Legal Current

Many people “touch” a case as it goes from a courtroom to a database, from a judge or  jury’s decision onto Westlaw – where a legal researcher may read it within minutes, depending on the court.

It’s all done to make the law easier to work with. And helping legal researchers work efficiently with the most current and comprehensive collections of cases and points of law.

West’s longstanding and trusted relationships with more than 3,500 judges and more than 600 courts in the United States provide just the starting points in a complex but swift process.

So no, it’s far from a small task to move a case beyond its raw form into one that contains West’s respected editorial enhancements and classification, onto Westlaw and into our various print publications.

It’s a series of tasks, performed swiftly by a number of people in a variety of roles within West.

Kate MacEachern is one of those team members. She’s a senior principal attorney editor. MacEachern knows the case acqusition and West editorial process inside and out.

She says in the early days of Westlaw, the company supplied pre-addressed postage-paid envelopes to judges and had them send in their opinions. West still does that for some courts. But opinions primarily come in from court FTP sites and Web sites, email and fax.

From there, it’s a fast initial load to Westlaw with some formatting to make sure it’s easily read and accessed – as well as the KeyCite history information added, MacEachern says.

And that’s where the case enters the editorial process, with attorney editors reading the case carefully, using their expertise in the law to determine the headnotes – the points of law that help a researcher quickly identify what is significant about the case.

Next comes the Key Number enhancement, where the legal principles of the case are organized by more than 400 topics and more than 94,000 classifiable areas of the law.

“I think of it as a really big filing cabinet,” said MacEachern. “We take the legal principles and we make little folders, so that if you want all the cases dealing with a particular legal concept, you pull the folder out of the drawer and you open it up, and there’s every case which dealt with that legal concept, whatever the particular words are that the court might have used.”

Before they are finalized for Westlaw, cases also are organized with KeyCite, so if one opinion overturns another researchers are alerted.

That’s especially important if it’s the case you’re relying on – or that your opponent is.

In this video clip, MacEachern says it’s all about saving time and making the life of the legal researcher easier:

By the way, Kate also was part of a Westcast video podcast we did in 2008, highlighting the work to get a case from the United States Supreme Court onto Westlaw and into print. Check it out!

Posted by Kevin Hunt in: Company Current | Voices | Share