Julie Gleason, a manager in New Product Development on the WestlawNext team, presented to a roomful of AALL attendees in a session entitled “WestSearch: The Technology Behind WestlawNext.”
“WestlawNext allows you to complete your research in less than half the time and the workflow tools integrate where you work today,” Gleason said.
But how?
“Legal search engines are very literal – they look for exactly what you put in a search box. We knew we could do better than that.”
By talking to thousands of Westlaw researchers and leveraging proprietary Westlaw technologies, like KeyCite, The West Key Number System, attorney-authored editorial enhancements, statutory indices and ResultsPlus, Thomson Reuters has trained a search engine to automatically complete several steps that the best legal researchers perform, all quickly behind the scenes, to first broaden the search across 12 core content sets, then search within this content to present better ranked results. WestSearch also looks at aggregated customer usage – printing, foldering, emailing, etc – to further correlate documents and improve the ranking of results.
We asked Legal Research Center, an independent company, to perform an efficiency study on WestlawNext. Fifty legal professionals used Westlaw and 50 received an hour of training and performed the searches using WestlawNext.
“Thanks to WestSearch, the WestlawNext users were well over 50 percent more efficient,” Gleason said.
Posted by Scott Augustin in:
Company Current | Products |
