Category: westlaw
By - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 11:38am
With WestlawNext (WLN) finally going live for law school faculty, librarians and staff yesterday afternoon, many law school librarians are finally getting permanent access to the much-hyped interface. This comes only a couple of weeks after Julie Jones's fascinating panel at the AALL Annual Meeting, "The Economics of Interface: Vendors Respond." Following presentation's by Thomson Reuters' Mike Dahn, LexisNexis' Molly Miller and Fastcase's Ed Walters, Larry Abraham of Fordham Law stepped up to the audience microphone and told the vendor representatives that their interfaces discourage users from using secondary sources, instead emphasizing primary law materials. Following Laurence's comments, a few other audience members (myself included) complained to the panel about how vendors treat secondary sources both within their systems and in training provided to subscribers.
With that fresh in mind, I wanted to hit on some specific problems I've encountered while searching secondary sources in WLN. My concerns aren't new. I mentioned them in my initial review of the product back in January. Specifically, when searching state-specific secondary sources, the results are often cluttered with irrelevant materials at the top of the results list. Here's part of what I had to say back in January:
The search algorithms for secondary sources are also problematic. When I select California as my jurisdiction, if there are California-specific resources available on my topic, those need to show up first in my results. Period. When I ran a search for the term "rape," the first 12 results were from "National" sources such as Am.Jur. Trials, Am.Jur. Proof of Facts, and several law reviews. More alarming, none of these were general overviews of rape law, but instead provided information on specific aspects of rape law in various jurisdictions. I discussed this problem with Mike Dahn, vice president of new product development at Thomson Reuters Legal. He assured me that this was not by design and that they were working to make sure jurisdiction-specific resources for a user's selected jurisdiction float to the top of search results, but as of now this isn't working correctly.
The problem I described then still occurs. Here's what the top search results for the Secondary Sources facet look like when I select California as my jurisdiction and search for the word "rape":
The first result from a secondary source covering California law doesn't appear until the 11th result. This means a researcher, despite having already selected a jurisdiction, has to wade through numerous off-topic, out-of-jurisdiction articles to find the ones that are on point for the search.
There is, however, a way around this problem. Having already narrowed the search results to the "Secondary Sources" facet, the left sidebar now displays additional filters. Find the one labeled "Jurisdiction" and select "California":
With this one tweak, the results reflect more of what a researcher expects to see when performing a jurisdiction-specific search:
The jurisdiction sub-facet illustrates part of the problem with the original set of results. Despite a researcher having selected California as the jurisdiction before running the search, WestlawNext still includes "National" sources in the results. In a state with fewer high-quality secondary sources than California — say Nevada — including these national sources is probably a necessary evil (though one would hope these national search results would be more on point). Just realize that if you want only state-specific resources you'll need to do that extra step of filtering.
Oddly, even if you narrow your search target to only "California Secondary Sources" by browsing the WLN sources before running your search, WLN still considers those national sources to be "California Secondary Sources," so you'll again need to apply a post-search jurisdiction filter to get true state-specific results.
But the problem with secondary sources in WLN doesn't go away by selecting a sub-facet. This refers back to another problem I discussed in January:
In these results, very little specific information about each source displays. Most of the time what a researcher sees is the title of the specific section, the title of the source, and a couple of text snippets in which the search terms are highlighted. Little to no information about where within that source the section appears shows in these results. For example, when a section of "Witkin and Epstein's California Criminal Law" title simply "Generally" appears, that's the extent of the citation information displayed. The precise article within "Witkin & Epstein" in which this section appears is nowhere to be found, so researchers won't know until viewing the document itself whether it's from an article about sex crimes, robbery or murder. The threaded information available in search results for statutory sections (Title, Chapter, Subpart, etc.) needs to be included in secondary sources as well, or else the results are confusing at best and unusable at worst.
Take another look at that last screenshot showing results from California-only secondary sources. This uses WLN's default "More Detail" display type. In these results, the first result looks to be the most relevant. After all, it is titled "Rape" in big bold print. The second and third results also look to be on point, but the information provided is rather cryptic about what specific crime they refer to. If the source in question isn't part of your subscription plan, the only way to find out if they're relevant is to click on each and incur an out-of-plan charge. Not exactly the best way to go about cost-effective research. Worse still, that first result — the one titled "Rape" — that looks so relevant? It turns out this is a section from an article about First Degree Murder that only discusses rape insofar as it pertains to the commission of a homicide. The second result ("Nature of Crime") is the only one in the top three actually from Witkin & Epstein's article about the crime of rape. The third document in the results ("In General") is, like the first, about homicide.
