Behind The Technology: See Why Attorneys Are Saying Quick Check From Westlaw Edge Can Change The Outcome Of A Case

Recently, ATL spoke with Carol Jo Lechtenberg, Sr. Director, Westlaw Product Management about the release of Westlaw Edge Quick Check, an AI-based work product review and analysis tool available to all Westlaw Edge users. Westlaw Edge Quick Check allows attorneys to quickly and securely review motions and briefs to instill full confidence in the results of their research.

Stephanie Wilkins: What customer problems was Quick Check designed to solve?

Carol Jo Lechtenberg: At Thomson Reuters, we are constantly talking to customers to get a better understanding of their pain points and how we might be able to use AI and innovative technology to solve some of those issues.  One thing we heard repeatedly from attorneys and legal research professionals was that it’s hard to know when they’re “done” researching and they’re never really sure if they’ve found everything there was to find.  

We also learned that every legal researcher has their own methodology.  No two researchers, let alone, legal research sessions are alike. And no one has time to employ every single, possible legal research method. Time and resources are always at a premium for attorneys and often knowing when they’re done is a matter of the clock telling them they’re done because they are frankly, just out of time.

Armed with that knowledge and my team’s own experiences of conducting legal research, since we are all attorneys ourselves, we believed there was a way to use AI and machine learning to find resources that attorneys and legal research professionals might miss using traditional research methods.  With Quick Check, we employ all the research methods that expert legal researchers do, but we also have the ability to go beyond traditional methods to find highly relevant resources for the legal issues presented in the attorney’s brief or memo.

We also knew that because time is at such a premium for attorneys, we needed to make Quick Check quick and efficient to use.  Thus, we built in several efficiencies such as:

• Organizing recommendations by document headings
• Providing case outcomes, related cases cited in the document for context and relevant snippets of text
• Providing recommendation tags and previous user interaction icons and filtering so attorneys can quickly determine the relevance of recommendations for their particular issues

Stephanie Wilkins: What makes Quick Check unique among the landscape of document analysis tools?

Carol Jo Lechtenberg: Quick Check has many key advantages among the landscape of document analysis tools.  First, the Quick Check algorithms leverage proprietary assets from Thomson Reuters, such as the Key Number System and KeyCite, so Quick Check can quickly and easily find highly relevant resources for the legal researcher.

Quick Check is also integrated into Westlaw Edge, which provides many benefits to the user.  First, since it’s a part of the Westlaw Edge subscription, there is no additional cost beyond the subscription to use it.  Second, it provides easy access from the Quick Check report to explore new cases and concepts within Westlaw Edge and use exclusive functionality, such as the KeyCite Overruling Risk warning, which notifies researchers when a case has been implicitly overruled by another.  And since researchers will be conducting most, if not all, of their initial legal research on Westlaw Edge, the ability to filter already viewed research in the Quick Check report is highly beneficial and efficient. When attorneys have already done hours of research on a brief in Westlaw Edge, the ability for them to either remove or focus in on what  they’ve already considered with a single click is a huge timesaver!

And finally, Quick Check provides an extensive amount of context while asking nothing of the researcher.  All the researcher needs to do is upload the brief or memo and Quick Check does the rest. Quick Check organizes a reasonable number of highly relevant recommendations by document headings, so it is very easy for the research to focus on what’s most important to them and ignore what’s not.  The researcher will not be overwhelmed with thousands of unorganized cases to wade through. Quick Check also provides case outcomes, and not for the case as a whole, but for the specific issue for which the recommendation is provided. This is because our customers told us that it’s incredibly important to have cases that are on-point for the law and the facts, but if the court didn’t hold favorably for their client, they don’t want to cite that case.  Case outcomes help them make that determination quickly. And Quick Check provides relevant snippet text, so the researcher can quickly determine relevancy of the recommendation. The beauty of these snippets is that relevant portions are generated solely based on the analysis of the uploaded document. No search query or additional input by the legal researcher required.

Stephanie Wilkins: Can you share how the AI is working behind the scenes to go beyond traditional research methods? 

