Westlaw
Encyclopedia
Westlaw is one of the primary online legal research services
for lawyers and legal professionals in the United States
and is a part of West
. In addition, it provides proprietary database
services. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 40,000 databases of case law
, state and federal statute
s, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources.
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 customers to determine whether 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 originated by West Publishing, a company whose headquarters have been in Eagan, Minnesota
since 1992; West was acquired by Thomson Corporation
in 1996. Several of Thomson's law-related businesses outside the United States have their own Westlaw sites, and Westlaw's international content is available at www.westlawinternational.com. For instance, Westlaw Canada from Carswell includes the Canadian Abridgment and KeyCite Canada, and Westlaw UK provides information from Sweet & Maxwell
and independent law reports, case analysis and case status icons. More recently, Westlaw China was introduced, with laws and regulations, cases, digests, and status icons (similar to KeyCite flags), for the law of the People's Republic of China
. In total, Westlaw is used in over 68 countries.
West’s chief competitor in the legal information retrieval market is LexisNexis
.
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.
-checking service available on Westlaw.
Verification of citations is necessary, because lawyers must determine whether a case has been reversed, overruled, or modified by a subsequent case before citing it in court. 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 Citations
, on which legal professionals relied 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
.
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.
West also provides BriefTools, which replaces West CiteLink, and provides citation checking and file retrieval services within a word processing document. Another version only inserts Westlaw links into documents.
West CiteAdvisor formats citations and creates a table of authorities. Like WestCheck, it is available online at http://citeadvisor.westlaw.com, or as software for a word processor.
Westlaw CourtExpress, http://courtexpress.westlaw.com, allows searching of court docket information.
Westlaw Watch, http://watch.westlaw.com, allows users to manage periodic monitoring of news and other databases for topics of interest.
Westlaw WebPlus on lawschool.westlaw.com provides a web search engine with a focus on legal information sites.
The Westlaw Litigator website, http://litigator.westlaw.com, provides access to legal calendaring and other litigation related applications.
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.
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 number
s (SSNs), previous addresses, dates of birth, and other information lawyers use to do background check
s on behalf of their clients. While there is no known case of identity 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.
s or key phones; then smaller terminals with internal modems. Westlaw's terminal was known as WALT, for West Automatic Law Terminal.
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. Westmate was discontinued on June 30, 2007.
. 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 United States District Court for the District of Minnesota
. 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.
s. It is basically an online extension of the classroom. Teachers use it to post syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, class materials and announcements. TWEN is also used for emailing, forum posting, live chats, polling and posting/submitting assignments. (In terms of this range of functionality, TWEN is similar to other educational systems such as Blackboard, marketed by Blackboard Inc.
).
Law school professors occasionally use it for their classes, and 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.
Computer-assisted legal research
Computer-assisted legal research or computer-based legal research is a mode of legal research that uses databases of court opinions, statutes, court documents, and secondary material. Electronic databases make large bodies of case law easily available...
for lawyers and legal professionals in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and is a part of West
West (publisher)
West publishes legal, business, and regulatory information in print, and on electronic services such as Westlaw. Since the late 19th century, West has been one of the most prominent publishers of legal materials in the United States...
. In addition, it provides proprietary database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
services. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 40,000 databases of case law
Case law
In law, case law is the set of reported judicial decisions of selected appellate courts and other courts of first instance which make new interpretations of the law and, therefore, can be cited as precedents in a process known as stare decisis...
, state and federal statute
Statute
A statute is a formal written enactment of a legislative authority that governs a state, city, or county. Typically, statutes command or prohibit something, or declare policy. The word is often used to distinguish law made by legislative bodies from case law, decided by courts, and regulations...
s, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources.
Most legal documents on Westlaw are indexed to the West Key Number System
West American Digest System
The West American Digest System is a system of identifying points of law from reported cases and organizing them by topic and key number. The system was developed by West Publishing to organize the entire body of American law...
