When conducting legal research, you don’t always have the time you would like to ensure it is as thorough and accurate as possible. Whether you need quick answers for a client, or have minimal time to submit your brief, you need the best solution in order to be as effective and efficient as possible.
When resources are limited, you turn to legal research technology. But how can you be sure that you can trust the quality and reliability of your legal research technology? It depends upon the quality of the people and processes behind it.
There’s more than artificial to our intelligence
Artificial intelligence and automation enable processing and analytical capabilities that make the research technology on Westlaw more powerful than ever before. But it’s the combination of that powerful technology along with humans who have deep legal expertise that create the best legal research service.
Behind Thomson Reuters Westlaw is a team of more than 500 bar-admitted attorneys with legal expertise to ensure you can complete your research quickly while remaining confident in its accuracy. For over 100 years, Westlaw attorney-editors have been classifying and connecting the law and adding annotations that deliver unparalleled legal information to our customers. When Westlaw selects legal experts to become attorney-editors, we seek qualities such as a solid legal education and bar admission, extreme attention to detail, and passion for the law and advancing the legal industry.
Efficiency — without sacrificing accuracy
Westlaw attorney-editors understand that legal research must be thorough, but also efficient. They keep this top of mind when creating editorial enhancements that make it easier for you to find and identify materials that are relevant to your specific issue. For example:
- Headnotes: Attorney-editors analyze cases to craft Headnotes for each major, individual point of law within an opinion. Not only do they bring the main legal concepts to the top of the case, they also summarize each issue’s facts, legal principles, and reasonings, with how these elements apply to the court’s holdings. Attorney-editors focus on helping you quickly comprehend the case’s relevance to your specific issue so that you’ll know which cases are worth considering further and which ones can be ruled out — saving you time.
- Statutes Accuracy: As session laws are passed, attorney-editors work diligently to ensure that you are seeing the most current and accurate version of a statute. Westlaw attorney-editors are experts in their given jurisdictions. They have relationships in place within their jurisdictions to know the state’s individual publishing rules. If a new session law has created a conflict between statute sections, attorney-editors leverage these relationships and their jurisdictional knowledge in order to publish the accurate version. When the law is rapidly changing — even when session laws cause multiple statutes to conflict with one another — you can quickly find the law you need on Westlaw and feel confident in its accuracy.
See the whole picture in one place
When you’re researching a particular area of the law, you want assurance that you understand the full picture. There’s the basic text of the law — and then there’s the history, application, and analysis surrounding it. Without an expert team behind your legal research technology classifying, summarizing, and connecting content together, you are left to do extra analysis and searching on your own. Westlaw attorney-editors help prevent this by making the full picture available in as few steps as possible.
Read the full article for more on the expertise behind your legal research technology — including how Notes of Decisions and the West Key Number System can help you research more efficiently.
BONUS: Check out these related articles for more insights from the experts:
- What does artificial intelligence mean for legal research?
- ‘Must See’ Legal Technology to Deliver Better Answers Faster
- Don’t Reinvent the Wheel with Your Legal Research
Follow Thomson Reuters Westlaw for the latest updates:
Mary Schlaphoff is a content writer for Thomson Reuters Westlaw specializing in thought leadership and branding intelligence. Prior to joining Thomson Reuters in 2016, Mary provided marketing research, strategy, and writing services to large and small clients in industries including technology, healthcare, and financial services. She holds a B.A. in political science from Coe College and an MBA from the University of Washington.