Legal Current

In conversations with customers since the launch of WestlawNext, we’ve been energized by their reaction to the new service. In many cases, it’s a shared pride – more than 3,000 legal professionals touched the new service or the research around it at some point during the development process.

We set out with the mission of making the law more transparent and accessible – something that I know we share with law librarians. So it’s especially important to me to acknowledge the ways the librarian community helped in developing WestlawNext:

-First of all, we put Mike Dahn, a former law librarian, in charge of the largest, most transformational product initiative our business has undertaken in over a decade. Mike is now vice president of WestlawNext Development.

-We talked to thousands of legal professionals about legal research, including many law librarians, conducting focus groups and in-depth interviews throughout the product development process.

-Our Academic Advisory Board saw the product as “Westlaw for the Next Generation” in May 2009. And in September 2009, we showed Project Cobalt (WestlawNext’s project name before launch) to our Law Firm Librarian Board. We listened as the boards offered valuable suggestions to enhance the WestlawNext experience for researchers, and many of their ideas were incorporated into the current version of WestlawNext.

-In the months before launch, we also asked librarians to be part of our user acceptance testing and beta groups.

WestlawNext is already helping users be more efficient and more confident in their research. But it’s important to note that the service will be in a constant state of evolution to make it even more powerful, collaborative and intuitive. To do that, we’ll need your continued help. Thanks in advance for providing the feedback that can make WestlawNext even more useful.

If you would like to learn more about WestlawNext and how it might fit your needs, a one-on-one discussion with an expert from our sales team is the best way to get started. Our Westlaw reps can help you understand how WestlawNext fits into your practice, how it compares to Westlaw on content, cost and other factors, and whether this is the right time to consider the new platform.

I appreciate the discussion and look forward to the continued conversation about WestlawNext.

Anne Ellis
Senior Director, Librarian Relations
Thomson Reuters, Legal

Posted by Anne Ellis in: Company Current | Products |