There is a more detailed view available than this one, but it doesn't solve the problem. To change the display type, go to the display options at the top of the search results (the icon showing one to three horizontal lines) and select "Most Detail":
Even with the most detail display available for search results, however, the full threaded information isn't included and it's still impossible to tell whether each result concerns the specific crime of rape without retrieving the document itself:
This isn't a problem so long as the source is part of your subscription plan and you can pull up as many documents as you want. But if "Witkin & Epstein's California Criminal Law" isn't in your plan, you might be faced with quite the dilemma when deciding how important it is to find the right document. Or perhaps you'll skip secondary sources altogether, jumping instead into the primary law results directly.
Truth be told, the more specific your search terms ("unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor" vs. "rape"), the stronger likelihood of having relevant search results float to the top. This is true of any search engine, and I'm not suggesting the search algorithm is the problem. It's the display. Given that general searches like "rape" are common in legal research, particularly when searching secondary sources, the lack of useful identifying information about a document is a problem that needs to be addressed by Thomson Reuters Legal.
I don't want this post to be interpreted as a negative review of WLN. Most of my review in January was positive and I stand by that overall opinion. WestlawNext is a vast improvement across the board over Classic Westlaw, and I don't share the opinion of many that it "dumbs down" legal research. To the contrary, I've found that it adds considerable power to most of the research I've done using the new system. Figuring out what database I need to search in Classic Westlaw doesn't mean I understand the sources of law any better. It just means I know what database I need to search in Westlaw.
But as superior as it is to its predecessor, it still has legitimate problems. The issues associated with secondary sources in WLN need to be highlighted. Even if Thomson Reuters opts to not fix these problems, we as researchers need to be aware of them. And as instructors — both in the classroom and at the reference desk — we need to be prepared to educate others about them, too.
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By - Friday, January 29, 2010 - 5:46pm
As I mentioned in my previous post, I traveled to Eagan, Minnesota (on Thomson Reuters' dime) earlier this week along with several other writers to get a sneak peek at Thomson Reuters' new legal research product, WestlawNext. I've already participated in a video roundtable discussion on the system, but I wanted to go into a little more detail in writing. Several others have provided comprehensive reviews of the product already, so I don't want to duplicate too much of their information. I do, however, want to look at things from the perspective of legal research instruction, since that's a big part of what I do in my job each fall, and because I've written in the past about Lexis and Westlaw's usability from that perspective over at VoxPopuLII.
The simplest assessment is this: Once law students gain access to WestlawNext (and "New Lexis," launching later this year), legal research instructors will have some 'splaining (or at least some adapting) to do.
Research instruction is marginalized and splintered at most law schools as it is. If law librarians -- the most qualified research instructors within any law school -- are part of a required 1L research curriculum, the length of that instruction is often brief. At Loyola Law School, for example, we have five weeks in the fall semester to cover the basics. At other schools, librarians might play no role. Instead, a legal writing program might rely on second-year students to teach the material. At the far end of the spectrum, some schools have no required research curriculum, offering only advanced research electives. Regardless of these requirements, electronic research instruction is often farmed out to vendor representatives, with Westlaw reps teaching Westlaw and Lexis reps teaching Lexis. The reliability of rep training varies, and a common complaint among librarians is that these reps emphasize full-text searching of primary law at the expense of secondary sources and other analytical materials. This leads to a somewhat disjointed program of instruction, even without the ground shifting beneath us.
When using the current versions of Westlaw and Lexis, a researcher needs to know exactly where relevant information is located before running a search. Therefore, when searching for primary law, she has to already know if she's looking for cases or statutes or regulations or some other type of document. In a familiar area of law, that's not a big hurdle, but when researching a new topic, the first task in research is often figuring out what type of law governs. Only then can the researcher move on to primary materials.
Using WestlawNext, however, a researcher no longer needs to select a source database before running a search. Instead, searches are most often limited only by jurisdiction, using a pop-up page overlay (NOT a pop-up browser window/tab) that allows precise selection of both state and federal jurisdictions. Then, upon running a search, the system provides results from all types of sources -- primary and secondary -- in that jurisdiction: cases, statutes, regulations, secondary sources, briefs, etc. The overview page shows just the first one or two results in each category, but the left sidebar of the page lists all the types of documents available with a count of the number of results in each of these facets. To see complete results for a particular type of resource, a researcher need only click the link for that category. When viewing these faceted results, more limiting options appear in the sidebar, such as jurisdiction, date, topic, and publication name depending on the type of materials being viewed.
Generally speaking, WestlawNext eliminates the need for researchers to know where to look for legal documents before running their searches. Don't know whether your clients' issue involves statutory or regulatory law? Just run the search and find out from the results.
To be fair, the current version of Westlaw already allows researchers to search multiple databases simultaneously, but the implementation is poor. Selecting the databases you want is a tedious process, the results display in one lump-sum list of results with no limiting facets, and basic functionality like tables of contents are nowhere to be found when viewing documents from your results. These problems are all dealbreakers, and they are corrected in WestlawNext.
