplement</i> American case law reporter that compiles opinions of the U.S. District Courts

The Federal Supplement is a case law reporter published by West Publishing in the United States that includes select opinions of the United States district courts since 1932, and is part of the National Reporter System. Although the Federal Supplement is an unofficial reporter and West is a private company that does not have a legal monopoly over the court opinions it publishes, it has so dominated the industry in the U.S. that legal professionals uniformly cite the Federal Supplement for included decisions. Approximately 40 new volumes are published per year.

Law practice management software is software designed to manage a law firm's case and client records, billing and bookkeeping, schedules and appointments, deadlines, computer files and to facilitate any compliance requirements such as with document retention policies, courts' electronic filing systems and, in the UK, the Solicitors' Accounts Rules as defined by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Legal research is the process of identifying and retrieving information to support legal arguments and decisions. Finding relevant legal information can be challenging and may involve the use of electronic research tools as well as printed books and materials. However, many resources that are useful for legal research are fee-based, and many are not easily accessible.

Computer-assisted legal research (CALR) or computer-based legal research is a mode of legal research that uses databases of court opinions, statutes, court documents, and secondary material. Electronic databases make large bodies of case law easily available. Databases also have additional benefits, such as Boolean searches, evaluating case authority, organizing cases by topic, and providing links to cited material. Databases are available through paid subscription or for free.

Casemaker is a Web-based legal research system that is part of Fastcase following a 2021 merger. State bar associations join the Casemaker system to provide online legal research services for dues-paying attorney members. The Casemaker system allows users to search and browse a variety of legal information such as statutes, regulations, and case law on the Web. Casemaker is designed to be navigable and provide its users with current and accurate legal materials.

Legal information retrieval is the science of information retrieval applied to legal text, including legislation, case law, and scholarly works. Accurate legal information retrieval is important to provide access to the law to laymen and legal professionals. Its importance has increased because of the vast and quickly increasing amount of legal documents available through electronic means. Legal information retrieval is a part of the growing field of legal informatics.

A table of authorities is part of a legal brief that contains an index of the cases, statutes, and secondary sources cited. This article deals specifically with the characteristics of tables of authorities in the United States. The table of authorities, often called a TOA, is frequently a legal requirement for litigation briefs; the various state courts have different rules as to what kinds of briefs require a TOA. The TOA list has the name of the authority followed by the page number or numbers on which each authority appears, and the authorities are commonly listed in alphabetical order within each grouping. The intention is to allow law clerks and judges to easily and rapidly identify and access the legal authorities cited in a litigation brief.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bloomberg Law</span> Online legal research service

Bloomberg Law is a subscription-based service that uses data analytics and artificial intelligence for online legal research. The service, which Bloomberg L.P. introduced in 2009, provides legal content, proprietary company information and news information to attorneys, law students, and other legal professionals. More specifically, this commercial legal and business technology platform integrates Bloomberg Law News with Bloomberg Industry Group's primary and secondary legal content and business development tools.

The United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers' Edition, or Lawyers' Edition, is an unofficial reporter of Supreme Court of the United States opinions. The Lawyers' Edition was established by the Lawyers Cooperative Publishing Company of Rochester, New York in 1882, and features coverage of Supreme Court decisions going back to 1790. The first Lawyers' Edition series corresponds to the official United States Reports from volume 1 to volume 351, whereas the second series contains cases starting from the official reporter volume 352. It is currently published by LexisNexis.

The law of the U.S. state of Georgia consists of several levels, including constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law, as well as case law and local law. The Official Code of Georgia Annotated forms the general statutory law.

References

  1. ↑ Hellyer, Paul (January 2005). "Assessing the Influence of Computer-Assisted Legal Research: A Study of California Supreme Court Opinions". 97 Law Library Journal 285-298 (2005).
  2. ↑ "Westlaw International". Westlaw International. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  3. ↑ "LawSource". Westlawecarswell.com. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  4. ↑ "Westlaw China– Law Books and Legal Information – West® | Westlaw®". West.thomson.com. Retrieved March 27, 2014.
  5. ↑ "Westlaw IE". Thomson Reuters. Retrieved June 27, 2013.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Bourne, Charles P.; Hahn, Trudi Bellardo (2003). A History of Online Information Services, 1963-1976. Cambridge: The MIT Press. pp. 313–315. ISBN   0-262-02538-8. Available via IEEE Xplore.
  7. 1 2 Martin, Sandra (September 26, 2009). "Prof's system revolutionized legal practice". The Globe and Mail. Toronto: The Globe and Mail Inc. Retrieved December 2, 2018.
  8. ↑ Jean McKnight, "Wexis versus the Net", Illinois Bar Journal 85, no. 4 (April 1997): 189-190.
  9. ↑ Archived February 28, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  10. ↑ "SFALL Newsletter, September 2000". Aallnet.org. Archived from the original on February 5, 2012. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  11. ↑ Wheeler RJ Jr. (2010). "Does Westlawnext Really Change Everything: the Implications of Westlawnext on Legal Research". SSRN   1773767.
  12. ↑ "Westlaw Next". West. Retrieved February 8, 2010.
  13. ↑ "Retiring Westlaw Classic". Legal Solutions Blog. Thomson Reuters. September 3, 2014. Retrieved March 2, 2017.
  14. ↑ "WestlawNext has been renamed Thomson Reuters Westlaw". Thomson Reuters. Retrieved March 2, 2017.
  15. 1 2 Mersky, Roy M.; Dunn, Donald J. (2002). Fundamentals of Legal Research (8th ed.). New York: Foundation Press. pp. 312–340. ISBN   9781587780646.
  16. ↑ "WestCiteLink users: Improved tools are here–Legal Information–West". West.thomson.com. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  17. ↑ "BriefTools– Law Books and Legal Information – West® | Westlaw®". West.thomson.com. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  18. ↑ "BriefTools Links Only Software Downloads–Legal Information–West". West.thomson.com. May 14, 2012. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  19. ↑ "West Cite Advisor - Automated Citations from West– Law Books and Legal Information – West® | Westlaw®". West.thomson.com. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  20. ↑ "Using Westlaw WebPlus" (PDF). West.thomson.com. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  21. ↑ "Westlaw Litigator Requirements". Litigator.westlaw.com. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  22. ↑ "Westlaw Today - Premium Legal News". legal.thomsonreuters.com. Retrieved March 18, 2022.
  23. ↑ "Claim presumably limited to the United States, as Canadian legal publisher Maritime Law Book has maintained a similarly robust Key Number System for decades" . Retrieved December 23, 2016.
  24. ↑ "Administrators Guide to TWEN" (PDF). Westlaw. September 19, 2022. Retrieved September 19, 2022.
  25. ↑ "The most comprehensive Web site for law school students and faculty". lawschool.westlaw.com. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  26. ↑ Archived March 31, 2005, at the Wayback Machine
  27. ↑ "Schumer's letter to Westlaw (in PDF format) about the issue" (PDF). Schumer.senate.gov. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  28. ↑ Chabrow, Eric (March 17, 2005). "Westlaw To Restrict Subscriber Access To Social Security Numbers". Informationweek.com. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  29. ↑ West Pub. Co. v. Mead Data Cent., Inc., 616 F. Supp. 1571 (D. Minn. 1985), aff'd, 799 F.2d 1219 (8th Cir.), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 1070 (1986).
  30. ↑ 94 Civ. 0589, 1997 WL 266972 (S.D.N.Y. May 19, 1997), affd. 48 U.S.P.Q.2d 1560; 158 F.3d 674 (2nd Circuit, 1998), cert. denied (Second Circuit Decision in HyperLaw v. West).
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