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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Editor’s note: This post begin a series of interviews with several West employees about the value of their work to the legal system.
Like a baseball manager who once played the game, West Reference Attorneys are coach and colleague to lawyers and law librarians looking for help with legal research.
We recently had the chance to talk about the job and its responsibilities with Reference Attorneys Andy O’Meara and Scott Hamel.
O’Meara says the moment he picks up the phone with customers, the focus is on assessing the caller’s situation, and then listening.
“I’ve been on the other side, I worked in a firm for awhile and I remember the partner’s footsteps coming down the hall when they needed me to look up information on something critical to a case,” O’Meara said. “Reference attorneys are really helpful for our customers because they can call in and talk to a licensed attorney – and someone who’s very experienced in legal research – about their legal issue.”
“The help we provide is invaluable and I think the customers appreciate our service because we’re simply there to help if they’re unable to find what they’re looking for,” said Hamel, who litigated for more than 20 years before coming to West. “They can call and discuss with us and we can lead them to the right cases.”
Every West Reference Attorney is a bar-admitted attorney with a deep understanding of Westlaw features, functionality, databases and services. They help refine search queries, find specific laws and documents and answer questions regarding the process of legal research on Westlaw.
“The value we provide to customers is showing them where to find the answer, explaining the content that’s available to them for analysis and also brainstorming with the caller to decide what legal issue it is that they’re trying to research and how best to approach their research problem,” added O’Meara.
In this video clip, O’Meara talks about the skills a reference attorney needs to have and Hamel explains why every call from a customer is “like a game show” for him:
As part of a Westlaw subscription, users can contact a West Reference Attorney anytime, at 1-800-REF-ATTY (1-800-733-2889) or by email.
More information is available on the West Web site.
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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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In July, I had a chance to meet Bob Berring, professor at Berkeley Law. I arranged our meeting to include him in a video that we debuted at the 2009 American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. The video is titled “Salute to Law Librarians” and features Berring, West author and law professor Arthur Miller and law librarian consultant Linda Will.
As many of you know, law librarianship is at the heart of Berring’s impressive career. He’s a teacher, author and tremendous resource and leader in his profession.
Before I flew out to San Francisco to meet Berring, I went on Twitter to see if anyone who follows the @westlaw account that I manage had any burning questions for him. This post features Berring’s answer, on video, to a question from @montserratlj who asked about the skills a legal reference librarian needs to have:
Berring’s response includes this quote, that “great reference librarians are born, not made”:
@montserratlj also asked us to find out if Berring has any plans to retire anytime soon, and what other careers he could have pursued:
On the retirement talk, Berring said that it’s not going to happen anytime soon. He’s a full-time professor and says “there’s no better gig than that. I will teach until they drag me out with a cane,” Berring joked. “The great thing about tenure is you can get old and stupid and obnoxious and all that happens is fewer people take your classes!” Though, he added, “there’s no better high” than getting a class engaged in learning about the law.
As for alternate careers Berring said, growing up in Ohio, his aspirations were to be a high school teacher in Cleveland. But “one little corner of me wanted to be President of the United States.”
We’ll share more from our interview with Bob Berring in some upcoming posts here on Legal Current.
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Employees at Thomson Reuters in Eagan took part in the second-annual Got Talent? Competition in support of the “Because We Care” Employee Giving Campaign.
Employees showcased their talents for the chance to have $5,000, $3,000 or $1,000 donated to the charity of their choice. The field of 12 acts was narrowed down to five finalists whose performances were judged by nearly 600 employees to determine a winner.
Finishing in third place was Pete Mohs, principal publishing specialist, who wowed the crowd with an acoustic guitar performance. A $1,000 check will be donated in his name, from the company, to VH1’s Save the Music Foundation.
Our second-place finisher was Aishwarya Sundar, software engineer, who braved the stage to perform dances of India. A check for $3,000 will be donated in her name to GiveIndia.
And our first-place finisher was Sue Denkinger, senior director, Customer Operations, who secured a $5,000 donation in her name to The Arc. Sue sang a medley of Hank Williams songs while playing the guitar. Check out a video replay of Sue’s performance here.
Along with the company match, this year’s Eagan-campus Employee Giving Campaign raised almost $2.2M for nonprofit organizations around the world.
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Whether you’re researching the patent on safety edging on skateboards or protecting your company’s legacy products, take a moment to learn a bit more about best practices in patent research and the new combined offering of Westlaw Patents + Thomson Innovation in the U.S. market.
These Westlaw Patents + Thomson Innovation videos take a lighter approach to discussing patents research.
Plus, they’re entertaining.
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David Brown, president of Thomson Reuters IP Solutions, took a few moments out on his recent trip to Beijing to share his thoughts on global growth in the patent and trademark industry.
In this podcast, he discusses how law firms are capitalizing on these growth opportunities, especially in China and Korea, to develop new clients and retain market share, and how Thomson Reuters is supporting their patent research needs through the new combined offering of Westlaw Patents + Thomson Innovation.
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Noted professor, attorney and West author Arthur Miller was the featured speaker at a luncheon Monday at the 2009 AALL Annual Meeting.
In his remarks, Miller stressed some of the key changes in the practice of law and the judiciary in the last half-century.
“Not only have we gone to a pretrial-centered system but we have a pathology of early determination,” Miller told the law librarians at the West-sponsored luncheon.
“One of the great American values historically embedded in our civil dispute resolution system has been access - citizen access. The right to go to court, and historically the right to a day in court and historically the right to have a day in court before a jury. That has been replaced by efficiency, economy and early disposition. We are morphing more and more into a process that will look like an administrative system not a judicial system,” said Miller.
He also discussed the foundations of legal research and predicted some new kinds of research developing in the years ahead. One, related to the need to remain current with legislative and administrative developments. The other, related to how other nations are taking up some elements of the American legal system, as this video clip shows:
Arthur Miller is a professor at NYU Law and practices at Milberg LLP in Manhattan.
The treatise Wright & Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure tops the list of Miller’s writings published by West.
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Visualization and patent mapping are important tools that companies are using to evaluate the strategic strength of their patent portfolios and identify areas for growth and innovation.
Bill Chambers, vice president of North American Sales for Thomson Reuters IP Solutions, spoke about patent visualization – among several IP-related topics – at an AALL vendor panel on Sunday. He recaps some of the key points here:
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Monday evening at AALL, West recognized law librarians at a tribute event that also served as the launch of a nation-wide campaign to salute law librarians and the critical role they play in managing knowledge and information on behalf of the organizations they represent.
This video was shown at the event. It features Arthur Miller, professor, New York University Law School; Bob Berring, professor, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law; Linda Will, law librarian consultant; and Peter Warwick, president and CEO of Thomson Reuters, Legal:
The campaign will include advertisements placed in national law magazines, newsletters and Web sites frequented by law librarians, and a publicity effort to recognize innovative law librarians who represent the best of what it means to pursue a career as a law librarian.
“The work of law librarians can sometimes go unrecognized,” said Anne Ellis, West’s senior director of Librarian Relations. “But the reality is that law librarians are more critical than ever in mining and managing all of the knowledge that the legal profession requires to successfully prosecute, defend or litigate their legal matters.”
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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.
Andrew F. Popper, a professor at American University, Washington College of Law, talks about his award-winning novel “Rediscovering Lone Pine.”
