Are You Sure You’re Relying on the Most Accurate Law?
Conducting legal research without a citator service is incredibly time consuming. To determine the validity of the points of law in a case you would have to read all the cases that cite to it, all the cases that cite to those cases, and so on.
That’s why litigation attorneys have been relying on citators, such as KeyCite on Westlaw, to find relevant cases and secondary sources quickly and to see warnings about the validity of points of law stated in a case. But, even the most comprehensive citators were relying largely on explicit citations, meaning they required a higher court to explicitly cite to a lower court opinion when changing the law, for that lower court opinion to get an overruled red warning.
This limitation in citator capability exposes risk as many attorneys mistakenly think that no red symbol means that a case is certified as good law for all its points of law. To be completely confident you are citing accurate law, it takes a laborious effort to manually validate each case you want to cite in a motion or brief that lacks a symbol.
But, Thomson Reuters knew there had to be a better way to caution attorneys of implicitly overruled law so they didn’t have to spend time doing this on their own. That’s when Thomson Reuters research scientists and attorneys joined forces to conduct expansive machine learning experiments to produce something better.
However, after reviewing 13,000 citations to about 1,800 red-flag cases, they found that putting warnings on all cases in a citation network wouldn’t have been an accurate approach because:
1) There are many valid reasons a case will cite to a red-flag case, these include:
- Citing to a point of law in the case that is still valid
- Distinguishing a fact pattern from the cited case
- Explaining historical context
2) Sometimes there are cases that discuss the same or very similar points of law that are not connected by citation. If you just relied solely on cases within the citation network, cases outside that network which should have the warning would be missed.
That’s why, attorneys and research scientists at Thomson Reuters worked through countless experiments with machine learning models to train the system to recognize cases that were likely to have points of law that were no longer valid, but ignore cases that discussed the same points of law but were still valid.
The result is a new class of citator, KeyCite® Overruling Risk, with is only available in Thomson Reuters Westlaw EdgeTM. It provides warnings on tens of thousands of cases across state and federal jurisdictions that state law is no longer valid in the jurisdiction. This is something that standard citators don’t catch.
“I’ve heard horror stories about associates who have not been rigorous about making sure all the citations within a case are still good law,” says Ryan Matthew Lawrence, an associate with Anthony Ostlund Baer and Louwagie, a Minneapolis litigation firm. “KeyCite Overruling Risk gives me confidence in my work; I know it’s thorough and complete.
“If I didn’t have KeyCite, I would need to review each citation within a case to ensure each of them is still good law, which is incredibly time consuming. Now, with the new KeyCite feature, I can know immediately whether there’s a risk, and investigate if that’s the case. Now, when I’m pressed for time and can’t review every citation within every case, KeyCite Overruling Risk gives me confidence because I know I’m citing good law.”
KeyCite Overruling Risk is an entirely new class of citator which cannot be found anywhere else. To fully understand the power of this new citator and see it in action, sign up today for a 15-minute demo of Westlaw Edge. You will quickly realize how much time you can save in your research while also increasing your confidence in your results.
Request your 15-minute demo today.
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