While the relevant sources of law can be gleaned more easily from search results, it presents a challenge to legal research instructors. As legal professionals who have used the old systems (and print resources) for years, we already understand what the various sources of law are and how they work together. To even use Westlaw and Lexis, law students needed to learn this foundation. With WestlawNext (and most likely "New Lexis") providing Google-esque search with faceted results, students can and will run searches without an understanding of legal sources and yet not feel confused by the results. Well, not at first.
Given this likelihood, research instructors will have to provide a solid overview of the sources of law to their students. Hopefully, we already do this. But until now we could rely on Westlaw's database selection requirement to force students into learning at least a little bit about these sources before running a search that provided meaningful results. Not anymore. A student need not understand anything about sources in order to retrieve a wide swath of relevant material, and many will have the illusory feeling that the research process has been simplified enough to eliminate any need for foundational training. After all, if the fact pattern mentions "unlawful sexual intercourse" and "California" (yes, I used a Roman Polanski hypothetical in my class), a student can search those terms and retrieve a California case that seems to be on point and perhaps believe they've performed due diligence. Of course, the governing law might actually be statutory. Or there might be an split among appellate courts in California on the specific issue. Or a higher court may have decided an issue a little closer to the one in the fact pattern, making the case in hand irrelevant.
This isn't a criticism of WestlawNext. Assuming one understands sources of law, the search experience in WLN is more efficient and more likely to provide relevant materials in results. From a single search a researcher can pull in a wide array of materials and browse them easily using the provided facets. A lawyer unfamiliar with California real estate law need not know of the existence of "Miller & Starr California Real Estate" ahead of time in order to easily find that source's information in WestlawNext.
Foundational source issues are already covered in legal research instruction. The problem isn't that we don't teach them. The problem is that students might be less likely to listen once research begins to seem deceptively easy. This makes it all the more important for us to spend substantial time on instruction and assignments that cover the sources of law, independent of the specific research tools and mechanics. The good news is that if the WestlawNext interface is the future of legal research, we'll be able to spend less time in the classroom teaching Westlaw and Lexis navigation, providing extra time for foundational information.
Just because one can search an entire jurisdiction's worth of material doesn't mean that Thomson-Reuters Legal has eliminated the ability to browse and search more specific information. The currently buried Westlaw Directory once again moves front and center in WestlawNext (albeit in a redesigned form). Rather than running a search from the front page, a researcher can browse via simplified tabs on the front page (which thankfully contain no search boxes or checkboxes). From the "State Materials" tab, if a researcher selects California, a clean list of California materials displays, and the search box at the top of the page now limits itself to just a search of California materials. Clicking "All California Secondary Sources" displays a list of state-specific secondary sources and a search box that now searches only these resources. Selecting a specific source, say "California Jurisprudence," displays the table of contents for that source and allows searching of only that title.
It's been said elsewhere, but it bears repeating: Boolean search still functions. Given that many doubters have yet to acknowledge any of my colleagues' statements on this topic, let me repeat that: Boolean search still functions. There may still be some glitches here and there in that functionality, but Thomson-Reuters Legal has made it clear they intend for those operators to work as expected in WestlawNext.
WestlawNext is not without its problems, however, and the biggest concern I have is a big one for legal research instruction: secondary sources. No matter how many times instructors tell students to begin research with a secondary source, many students will still insist on running full-text searches of cases and statutory codes. (I was one of them.) Part of the blame lies at the feet of database reps who consistently overemphasize full-text searching of primary law in their training sessions, but anytime you ask students to find a case, the logical inclination is to, well, search cases.
I won't quibble with the order of the search facets in WestlawNext. Cases, statutes and other primary materials do belong at the top of the food chain because that's what lawyers and law students should be citing as precedent. The problem is how the results within the secondary sources facet display. In these results, very little specific information about each source displays. Most of the time what a researcher sees is the title of the specific section, the title of the source, and a couple of text snippets in which the search terms are highlighted. Little to no information about where within that source the section appears shows in these results. For example, when a section of Witkin and Epstein's California Criminal Law title simply "Generally" appears, that's the extent of the citation information displayed. The precise article within Witkin & Epstein in which this section appears is nowhere to be found, so researchers won't know until viewing the document itself whether it's from an article about sex crimes, robbery or murder. The threaded information available in search results for statutory sections (Title, Chapter, Subpart, etc.) needs to be included in secondary sources as well, or else the results are confusing at best and unusable at worst.
