Editor’s note: Guest blogger Bob Berring, a professor at Berkeley Law, is also a West author specializing in legal research. He also has been a consultant and speaker at events hosted by West.
Last semester, Dan Dabney, senior director in Classification for West, came to our Advanced Legal Research class to speak. He asked if Mike Dahn, vice president of WestlawNext product development, could come and show me a prototype of WestlawNext.
Mike not only showed it to me, he made a proposal. West had been running beta tests with a wide range of lawyers in firms big and small, but they thought that our Advanced Legal Research students at Berkeley, having just spent months thinking about legal information, and our Reference Librarians, who live in the world of research each day, would be an ideal group to run the new system through its paces.
Was it easy to use? Did it return the right results? How did it compare with the existing version of Westlaw? We agreed to coordinate a group of students and librarians to do just that.
Can I generalize about what I saw in the new system?
The new version of Westlaw is designed for the legal researchers of 2010. It is just right for students and librarians who are part of the Google generation. I see it as a crucial break with the old form of thinking about the research process.
Instead of a busy opening screen, replete with choices, it is a clean search box. It allows for unstructured searching and easy entry. The information designer’s fatal error of adding more and more bells and whistles in an attempt to enhance searching power has been avoided. This system is more intuitive. It works with the researcher. Moving away from the old paper-based models of approaching legal research has been hard and slow. We have moved in small increments. This is a major leap, bringing the legal research process more in line with the rest of the information revolution. Features like folders for saved work and documents are much more straight-forward. Filtering your information by type of document is simple.
The search system appears to work well. Whether searching in a narrow niche area or looking more broadly, the system responds. Combining ease of use with substantive firepower is a heady blend.
I have mulled over how much WestlawNext will change how our students work, how lawyers function. While there are still mornings when I wax nostalgic about finding things the old fashioned way, I know that intuitive, clean, powerful systems are the future of research.
It was fun to play with one in beta.
Bob Berring
University of California-Berkeley Law
Posted by Bob Berring in:
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