, which is West's master classification system of U.S. law. Westlaw supports natural language
Natural language processing
Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....
and Boolean searches. Other significant Westlaw features include KeyCite, a citation checking service, which allows customers to determine whether 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 originated by West Publishing, a company whose headquarters have been in Eagan, Minnesota
Eagan, Minnesota
Eagan is a city south of Saint Paul in Dakota County in the U.S. state of Minnesota. The city lies on the south bank of the Minnesota River, upstream from the confluence with the Mississippi River. Eagan and nearby suburbs form the southern portion of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the fifteenth largest...
since 1992; West was acquired by Thomson Corporation
Thomson Corporation
The Thomson Corporation was one of the world's largest information companies.Thomson was active in financial services, healthcare sectors, law, science & technology research, and tax & accounting sectors...
in 1996. Several of Thomson's law-related businesses outside the United States have their own Westlaw sites, and Westlaw's international content is available at www.westlawinternational.com. For instance, Westlaw Canada from Carswell includes the Canadian Abridgment and KeyCite Canada, and Westlaw UK provides information from Sweet & Maxwell
Sweet & Maxwell
Sweet & Maxwell is a British publisher specialising in legal publications. It joined the Associated Book Publishers in 1969; ABP was purchased by the Thomson Organization in 1987, and is now part of Thomson Reuters. Its British group includes W. Green in Scotland and Round Hall in Ireland...
and independent law reports, case analysis and case status icons. More recently, Westlaw China was introduced, with laws and regulations, cases, digests, and status icons (similar to KeyCite flags), for the law of the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
. In total, Westlaw is used in over 68 countries.
West’s chief competitor in the legal information retrieval market is LexisNexis
LexisNexis
LexisNexis Group is a company providing computer-assisted legal research services. In 2006 it had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records related information...
.
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.
WestlawNext
West introduced WestlawNext on February 8, 2010. The main advances are that a user can start a search without first selecting a database, and the search screen allows one to click checkboxes to select the jurisdiction and nature of material wanted. A new search algorithm, referred to as WestSearch, claimed to be the world's most advanced legal research engine, executes a federated search across multiple content types. Users can either enter descriptive terms or Boolean connectors and select a jurisdiction. Documents are ranked by relevance. WestlawNext also supports retrieving documents by citation, party name or KeyCite reference. An overview page enables users to see the top results per content type, or to view all results for a particular content type. Filters can also be applied to refine the result list even further. On the results page, users can also see links to related secondary sources relevant to their research. WestlawNext also provides folders for storing portions of the research selected by the user.KeyCite
KeyCite is a citationCase citation
Case citation is the system used in many countries to identify the decisions in past court cases, either in special series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a 'neutral' form which will identify a decision wherever it was reported...
-checking service available on Westlaw.
Verification of citations is necessary, because lawyers must determine whether a case has been reversed, overruled, or modified by a subsequent case before citing it in court. The United States judiciary operates under the principle of stare decisis
Stare decisis
Stare decisis is a legal principle by which judges are obliged to respect the precedents established by prior decisions...
– 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 Citations
Shepard's Citations
In legal research, Shepard's Citations is a citator, a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. The verb Shepardizing refers to the process of consulting Shepard's to see if a case has been overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by later cases...
, on which legal professionals relied 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
American Bar Association
The American Bar Association , founded August 21, 1878, is a voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students, which is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. The ABA's most important stated activities are the setting of academic standards for law schools, and the formulation...
.
Associated software and websites
WestCheck is softwareComputer software
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....
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
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
add-in, either of which may be used, and there is a web site, westcheck.com, that offers the same functionality.
West also provides BriefTools, which replaces West CiteLink, and provides citation checking and file retrieval services within a word processing document. Another version only inserts Westlaw links into documents.
West CiteAdvisor formats citations and creates a table of authorities. Like WestCheck, it is available online at http://citeadvisor.westlaw.com, or as software for a word processor.
Westlaw CourtExpress, http://courtexpress.westlaw.com, allows searching of court docket information.
Westlaw Watch, http://watch.westlaw.com, allows users to manage periodic monitoring of news and other databases for topics of interest.
Westlaw WebPlus on lawschool.westlaw.com provides a web search engine with a focus on legal information sites.
The Westlaw Litigator website, http://litigator.westlaw.com, provides access to legal calendaring and other litigation related applications.
Key Number System
The West Key Number SystemWest American Digest System
The West American Digest System is a system of identifying points of law from reported cases and organizing them by topic and key number. The system was developed by West Publishing to organize the entire body of American law...
is a master classification system of U.S. law, and is claimed to be "the only recognized legal taxonomy
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
." 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.
Identity theft controversy
In February 2005, after the ChoicePointChoicePoint
ChoicePoint was a data aggregation company based in Alpharetta, near Atlanta, Georgia, United States, that acted as a private intelligence service to government and industry...
identity theft
Identity theft
Identity theft is a form of stealing another person's identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person's identity, typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person's name...
incidents became public, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer
Charles Schumer
Charles Ellis "Chuck" Schumer is the senior United States Senator from New York and a member of the Democratic Party. First elected in 1998, he defeated three-term Republican incumbent Al D'Amato by a margin of 55%–44%. He was easily re-elected in 2004 by a margin of 71%–24% and in 2010 by a...
