Westlaw in the United States

History

Barclays Law Publishers, founded in 1856, was absorbed by the Thompson/Reuters collective in 1995 into the Bancroft-Whitney Division. In 2010, Thomson closed the Banks-Baldwin’s Cleveland office.

West

From Citypages:

“In the 1920s, when the federal government was ready to streamline its statutes, West was called in to help. Before 1875, United States federal statutes had been collected but not codified, meaning grouped by subject. The first attempt that year was riddled with errors. West’s 1926 codification was the most thorough U.S. Code ever (though it still contained some 537 errors, 88 of them of substance).

West published the U.S. Code for years—often for free. But its real innovation was an unofficial version of the code, including notes about the changes, which lawyers found far more useful. West’s version, U.S. Code Annotated, was easier to use because it was more organized, and more thorough, than the U.S. Code itself.

Over the years, West added enhancements to its system for organizing case law —like headnotes in the 1900s, which were case summaries that identified and spelled out the points of law in a case, and an electronic citation service in the 1990s, which notified attorneys when a particular law changed. These tools made West’s products easier and faster to use. During the 20th century, the company’s publications became so entrenched as the industry standard that judges required attorneys to cite the page number of the West volume—not the official court record or government code—in their written arguments. (…)

The president of West Publishing, Dwight Opperman, followed Lexis’s entrance into the market closely. Opperman reasoned that West could provide a more efficient service at a lower cost with just its case summaries. The summaries were shorter and so would be faster—and therefore cheaper—to search. In 1975, West Publishing launched Opperman’s vision: Westlaw. (…)

The company’s computer scientists designed a system of algorithms that they dubbed CARE, Categorization and Recommendation Engine. The computer uses a system of statistics, including Bayesian probability, to predict where documents should be categorized. CARE suggests key numbers for new cases, identifies cases affected by a new decision, and performs a host of other tasks. Before CARE, West had hired freelance attorneys to do this work. Now, a computer can do it more quickly and more accurately.”

West’s National Reporter System

This West Digest system “made the law readily available, but as the pile of information grew, finding the relevant information became increasingly difficult.

To solve this problem, a brilliant West Publishing employee named John Mallory came up with his own version of the Dewey Decimal System in 1908. He divided the law into 400 topics, based upon an introductory legal course at Harvard Law School. He assigned each topic a key number, and created subcategories within each of those key numbers.

To make case law easier to search by subject, West Publishing began issuing a digest that identified all the key numbers and all the decisions that had come out related to them.”

West publishes a series of case “Digests” covering a jurisdiction (e.g., the Federal Digest or the New York Digest), region (e.g., the Atlantic Digest), subject (e.g., the Bankruptcy Digest) or date range (the Decennial Digest). Each Digest provides summaries of the relevant published judicial decisions. The summaries are organized according by West Key Numbers. (For a discussion of the West Digest System, see Barkan, Mersky and Dunn’s Fundamentals of Legal Research.)

You’ll find at least the Federal Digest and the local state or regional Digest in most large law libraries located in a state that has a Digest. You’ll tend to find more Digests in the larger academic libraries. Local law firm libraries will generally lend Digest volumes, while academic libraries will generally provide copies of select sections.

Alternatively, you can recreate any Digest set using Westlaw. You do this by clicking on the “Key” icon or going into the “Key Number Service” or maybe something else if you’re using yet another version of Westlaw. Call Westlaw (800-733-2889) for more specific assistance.

To find out if a state has a digest (e.g., Texas does, Delaware doesn’t), you can look up the state in the Legal Information Buyer’s Guide & Reference Manual or a similar directory, or you ask a reference librarian in an academic (or other large) law library in that state.

Note: It can be extremely difficult to borrow out-of-state Digests. Unless the state in question is contiguous to yours, you’re generally better off getting copies or using Westlaw.

WestlawNext

WestlawNext was a competitor of Lexis Advance.

The Maryland State Law Library presented the results, in September 2011, of a survey of law librarians about WestlawNext with commentary from the panelists. The outcome was the following:

• More law firms than law school libraries are using WestlawNext. Very few corporate, government, or courts libraries are using WestlawNext.
• Most firms did see increased costs in using WestlawNext, but some saw a price decrease. Overall the pricing model seems simpler to understand.

WestlawNext searchers liked the following features and issues:

• Ease of use
• Federated search
• Folder and folder sharing
• Faceted and aggregated results that show new material
• Librarians liked that searchers saw not only primary sources but valuable secondary sources.

WestlawNext searchers disliked the following features and issues:

• Oversimplification of research
• Lack of precision
• Unclear, inconsistent search algorithm
• Exclusion of some Westlaw materials
• Difficulty knowing what content is (and is not) included
• Difficulty constructing Boolean searches
• Difficulty constructing narrow issue searches
• Unavailability of field searching
• Tendency to get too many search results

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