A major challenge of issue-based legal research is that most legal search engines are very literal. Literal search engines – such as Natural Language on westlaw.com – rely heavily on the actual words you use to search. This makes it necessary for you to write a search query that includes every possible variation of how your issue could be described.

Enter WestSearch^® on WestlawNext^®.

Descriptive Terms for Relevant Results

WestSearch – a new and highly innovative algorithm created at West – dramatically improves the quality and ranking of search results.  Check out this video to learn how the WestSearch algorithm works, and how to use it:

For additional training resources, visit: www.westelearning.com

See our entire YouTube archive at westlawinsider.com/videos

Under the Hood of WestSearch

Let’s take a look at the key components of the WestSearch algorithm:

• West Key Number System – This is the foundation of WestSearch. Because thousands of West attorney-editors have read, summarized and classified the law by topic for over 100 years, WestSearch can identify the topics of law best represented by the terms of your search and return highly relevant documents for those topics – even if the documents don’t have the terms you put into the search box.
  
• KeyCite – KeyCite maps the citation network among all federal and state cases in West’s^® National Reporter System^® (as well as over 1 million unpublished cases), federal and state statutes, and thousands of secondary source publications. WestSearch analyzes the rich connections among documents, making your results more inclusive and bringing the most relevant documents to the top of the list.
  
• West Secondary Sources – With thousands of practice guides, legal encyclopedias, and authoritative treatises, WestSearch can find primary law that is heavily discussed in each jurisdiction and detect similar phrases that apply to your concepts.

By leveraging these assets, WestSearch can identify legal issues, follow connections between documents, and even return highly relevant documents that don’t contain your exact search terms. For example, if two documents share the same Key Number and cite to the same authority, WestSearch can connect those two documents, even if they do not share the same language. This is the same process that attorneys perform on westlaw.com today – researching Key Numbers and investigating KeyCite for citing references – WestSearch just automates the process so you can find the right answers in a matter of minutes instead of hours.

When was the last time you made a New Year’s Resolution and stuck with it?

Statistics regarding resolutions are somewhat grim. According to the Opinion Corporation of Princeton:

• 62% of people make New Year’s resolutions
• 8% are successful
• 19% achieve resolutions every other year on average
• 49% have infrequent success
• 24% never succeed and have failed on every resolution every year

Maybe this year will be different for me. After a relaxing and fun New Year’s Eve making fondue with my family, we each made our own “Top 10 List” of resolutions for 2012. I split my list 50-50: half personal resolutions and half professional resolutions. Although I won’t share all of my vices with you, I can tell you a few of my promises.

On a personal note, I will continue to exercise. To force myself to do so, I already signed up for multiple obstacle racing events over the spring and summer (think boot camp and mud). I also made a commitment to my personal trainer that I won’t eat a whole box of Girl Scout cookies (at least not in one sitting), and pinky-swore to my husband that I’ll join him at least three days a week in our home gym.

On a professional note, I vowed to network more and to expand my math acumen (okay, for those that know me that one may be tough to achieve). Networking will entail setting up a few more meetings, phone calls or coffee chats (with fat free lattes of course). I hope to gain a better understanding of other business organizations and their associated strategies.

As for my math goals, I even have my fourth grader on speed dial. Maybe I could talk to our product developers and have them enhance the WestSearch functionality on WestlawNext to be able to explain the Pythagorean theorem to me? WestSearch’s advanced search technology efficiently and effectively searches billions of legal documents, identifies the most relevant information with one plain language query, and ranks the most relevant documents at the top of your list. If our developers can’t help me, this resolution might stay on my list forever. After all, there is a reason I went to law school and not nursing school!

I have to think that the small law customers who have shared their stories with us on the Small Law Lifestyles made a promise or two on New Year’s Eve. Perhaps they made commitments to practice, to develop, to enjoy their passions?

What are your New Year’s Resolutions? If they involve fewer hours in the office and more time doing what you like to do versus what you have to do, we can help. Try WestlawNext free for two weeks and this just may be the year that you stick to your resolutions.

Enter WestSearch^™ on WestlawNext^®.

