Digital Legal Research Goes Human Today

• 01 Feb 2010

Some time ago, legal research went digital. Today, it goes human. Introducing the next generation in legal research: WestlawNext™ .

WestlawNext delivers the power, precision and insight that attorneys in the U.S. need in a legal research system, with an elegantly simple and easy-to-use interface that helps quickly uncover all the documents that are relevant to a legal matter. It also delivers powerful new tools to help attorneys and legal researchers analyze, organize and share legal information more efficiently, significantly increasing user productivity.

We've leveraged a 140-year legacy of analyzing and organizing legal information with the latest in search technology to set a new standard for legal research tools. WestlawNext's  combination of authority and insight, driven by technology and innovation, now provides our U.S. Westlaw customers with the broadest range of sophisticated legal research tools in the industry including:

Smarter, Swifter Search

Using artificial intelligence and data mining, WestlawNext learns associations between queries and topics across all of its users. This process improves the ranking of search results and delivers higher quality information - better results faster - to every user.

Every search leverages Westlaw's editorial analysis, Key Number taxonomy, and state-of-the-art search technologies to bring users more inclusive, more relevant results, so a user can be confident that they haven't missed anything. Westlaw editors annotate documents in ways that help both the human reader and the search system.

Inviting and Intuitive Design

WestlawNext sports a streamlined, easy-to-navigate look that is designed to complement the way a legal professional thinks and works. The new design makes it easy to view content sources and quickly find what users need from your favorite sources. Users don't have to pick a database to search; rather, they can simply type any word or phrase into one search box.

Based on a keen understanding about the interaction between our customers and the research interface, WestlawNext incorporates an intuitive design that anticipates the way a customer searches for information and organizes that information.

What You Need, Where and When You Need It

WestlawNext allows users to tag and assign information as they go, so when their research is complete, it's already organized. Users can insert key documents and text snippets in dedicated folders by issue, client or topic, keeping pertinent and related information in one place for quick access later. With a user's folders all in one place, an attorney or legal librarian can quickly switch between matters or return to a previous search days, weeks or months later. 

WestlawNext also allows users to search 12 months of My Research History, filtering research by any time period, client ID or topic, eliminating the need to re-do a search, even those a user didn't put in a research folder. To complement this, WestlawNext lets users add their own personal notes on a particular case for future reference, highlight key passages online, and copy and paste with Bluebook citation.