
Westlaw edge upgrade#
Next year, coverage will be extended into the areas indicated by the chart below.Ĭustomers who upgrade to Westlaw Precision will still have full access to all the content, features and functionality of Westlaw Edge, so they will still be able to research as they have previously done, but with the addition of these new capabilities. Supreme Court cases.īefore the end of the year, coverage will be extended to arbitration, insurance and real estate.
Westlaw edge plus#


While the tagging has been done by both humans and using machine learning, Dahn emphasized the human element as critical to the precision in Precision. Westlaw Precision tackles these shortcomings in legal research by performing an intricate operation of tagging the law, facts, outcomes, procedural posture and parties by topic “at new levels of specificity.” The problem TR sought to address with this new version of Westlaw is the difficulty of and time needed for legal research, Mike Dahn, head of product management, Westlaw, told reporters during a media briefing Monday, which was also attended by Paul Fischer, president, legal professionals, and Andy Martens, head of research products and editorial.Ĭustomer surveys indicated that researching a complex legal issue typically takes a lawyer from 12 to 22 hours.ĭahn identified three reasons for this, and they are familiar to anyone who has done legal research: Searches often retrieve irrelevant cases, miss relevant cases, and return so many results that they can take hours to review. Nearly all those lawyers said they found important cases faster and found cases they might not have otherwise. This enables customers to specify precisely what they want and retrieve it quickly.”Īdvance testing of Westlaw Precision among 101 lawyers found that just 10 minutes into a research session, the lawyers had found three times as many relevant cases, TR says.

“Now we are also classifying cases by issue outcome, fact pattern, motion type, motion outcome, cause of action, and party type.

“For more than 100 years, we have classified legal issues with the West Key Number System,” Leann Blanchfield, head of primary law, editorial, said in a statement. What does TR mean by more precise? It means search results that better match not just the legal issue, but also the outcome, fact pattern, cause of action, motion type and outcome, party type, and area of law.Īnd in a moment when AI-driven research is all the rage, Precision takes a somewhat old-school approach to achieving this precision - using hundreds of lawyer editors to manually tag cases with greater granularity than Westlaw had previously done through its Key Number System (while by no means abandoning the advanced AI that helped power Westlaw Edge). It is called Westlaw Precision and, as the name suggests, its focus is on delivering research results that are more precise than ever before, and delivering them with greater speed than ever before. Just four years after launching Westlaw Edge as its next-generation legal research platform, Thomson Reuters today unveiled the next-next generation.