Descriptive Terms for Relevant Results

WestSearch – a new and highly innovative algorithm created at West – dramatically improves the quality and ranking of search results. When you are ready to research, simply type your legal issue using simple descriptive terms and WestSearch will:

Under the Hood of WestSearch

Let’s take a look at the key components of the WestSearch algorithm:

• West Key Number System – This is the foundation of WestSearch. Because thousands of West attorney-editors have read, summarized and classified the law by topic for over 100 years, WestSearch can identify the topics of law best represented by the terms of your search and return highly relevant documents for those topics – even if the documents don’t have the terms you put into the search box.

• KeyCite – KeyCite maps the citation network among all federal and state cases in West’s^® National Reporter System^® (as well as over 1 million unpublished cases), federal and state statutes, and thousands of secondary source publications. WestSearch analyzes the rich connections among documents, making your results more inclusive and bringing the most relevant documents to the top of the list.

• West Secondary Sources – With thousands of practice guides, legal encyclopedias, and authoritative treatises, WestSearch can find primary law that is heavily discussed in each jurisdiction and detect similar phrases that apply to your concepts.

 By leveraging these assets, WestSearch can identify legal issues, follow connections between documents, and even return highly relevant documents that don’t contain your exact search terms. For example, if two documents share the same Key Number and cite to the same authority, WestSearch can connect those two documents, even if they do not share the same language. This is the same process that attorneys perform on westlaw.com today – researching Key Numbers and investigating KeyCite for citing references – WestSearch just automates the process so you can find the right answers in a matter of minutes instead of hours.

For example:

The WestSearch^™ search box lets you enter anything you’re looking for and returns highly relevant results. Also, it’s displayed at the top of the page so you don’t need to go back to the home page to start a new search.

It is a fundamental truth of my being.  It’s okay.  I own it.  In fact, I’m proud of it.  I love being a nerd, so don’t feel sorry for me. If anything, feel sorry for my wife.  You see there are many different varietals of nerds in this wide world of ours, but there seems to be a singular characteristic common to all types, something that I like to call obsessive appreciation.  Nerds are uncontrollably compelled to collect, catalogue, and curate information relevant to a particular topic.  It is important to note that this is primarily driven by a genuine love for the subject matter.  Oftentimes, this collection accumulates in a critical mass of minutia, resulting in an exuberant and detailed diatribe.  If you happen to be in the close proximity of a nerd when this happens, I would advise you to take shelter or else learn everything you never wanted to know about how the Millennium Falcon’s hyper-drive differs from the USS Enterprise’s warp core.  Like, I said feel sorry for my wife.

Legal Research happens to be among the many subjects about which I obsess.  I was always a keen legal researcher and do believe that my prior nerdy tendencies were directly responsible for my ability to ferret out elusive legal doctrine.  I could often be found in the law library with a stack of reporters under one arm and a citator under the other, hurrying from stack to carrel and back again.  Attending law school as the world-wide web exploded, I was introduced to Westlaw and was immediately hooked.  All of the information that I could ever want or need about any case was at my fingertips.  I remember one afternoon, delving deep session notes on a particular piece of legislation on Westlaw and exclaiming, “Man, this is so cool. I could do this all day.”  My study partner shook her head and stated, “You are such a nerd, if you love it so much why don’t you work for Westlaw.  Then you could talk about Boolean searching and citing references all day long and leave me to my memo… Now, help me find this case.”  A kernel of that conversation stuck with me and when I wound up in the Twin Cities, I ended up doing just that.

Working in Westlaw Account Management gave me the ability to share my nerdy appreciation of legal research and Westlaw with our customers.  When WestlawNext launched just over a year ago, I was initially skeptical.  How dare they fool with my beloved Westlaw!  Newer is not always better and I still hadn’t recovered fully from the crushing disappointment of The Phantom Menace.  But, upon release, I was floored at how well the product fit my research compulsions and the needs of our customers.  The algorithm behind WestSearch was a work of art, pure genius.  It became clear to me that I wasn’t the only nerd at Westlaw.  The level of care and attention to detail poured into the product was so evident, that it was clear that designers and engineers behind the product loved Westlaw and legal research as much as I did.  Should, perchance, our paths happen to cross, please don’t be alarmed if I suddenly and eagerly begin discussing the ways in which cross-content searching on WestlawNext saves time.

