Legal Current

Today marks the official launch of WestlawNext from Thomson Reuters Legal.

WestlawNext is a ground-breaking legal research system that represents the culmination of more than 100 years of West attorney-created editorial analysis and technological innovation.

More than five years in the making, it offers a clean, modern interface and powerful new search functionality that makes legal professionals significantly more efficient and gives them the confidence that they’ve explored every relevant document.

Unveiled today at LegalTech New York, the largest legal technology conference in the world, WestlawNext represents the largest product launch from Thomson Reuters, Legal in more than a decade.

“We’ve combined our 138-year legacy of analyzing and organizing legal information with cutting edge search technology to set a new standard for legal research tools,” said Peter Warwick, president and CEO, Thomson Reuters, Legal. “This combination of authority and insight, driven by peerless technology and innovation, is the essence of intelligent information and provides a powerful advantage for our customers.”

The cornerstone of this significant advancement in legal research is WestSearch™, a proprietary search engine that automates the best practices of expert legal researchers, delivering more inclusive, better ranked results. WestlawNext also includes powerful new tools to help legal professionals analyze and organize legal information more efficiently than ever before.

After watching hundreds of legal professionals perform research and thousands of hours of Westlaw log analysis, it was clear to the project team that researchers typically start by finding relevant documents, then turn to powerful finding aids that link documents together, such as the West Key Number System, KeyCite and Westlaw’s vast collection of authoritative treatises and practice guides, to complete their research.

Working with customers, the WestlawNext team saw that legal professionals could benefit from solutions beyond search. Using current tools, it’s cumbersome to annotate, organize and share relevant documents. With WestlawNext, users can highlight relevant sections of text and create notes on a document – all online. Important documents also can be organized in the WestlawNext online foldering system. These folders not only save users time and map to their workflow, they also support an organization’s efforts to “go green.”

In this video, Mike Dahn, vice president of WestlawNext Product Development, provides an overview of WestlawNext.

A longer version of that video, here, features an extended look at the features after the overview by Dahn.

WestlawNext is available for U.S. practitioners now and its capabilities will be progressively added to Westlaw platforms across the globe.

For more information about WestlawNext, visit www.westlawnext.com.

Posted by John Shaughnessy in: Company Current | Video | Share