Carol Jo Lechtenberg: Let me start by saying, it is never our objective to replace attorneys.  Rather, our goal is always to make legal research faster and more effective, so attorneys can focus on the things that only attorneys and humans can do.  

The key to any good AI is having 3 main components: domain expertise, AI expertise and good data.  At Thomson Reuters, we’re fortunate to have all three — attorneys with years of legal research and writing expertise, research scientists with extensive expertise in AI and machine learning, and expansive, high-quality data.

The process begins by analyzing the document that is uploaded into Quick Check.  That includes segmenting the document, extracting relevant language and citations from each segment and then using that relevant language and those citation relationships to expand the analysis with related terminology, topics and citations.  There are many algorithms built into Quick Check, each with a unique purpose, but aimed at the common goal of providing highly relevant recommendations, not previously cited in the document.

AI and machine learning, by its very nature, has the ability to find resources in ways we understand, but also in ways that we do not.  The machine is trained by telling it the data it can use to determine recommendations and the resources it can use to figure them out. On the flip side, it is told what is a good recommendation and what is a bad recommendation.  Over time, and tens of thousands of instances of good recommendations and bad recommendations, the machine learns what is good and bad and can find those recommendations on its own.

And since the human process is very linear — run a search, click into a case, click on a key number, click into another case, go back, rinse, and repeat — it is far more time-consuming than what Quick Check can do by running all these processes in parallel.  So not only does Quick Check provide resources that an attorney might miss with traditional research, it will find them in far less time.

Stephanie Wilkins: Harnessing innovative legal tech is one avenue attorneys are taking to gain an edge. How does Quick Check help with that? 

Carol Jo Lechtenberg: Quick Check is one of the most innovative legal technology capabilities on the market today.  Firms are always trying to figure out the best, most efficient ways to stay on top of their game.  As I mentioned earlier, time and resources are always at a premium, so if they can use an AI capability like Quick Check, in which pieces of the legal research process are automated for them, they gain the advantage of being able to spend more time on the parts of their job that only a human can do.  Plus, Quick Check goes above and beyond what attorneys can do with traditional research, so they have the added advantage and confidence that they haven’t missed important resources and arguments for their clients.

Stephanie Wilkins: You’ve obviously done a lot of customer research throughout the development of this. What feedback did you hear most often, and were you able to incorporate it into development?

Carol Jo Lechtenberg: Not to sound like a broken record, but what we heard most often was that attorneys weren’t always sure when they were done researching. They often had the fear that they were missing something, and they didn’t want just another long list of search results to sort through. Whatever capability we built needed to be quick and efficient for them to use.  We were able to address all these issues with Quick Check by providing recommendations that the attorney may have missed in previous research. And if the recommendations are resources that the attorney previously saw during their research, we quickly and easily point it out with the previous user interaction icons. We also make sure that the recommendations in Quick Check are highly relevant and contain a significant amount of context so the attorney can immediately determine whether a recommendation will be helpful to them.  Quick Check allows attorneys to do just that — a quick check of their work or that of their opponents.

Stephanie Wilkins: It was recently announced that Thomson Reuters is partnering with Crowell & Moring to co-develop the future of Quick Check. How important is it to align with customers for development?

Carol Jo Lechtenberg: Aligning with customers for product development is critical for the delivery of greatness.  We could design many things based on what is doable or “cool,” but if it doesn’t have true usefulness or value for our customers, there is no point.  Working with our customers, who are in the trenches every single day, feeling the pain that comes with the tools they’re currently using or how they deal with their clients is critical for us knowing the right things on which to focus.  Once we have a good sense of the pain points and what might be helpful to alleviate the pain, co-development with customers is incredibly important because they are the people who will actually use the product. It is very easy for us to design a product, where the location of every link and button makes perfect sense to us, but again — if it isn’t intuitive for our customers, there’s no point in designing it.  By aligning with our customers, we have first-person feedback about what works, what doesn’t and WHY. It is that dialogue that gets us to a point where the capabilities we create are not only beautiful and revolutionary, but incredibly useful too.

Learn more about Quick Check 

You can also upload your brief with a free trial of Quick Check on Westlaw Edge.