This Thursday, May 20, Boston-area legal professionals will gather for the annual Excellence in the Law event, a lively cocktail party and classy award ceremony rolled into one fun evening.

One of the night’s highlights will be “The Lawscars,” a competition that has nominees vying for such titles as “Law Professor of the Year,” “Rainmaker of the Year” and “Best Dressed Lawyer.” Other honors to be doled out include Diversity Heroes, Up & Coming Lawyers, and the Excellence in Legal Journalism Award.

Johnny and Jenny Westlaw – the stars of the WestlawNext road show videos from a couple of months ago – were invited to Boston to emcee the event and provide red-carpet coverage a la the similarly named ceremony for actors and actresses. (The event’s organizers became fans of the duo when Jenny Westlaw visited Boston in March.) While prior commitments prevented them from attending, Johnny and Jenny appreciate the invite and welcome any future invitations.

Westlaw is proud to be a sponsor of this event, and we look forward to finding out who gets the nod for each of the honors – especially the coveted “Law Firm of the Year” award.

Bostonians: For more information or to attend this event, please contact Melissa Mitchell at 617-218-8213 or melissa.mitchell@lawyersweekly.com.

Everyone else: Let us know about your event, and we may feature it in a future post! Send details to westelearning@thomsonreuters.com.



If you’ve seen WestlawNext in action, you know that it searches in an entirely new way. Rather than choosing a database first, you simply search through all of West’s core legal content and secondary sources in a single pass. The system gives you multiple ways to slice and dice the results, so you can quickly pinpoint the best resources.

OK, that’s great – but how are these supercharged search results organized? This is a question we’ve heard from many of you, so we asked Kim Ellenberg, a West reference attorney, to explain.

Reference attorneys like Kim answer questions like this every day, and they played a critical role in shaping WestlawNext in the years leading up to its launch. The feedback from customers continues daily, and reference attorneys continue to suggest enhancements to WestlawNext based on what they hear from you.

So please keep the queries coming – and know that, even if we can’t respond directly, we do make note of every comment and tweet that comes our way.

There’s still time to play our third round of What’s Next Trivia with Johnny & Jenny Westlaw for a chance at $30 in Starbucks gift cards. Here’s what to do:

• Watch  the Johnny & Jenny videos from the third week of the tour in Miami, Atlanta and Tampa. (Especially Tampa, wink wink.)
• Watch any of last week’s videos (from Houston, Denver or Dallas) and wait for the trivia question to pop up at the end (or click on the PARTICIPATE tab to skip ahead).
• Answer a single trivia question about one of the videos. Then type in your name and email address (so we can contact you if you win) and click Submit. That’s it!

One winner will be chosen at random from the entries we receive each week, so keep following and playing along as Johnny & Jenny visit the remaining cities on the tour! (For more information, see the official rules.)

It seems that a law degree may improve your odds of being elected president, since 26 of our 44 presidents have also been lawyers. Here’s the complete list of lawyer-presidents:

1. John Adams
2. Thomas Jefferson
3. James Madison
4. James Monroe
5. John Quincy Adams
6. Andrew Jackson
7. Martin Van Buren
8. John Tyler
9. James Polk
10. Millard Fillmore
11. Franklin Pierce
12. James Buchanan
13. Abraham Lincoln
14. Rutherford Hayes
15. Chester Arthur
16. Grover Cleveland
17. Benjamin Harrison
18. William McKinley
19. William Howard Taft
20. Woodrow Wilson
21. Calvin Coolidge
22. Franklin Roosevelt
23. Richard Nixon
24. Gerald Ford
25. Bill Clinton
26. Barack Obama

If you like presidential trivia, try these expert-level bonus questions. The answers are at the bottom of this post.

1. Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law in 1991. (Yep, that’s him above, on campus.)
   Who was the only president besides Obama to earn a law degree from Harvard?
2. Who was the last president without a college degree?
3. Why is Obama considered to be the 44^th president, when he’s only the 43^rd person to serve in that office?

Thanks to everyone who played during our second week of What’s Next Trivia – and congratulations to Abby W., an assistant librarian at a law firm in Minneapolis, who answered our trivia question and won the drawing for a $30 Starbucks gift card! We look forward to seeing Abby and our other Twin Cities friends at next week’s preview breakfast in Minneapolis. In the meantime, keep playing What’s Next Trivia with Johnny & Jenny Westlaw – and we’ll keep handing out those Starbucks gift cards.

How to enter and win

• Watch  the Johnny & Jenny videos from the third week of the tour (Miami, Atlanta and Tampa).
• Go to any of this week’s videos (from Houston, Denver or Dallas) and click on the PARTICIPATE tab on the bottom of the video screen.
• Answer a single trivia question about one of the videos. Then type in your name and email address (so we can contact you if you win) and click Submit. That’s it!

One winner will be chosen at random from the entries we receive each week, so keep following and playing along as Johnny & Jenny visit the remaining cities on the tour! (For more information, see the official rules.)

Answers to Bonus Questions

1. Rutherford Hayes graduated from Harvard Law School – way back in 1845.
2. Harry Truman never earned a college sheepskin, although he did study law at the University of Missouri in Kansas City for a couple of years.
3. Grover Cleveland served non-consecutive terms, so he is counted as the 22^nd and the 24^th presidents.