Are you a Westlaw or legal research nerd?  Stand tall, be proud and tell us about your obessions.

Note: This is not a “bridge page,” but rather, a content category in WestlawNext. As a result, your search is simple and straightforward, thanks to the no-frills WestSearch search  engine and a variety of WestlawNext filters to zero in on relevant dockets. You can even use a jurisdiction- or topic-specific advanced search template, if you prefer.

Search example

Suppose you want federal court dockets from Texas in which the Enron Corporation appeared as a party.

• Click Dockets in the All Content tab at the WestlawNext home page.
• The Dockets category page is displayed. Click advanced.
• The Advanced Search: Dockets search template is displayed.
  • Type enron in the Participant Name text box and click Advanced Search.

To narrow your result to U.S. district and bankruptcy courts in Texas, click Select Multiple Filters, then browse the federal districtcourt and bankruptcy court filters under Jurisdiction in the left column.  Select the Texas district and bankruptcy courts using the check boxes. Then click Apply Filters.

WestlawNext Research Expert Webinars are your chance to get answers to your questions. Each 30-minute live webinar includes 20 minutes of instruction followed by 10 minutes of live Q&A with the audience.

Past webinars have proven popular among power researchers, who always seem to come prepared with their own questions drawn from real-world experiences. (In case you missed any of them, you can see the answers on the WestlawNext Q&A page).

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Learn what makes WestSearch the most advanced legal search engine in the world. In this session, you’ll see how WestSearch leverages the West Key Number System, KeyCite, West secondary sources, and customer usage data to give you the best results. We’ll also discuss how WestSearch accommodates different search methods, including plain language, Terms & Connectors, Advanced Search, and Key Number searches.

Choose a date and time that works for you. (Each webinar lasts 30 minutes.)

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WestlawNext provides a lot of new features, which means there are some new tricks to learn for delivering and printing your documents. In this session, you’ll learn how to deliver documents with notes and highlighting, deliver documents from folders, find and print multiple citations, export folders, and even export to Amazon Kindle™ for unprecedented document portability.

Choose the half-hour session that best fits your schedule.

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Remember, each of these 30-minute webinars is free, so there’s no reason to wait. Register now!

Q: Is WestlawNext different from Westlaw? How do I get to the WestlawNext site?

A: WestlawNext and Westlaw.com are different. If you have a subscription to WestlawNext, you can sign on at next.westlaw.com, or access WestlawNext through links on Westlaw.com.

Q: Can you limit citing references by more than one variable, like date and type of document?

A: Yes. To do this today, first select a document type, then narrow your selection using the date filter. The ability to narrow your results using multiple filters at the same time is planned for future development.

Q: In the citing references title column, I sometimes see green quotation marks (“) by the case name. What do those mean?

A: Green quotation marks on WestlawNext indicate that the citing case directly quotes the cited case. They’re used the same way as the purple quotation marks on Westlaw.com.

Q: Can I search within a case for a particular word or phrase?

A: Yes. Currently, the easiest way to search within the text of a document for a word or phrase is to use Ctrl+F on your keyboard. Incorporating “search within” capabilities into documents on WestlawNext is planned as a part of future development.

Q: Will Westlaw be going away, leaving WestlawNext as the search tool to use?

A: Westlaw.com is a great product and will continue to be supported, with WestlawNext available as a premium product that offers a next-generation legal research experience. Only WestlawNext users have access to WestSearch™ ―  a custom-built search algorithm that leverages over 100 years of West’s editorial analysis of the law and emulates the best practices of experienced legal researchers ― and tools for increased organization and efficiency, such as folders and the ability to add notes and highlighting to documents.

Q: What was the URL for the WestlawNext site again?

A: WestlawNext subscribers can access the site at next.westlaw.com or through links on Westlaw.com.