The Evolution Of Online Legal Research Tools

Technology columnist Jeff Bennion checks out Cheetah, the new online legal research tool by Wolters Kluwer.

I remember when I started my legal career a little over ten years ago and we had two choices for document databases: Concordance or Summation. Fast forward a few years, and there have been so many developments that those programs are no longer dominant. Part of this is because we as a society have become more demanding of our software. We want intuitive designs, we want to find what we want in fewer clicks, and we want more functionality. Apps on our phones are updated at least every couple of months, and web-based apps undergo constant revisions. And because it’s a buyer’s market for software services, if we don’t like the features or price of one tool, we can quickly move on to the next one.

Although there is an oligarchy of legal research tools, these market principles are creeping into that arena as well. Some of you might have noticed a cheetah walking across your screen on Above the Law over the last couple of weeks. It’s an ad for a new online legal research tool by Wolters Kluwer, aptly named “Cheetah.” Since I am also a litigator when I am not writing about legal technology, I decided to check it out and report.

What’s On There

Cheetah consists primarily of law treatises and practice guides for three practice areas: (1) securities and corporate, (2) antitrust and competition, and (3) litigation:

Each of these three areas has a dashboard that groups related content together. For example, here’s what we have for the Litigation tab:

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From there, you have access to the WK secondary source library, such as Thomas Mauet’s Trial Techniques book or Edward Imwinkleried’s treatise on evidence (affiliate links), as well as other practice guides. Each of the three dashboards has a link to a smart chart, which opens in a pop-up window and gives you a list of categories in that practice area. You click to drill down to specific subcategories and then are taken to a table that has a short summary of that topic, a list of key primary law (with links that open up in LoisLaw), and a link to the treatises that discuss that topic more fully.

Organizing What You’ve Found

The interface is pretty clean and easy to navigate, but additional organizational tools are a big help to pick up research trails and collect your notes into piles for use in motions later. When working with sources, you have the option to highlight and annotate the text and add documents to worklists. For example, say I’m working on the Jones insurance bad faith case and the Smith wrongful termination/harassment case. I can create a worklist for Bad Faith with all of my research for that topic and a worklist for Smith with all of my research on the two topics in that case. Then, when I am drafting my motions for summary judgment, I open up my saved worklists and pull out those saved documents. Within the saved worklists, I can create tags for each document. So, in the Smith case, I could create a tag for wrongful term and one for harassment:

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I can also highlight documents and review all of my highlights by name of document or by date. The search function is a natural search tool like Google or Amazon, and you can then apply filters to drill down to more relevant content. For example, if I’m looking for information related to deposing corporate representatives, I can run that search and filter by jurisdiction, practice area (tips for deposing corporate reps in products cases or corporate reps in securities cases), and other filters:

All material can be downloaded as PDFs. I logged in from my phone to see if the content was mobile-optimized and it looked pretty good and was easy to navigate.

Cheetah also has a newsletter and news tracking service for delivering daily news in your practice area to you based on your preferences.

So, here’s the product highlight page with an introductory video. Check it out and see if it works for you.


Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. Although he serves on the Executive Committee for the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section, the thoughts and opinions in this column are his own and are not made on behalf of the State Bar of California. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

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