Legal Research: Easier Today than Ever
Online legal research technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past decade alone – and continues to do so today, making legal research easier than ever.
Just because research is easier doesn’t mean that it is always easy. Rather, the skill requires consistent honing – and sometimes, even with such regular practice, many researchers may find themselves at a dead end.
But, as I said, online legal research technology continues to advance today, and often in ways to help alleviate common problems experienced during the research process. Take, for example, the six recent enhancements made to Thomson Reuters Westlaw™. Each offers solutions to frequent sources of headaches and wastes of time in legal research.
The first of these is Research Recommendations, which is exactly what it sounds like: Westlaw® making recommendations about relevant documents and Key Numbers based on your research. Ever feel like you hit a dead end in your research on a specific legal issue? Maybe Westlaw® knows of something that may have escaped your search queries – or a related issue for which you hadn’t even thought to search. It can often seem that you’re looking at the same handful of cases on a particular issue, and Research Recommendations may be one way to break that cycle.
What if you’re having trouble even getting started on your research to begin with? Maybe you don’t know where to start looking on a particular issue; or maybe you do, but it involves scouring case after case to find the one that best fits your specific needs. Westlaw Answers, the second of these enhancements, may be the answer you’ve been looking for (sorry, bad pun). Westlaw Answers provides, well, answers to some common types of legal questions, and further provides jurisdiction-specific authorities on that question. What’s more, these Answers auto-populate when you’re entering your search terms, so you’ll know right away if there’s an Answer to help jumpstart your research.
Now, let’s say you’ve reached what you feel is the end of your research – you’ve exhausted your searches, and now have a folder full of relevant documents to sort through. Plus, the process of sorting through your documents is tedious; furthermore, how do you know that you haven’t missed anything? Enter Westlaw’s Folder Analysis, which analyzes your folder’s contents, identifies the issues therein, and sorts the folder by these identified issues – which is presented in an easy-on-the-eyes graphical representation. Based on this analysis, the feature may also be able to suggest additional relevant cases on each issue.
Even if your folder is sorted by issue, processing the research in your folder is still a daunting task. While you may know which issue a particular case is related to, it may not be readily apparent what the case actually says. That’s where Westlaw’s Research Report can help. This feature generates a report that summarizes the research in your folder – a report complete with a linked table of contents and all annotations. This feature also allows you to edit your notes from the summary screen, and extract your report via email, print, download, or Dropbox.
And speaking of sharing your research, another of Westlaw’s new enhancements is Shared Notes, which allows users to – as you may have guessed – share notes in a document with colleagues. Finally, Westlaw’s Snapshots enhancement provides snippets of information about legal professionals, companies, and popular names of statutes that may be related to a particular search. These snapshots link to more comprehensive information about the subject of the search, and often provide that extra bit of support to make your research go more smoothly.
While all of these enhancements have something unique to offer to help in your legal research process, the best part is that they are all already integrated into Westlaw – so you don’t have to do anything extra to take full advantage of them. Hopefully, they will serve to make your researching endeavors as painless as possible.
Learn more about the latest Westlaw enhancements, or start a two week free trial.
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