(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 number
Social Security number
In the United States, a Social Security number is a nine-digit number issued to U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and temporary residents under section 205 of the Social Security Act, codified as . The number is issued to an individual by the Social Security Administration, an independent...
s (SSNs), previous addresses, dates of birth, and other information lawyers use to do background check
Background check
A background check or background investigation is the process of looking up and compiling criminal records, commercial records and financial records of an individual....
s on behalf of their clients. While there is no known case of identity 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 couplerAcoustic coupler
In telecommunications, the term acoustic coupler has the following meanings:# An interface device for coupling electrical signals by acoustical means—usually into and out of a telephone instrument....
s or key phones; then smaller terminals with internal modems. Westlaw's terminal was known as WALT, for West Automatic Law Terminal.
Around 1989, both started offering programs for personal computers that emulated the terminals, and when Internet access
Internet access
Many technologies and service plans for Internet access allow customers to connect to the Internet.Consumer use first became popular through dial-up connections in the 20th century....
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
Borland
Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...
C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
around 1997, and then changed to a program compiled on a Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
platform that incorporated portions of Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
. This was the first program to incorporate HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
; prior to that, Westmate had "jumps" indicated by triangles instead of "links
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...
." Shortly after that, both publishers started developing web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
interfaces, with Westlaw's being notable for the use of "web dialogs," emulating the piling of open books on a table. Westmate was discontinued on June 30, 2007.
Legal disputes
In the mid 1980s, Westlaw sued LexisNexis over copyright infringementCopyright infringement
Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...
. 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 United States District Court for the District of Minnesota
United States District Court for the District of Minnesota
The United States District Court for the District of Minnesota is the Federal district court whose jurisdiction is the state of Minnesota. Its two primary courthouses are in Minneapolis and Saint Paul...
. After Lexis' appeals were turned down by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals
United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit is a federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts:* Eastern District of Arkansas* Western District of Arkansas...
, 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
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals...
held that West did not have copyright on the corrections it made on opinions or on the internal pagination.
The West Education Network (TWEN)
TWEN is Westlaw’s online courseware that is specifically tailored for law schoolLaw school
A law school is an institution specializing in legal education.- Law degrees :- Canada :...
s. It is basically an online extension of the classroom. Teachers use it to post syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, class materials and announcements. TWEN is also used for emailing, forum posting, live chats, polling and posting/submitting assignments. (In terms of this range of functionality, TWEN is similar to other educational systems such as Blackboard, marketed by Blackboard Inc.
Blackboard Inc.
Blackboard Inc. is an enterprise software company with its corporate headquarters in Washington, D.C. and is primarily known as a developer of education software, in particular learning management systems. Blackboard was founded by CEO Michael Chasen and chairman Matthew Pittinsky in 1997 and...
).
Law school professors occasionally use it for their classes, and 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.
See also
- Black's Law DictionaryBlack's Law DictionaryBlack's Law Dictionary is the most widely used law dictionary in the United States. It was founded by Henry Campbell Black. It is the reference of choice for definitions in legal briefs and court opinions and has been cited as a secondary legal authority in many U.S...
- American JurisprudenceAmerican JurisprudenceAmerican Jurisprudence is an encyclopedia of United States law, published by West. It was originated by Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, which was subsequently acquired by the Thomson Corporation. The series is now in its second edition, launched in 1962...
- American Law ReportsAmerican Law ReportsIn American law, the American Law Reports are a resource used by American lawyers to find a variety of sources relating to specific legal rules, doctrines, or principles. It has been published since 1919 and remains an important tool for legal research....
- Corpus Juris SecundumCorpus Juris SecundumCorpus Juris Secundum is an encyclopedia of U.S. law . Its full title is Corpus Juris Secundum: Complete Restatement Of The Entire American Law As Developed By All Reported Cases It contains an alphabetical arrangement of legal topics as developed by U.S...
- West American Digest SystemWest American Digest SystemThe West American Digest System is a system of identifying points of law from reported cases and organizing them by topic and key number. The system was developed by West Publishing to organize the entire body of American law...
- WexisWexisWexis is a humorous portmanteau used to refer to the alleged duopoly of publishing conglomerates that dominate the U.S. legal information services industry — namely, West Publishing and LexisNexis....
External links
- Westlaw.com — Official website.
- WestlawCanada.com — Official website.ca
- Westlaw India — Official Indian website.
- Westlaw IE — Official Irish website.
- Article from Minneapolis News about the history of West Publishing and Westlaw