Today, Thomson Reuters, Legal announced it has named Sharon Sayles Belton, former mayor of the city of Minneapolis, as vice president, Community Relations and Government Affairs.
In her new role, Sayles Belton will direct government affairs activities, focusing on key issues that impact the legal businesses of Thomson Reuters as well as its customers and employees. In addition, she will lead the company’s community outreach efforts through Community Relations and sponsorships to ensure greater connectivity between individual programs/activities and the company’s mission, values and goals.
Read the full news release here.
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The launch of WestlawNext is important for all of Thomson Reuters, not just our Legal division.
The work it took to design and build the system is evidence of the entire company’s commitment to listening to customers and what they need in their workflow – and reflects the culture of innovation within the business.
But it’s also a tribute to the talent, development and expertise of our employees, as Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer talks about in this video clip:
For more information about WestlawNext, go to www.westlawnext.com.
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In front of a full room of journalists, legal industry analysts and bloggers at LegalTech New York, Thomson Reuters, Legal CEO Peter Warwick introduced WestlawNext, the business’s new legal research system.
“WestlawNext is the most significant innovation in our history in terms of the time and investment, and I hope the timing of that investment isn’t lost on any one here,” Warwick said Monday. “We created an entirely new research experience from the ground up even while we already had the most preferred legal research service in Westlaw.”
Flanked by Andy Martens, senior vice president of New Product Development for Legal, and Mike Dahn, vice president WestlawNext Product Development, Warwick praised the development and design teams that worked for five years with the vision to make legal research more human.
“We created WestlawNext to work the way our customers do… …to be more human,” Warwick said. “To that end, WestlawNext is elegant, agile, easy to use, more precise, truly intelligent and intuitive. But behind the scenes, it has remarkably complex and powerful technology.”
See a short video from the news briefing featuring comments, in order, from Warwick, Martens and Dahn:
For more information, watch this video showcasing the development and features of WestlawNext and visit www.westlawnext.com.
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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.
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Almost as soon as the technology existed for computers to talk to one another, so grew the notion of information as transient, kinetic, ubiquitious and unbound. As Stewart Brand, author, editor and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog noted at the Hacker’s Conference in 1984, “The information wants to be free.”
And today it is, with free repositories of caselaw, plus regulatory and administrative materials easily accessed through hundreds of government and commercial Web sites – including our own, FindLaw, which offers one of the Web’s largest collections of free legal information.
These sites are a great resource for professionals and personal users interested in general background on a legal matter or case. But for specialized users, and for the most critical applications, information needs to be more than free.
It needs to be relevant, current, contextual, organized and authoritative – requiring rigor, process and, for West, a human hand guided by unique expertise and insight.
We asked Bob Berring, legal research guru and Walter Perry Johnson Professor of Law at the University of Califonia, Berkeley, for his thoughts on the matter:
Editor’s note (Oct. 30, 2009): West has published legal research titles authored by Bob Berring. He was a consultant and speaker at law librarian events for West until 2007.
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Today kicked off the first day of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) 2009 Annual Meeting. West and many of the Thomson Reuters, Legal businesses are present at the event this year, which is being held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, in Washington, D.C., through Wed. July 29.
Law librarians from across the United States, and more than 50 international attendees, come to the AALL Annual Meeting to learn about the new technologies that will help them add value to their customers’ work, learn abut industry trends and best practices, and to network with vendors and with each other. This year, as the entire legal industry has braced against the pressures of the economic downturn, “doing more with less” is a common topic of conversation.
The theme at the West booth focuses on the unique and admirable attributes that law librarians eminate — such as integrity, energy and resilience. These themes tie into a new campaign that West is launching at the show to salute the work of law librarians everywhere.
We talked about that campaign – and the importance of AALL – with Anne Ellis, senior director in Librarian Relations at West in this video interview:
AALL attendees can also visit booths for Westlaw Business, Thomson Innovation/IP Solutions, International Sales & Marketing, Westlaw CourtExpress and the Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting business.
Over the next few days here on Legal Current, we’ll be sharing some of the news from the meeting about the sessions, events and attendees.
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Around the office, Thomson Reuters, Legal President and CEO Peter Warwick has challenged all of us to examine our work more deeply – to focus on our customers’ customers – and to see our efforts in the context of equal justice, the rule of law and human rights.
So we were proud to hear that Peter was being recognized by PAIR Project for his generosity and service to their humanitarian mission with their Outstanding Business Leader award. The ceremony was held last night in Boston as part of PAIR’s annual awards gala.
PAIR Project helps people escaping persecution in their home countries who are seeking asylum in the United States, primarily by offering pro bono legal services.
In the organization’s announcement, Sarah Ignatius, PAIR Project executive director, said: “Peter’s support and leadership from the corporate community has been tremendously powerful for PAIR. He’s an inspiring leader in many ways, and we’re extremely grateful that he’s stepped forward as an influential leader who’s passionate about human rights to help generate support for PAIR Project and its mission.”
Among his many roles, Peter sits on the board of trustees for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which recently launched TrustLaw, a new initiative that will provide information, resources, legal news and support materials for global pro bono work. He also provides executive sponsorship for Thomson Reuters and West initiatives around diversity and pro bono support, notably through our “Do Justice” program, which provides advocacy and resources to support law firm pro bono activities.
Peter, who was born in the UK and has worked both in Europe and Asia Pacific, became a United States citizen in 2006. Peter was out of the country and not able to attend the ceremony, and accepted the award by video:
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Thomson Reuters, Legal, President & CEO Peter Warwick offered his perspective on the company’s approach to the current economic reality in a panel discussion, “Adapting and Thriving in a Challenging Economy”, at the Minnesota Venture & Finance Conference.
The launch of WestlawNext brings a significant advancement in the way professional legal research is done.
A discussion about online privacy and “The End of Forgetting,” with law professor Jeffrey Rosen.
