Westlaw

Westlaw (http://www.westlaw.com) is one of two major online legal research services for lawyers and legal professionals in the United States (the other being LexisNexis). In addition it along with Lexis, Choicepoint and others engage in proprietary database services. Westlaw gives subscribers unique search technologies and tools that help them find, understand and apply the law and legal concepts in the service of their clients. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 20,000 databases of case law, state and federal statutes, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources. Most customers are attorneys or law students but other individuals can also obtain accounts. A credit card site (http://creditcard.westlaw.com) allows anyone with a credit card to retrieve primary law documents by citation.

Most legal documents on Westlaw are indexed to the West Key Number System, which is West's master classification system of U.S. law. Westlaw supports Natural Language and Boolean searches. Other significant Westlaw features include KeyCite, a citation checking service which allows to determine if cases or statutes are still good law; and a customizable tabbed interface that lets customers bring their most-used resources to the top. Other tabs organize Westlaw content around the specific work needs of litigators, in-house corporate practitioners and lawyers who specialize in any of over 150 legal topics.

Westlaw was published by West Publishing, a company whose headquarters have been in Eagan, Minnesota since 1992; West was acquired by Toronto-based Thomson Corporation in 1996. It is now called Thomson West, part of the Thomson Legal & Regulatory division of Thomson. Thomson has businesses in more than 21 countries. In recent years, several of Thomson's law-related businesses have launched Westlaw franchises, and Westlaw's international content is available at a new web address, www.westlawinternational.com. For instance, Westlaw-/-eCarswell includes the Canadian Abridgment and KeyCite Canada,and Sweet & Maxwell and independent law reports, and the Red Flag Alert.[http://www.sweetandmaxwell.co.uk/westlaw/about.htm" target="_blank" >^* In total, Westlaw is used in over 68 countries.

Because of the prominence of Westlaw within Thomson West's product offerings, many Thomson West customers use the name "Westlaw" to refer to the entire West organization. West’s chief competitor in the legal market is LexisNexis. Since West and LexisNexis are so pervasive in the legal research marketplace, some customers have jokingly imagined an organization called Wexis.

Features

KeyCite

KeyCite is a citation-checking service available on Westlaw.

The United States judiciary operates under the principle of stare decisis – a system of legal precedents – to ensure the courts deliver consistent rulings on similar legal issues, regardless of the political or social status of the parties involved. As such, legal professionals must be certain that the legal citations they use to reinforce their arguments are accurate and still “good law.” KeyCite leverages Westlaw technologies, West’s attorney-authored case law headnotes and the West Key Number System to determine and immediately alert legal professionals that case law they are reviewing has been either overturned, or may have history which deems the precedential value of the opinion invalid.

KeyCite was introduced to Westlaw in 1997 and was the first service to seriously challenge the Shepard’s citation-checking service that legal professionals relied on for generations. Shepard’s had become such a necessary part of legal research, that citation checking is still informally referred to as “Shepardizing.”

In 2004, KeyCite was determined to be the most-used citation checking service in an annual survey of law firm technology use conducted by the American Bar Association.

WestCheck is software that may be used to extract citations from a word processing document and submit them to KeyCite (or to Westlaw for retrieval of full text documents). The software consists of a standalone program and word processor add-in, either of which may be used, and there is a web site, westcheck.com, that offers the same functionality.^*

Key Number System

The West Key Number System is a master classification system of U.S. law, and is claimed to be "the only recognized legal taxonomy." The West Key Number System was created by West Publishing Company and can be described as a highly detailed index of over 110,000 legal topics and sub-topics. The index serves as the backbone for legal information published by West, which appears in the company’s print publications, and now on Westlaw.

West’s publications are pervasive in law firms, and lawyers generally consider them necessary to legal research. The West Key Number System helped to give West’s publications this stature by giving legal researchers a unique starting point from which to quickly find the most on-point statutes, court opinions or other legal information from the collection of hundreds of millions of documents of American law.

Identity Theft

In February 2005, after the ChoicePoint identity theft incidents became public, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) publicized the fact that Westlaw has a database containing a large amount of private information on practically all living Americans. Besides widely-available information such as addresses and phone numbers, Westlaw also includes Social Security numbers (SSNs), previous addresses, dates of birth, and other information lawyers use to do background checks on behalf of their clients. While there is no known case of identify theft involving Westlaw, the company responded to the controversy by announcing it had eliminated access to full SSNs for 85 percent of its clients who previously could retrieve this information, mostly lawyers and government agencies.

History

Both Westlaw and LexisNexis started in the 1970s as dial-up services with dedicated terminals. The earliest versions used acoustic couplers or key phones; then smaller terminals with internal modems (Westlaw's was known as WALT^*).

Around 1989, both started offering programs for personal computers that emulated the terminals, and when Internet access became available, an Internet address (such as westlaw.westlaw.com) became an alternative that could be selected within the "Communications Setup" option in the client program, instead of a dial-up number. West's program was known as Westmate. It was based on Borland C++ around 1997, and then changed to a program compiled on a Microsoft platform that incorporated portions of Internet Explorer. This was the first program to incorporate HTML; prior to that, Westmate had "jumps" indicated by triangles instead of "links." Shortly after that, both publishers started developing web browser interfaces, with Westlaw's being notable for the use of "web dialogs," emulating the piling of open books on a table.

Legal disputes

In the mid 1980s, Westlaw sued LexisNexis over copyright infringement (West Pub. Co. v. Mead Data Cent., Inc., 616 F. Supp. 1571 (D. Minn. 1985), aff'd, 799 F.2d 1219 (8th Cir.), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 1070 (1986)). LexisNexis's "star pagination" system, a feature which allowed users of either research system to find the printed page of a case without looking to the actual book, was found to infringe West's copyrights by the Minnesota District Court. After Lexis' appeals were turned down by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, the company entered into an agreement with West to pay them $50,000 per year to license West's pagination and text corrections. No other publisher was offered similar terms, and the terms of the agreement were kept secret until they came out in discovery in the Mathew Bender / HyperLaw v. West lawsuit.

In the mid 1990s, Alan Sugarman, who runs HyperLaw, sued West. The District Court in New York and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that West did not have copyright on the corrections it made on opinions or on the internal pagination. West appealed to the US Supreme Court, but the US Supreme Court declined to take the case.

The West Education Network (TWEN)

TWEN is Westlaw’s online courseware that is specifically tailored for law schools. It is basically an online extension of the classroom. Teachers use it to post syllabi, PowerPoints, class materials and announcements. TWEN is also used for emailing, forum posting, live chats, polling and posting/submitting assignments.

Law school professors use it for their classes, but it is also used by librarians and career services offices. Students can also create and manage their own courses for law reviews, journals and any student organization.

External links

Legal research

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