The search algorithms for secondary sources are also problematic. When I select California as my jurisdiction, if there are California-specific resources available on my topic, those need to show up first in my results. Period. When I ran a search for the term "rape," the first 12 results were from "National" sources such as Am.Jur. Trials, Am.Jur. Proof of Facts, and several law reviews. More alarming, none of these were general overviews of rape law, but instead provided information on specific aspects of rape law in various jurisdictions. I discussed this problem with Mike Dahn, vice president of new product development at Thomson Reuters Legal, he assured me that this was not by design and that they were working to make sure jurisdiction-specific resources for a user's selected jurisdiction float to the top of search results, but as of now this isn't working correctly.
Apart from these concerns, I'm still excited by the overall direction of WestlawNext. This really is a significant step forward in electronic research. I hesitate to call WestlawNext a "game-changer" because I think the game changed for all online search providers awhile back. Westlaw and Lexis are simply catching up, finally pushing legal search into the 21st century.
One final thing to note about the progress made here by Thomson Reuters (and presumably by LexisNexis later this year) is that it furthers the gap between the haves and have-nots in legal information. Once these new products are pushed out to law students, the more comfortable they become searching jurisdictions instead of sources, the harder it will be for them to use source-oriented tools (especially print materials). Again, this presents a challenge for those of us who teach legal research to make sure we provide them the foundation necessary to perform research on any platform.
I'm hardly the only person writing about WestlawNext this week. Here's a list of the reviews already in circulation:
Robert Ambrogi, A First Look at WestlawNext
David Bilinski, Dave’s Top 10 List about WestlawNext
Laura Bergus, WestlawNext: It’s About Time
Simon Chester, The Future of WestLaw – A First Glimpse
Jason Eiseman, 5 random thoughts about WestlawNext
Carolyn Elefant, My Trip Out [to] West: A Preview of WestlawNext
Greg Lambert, WestlawNext - A Study in Applying Knowledge Management & Crowdsourcing
Betsy McKenzie, Westlaw Next
Lisa Solomon, WestlawNext Preview: Product and Pricing
Jason Wilson, WestlawNext Review: Ending the tyranny of the keyword?
And of course, be sure to check out Jason Eiseman's video roundtable with Greg Lambert, Jason Wilson and me:
Video: discussion of WestlawNext
By - Tuesday, November 24, 2009 - 6:03pm
Last night while grading student assignments for my legal research classes, I encountered an anomaly in the text of California Jurisprudence 3d. I'd asked students to locate a secondary source discussing California's criminal charge of Unlawful Sexual Intercourse with a Minor. (Yes, I used the Roman Polanski case for my fact pattern.) For those who chose to use Cal. Jur., the experience differed depending on whether they used Lexis or Westlaw.
First, the section numbers don't match. In Westlaw, the general discussion of Unlawful Sexual Intercourse (which falls hierarchically at Criminal Law: Crimes Against the Person -> X. Unlawful Sexual Intercourse -> A. In General) begins at 18 Cal. Jur. 3d Criminal Law: Crimes Against the Person § 595. In Lexis, however, this same discussion begins at § 487 (found in the same hierarchical location). In the Westlaw version, there is a link to something called a "Correlation Table" which shows a column of section numbers aligned with another column of section numbers. Sure enough, in this table § 487 in the left column correlates with § 595 in the right column. Unfortunately, the table offers no explanation as to what this correlation is. I finally tracked down the explanation in the print edition of Cal. Jur., which reads as follows:
This table shows where the subject matter in the various sections of the former edition of California Jurisprudence 3d is set forth in this revised volume. This table enables the user to translate references found in the prior edition and other legal publications into references to this edition.
Thus, it appears Lexis's version of Cal. Jur. still uses the section numbers found in the former edition and have not been updated to reflect the numbering scheme in the revised volumes.
This is not, however, the only problem. The second problem with using Cal. Jur. in Lexis and Westlaw is that the text itself doesn't match. Take, for example, the first paragraph of § 595/487. In both Lexis and Westlaw, the first two sentences are identical:
The Penal Code defines unlawful sexual intercourse as an act of sexual intercourse accomplished with a person who is not the spouse of the perpetrator if the person is a minor. The provision further defines a "minor" as a person under the age of 18 years, and an "adult" as a person who is at least 18 years of age.
Both versions place footnote 1 after the second sentence. In Westlaw, the paragraph concludes with this sentence:
Unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor is a general intent offense.
Footnote 2, citing a 2009 California Court of Appeals case, appears here in Westlaw. Lexis, on the other hand, includes neither the sentence about general intent nor the footnote containing a citation to a 2009 case. Instead, Lexis continues the first paragraph with:
This offense was formerly incorporated in the section of the Penal Code defining rape, during which time it was often referred to by the courts as statutory rape.
In Westlaw, this sentence is in the second, not first, paragraph. The discrepancies continue from there, with sentences arranged in a different order depending on which system you consult. Further, Westlaw's version of the section has 13 footnotes, while Lexis's only has 10.
I'm not sure what the problem is at this point. Lexis includes a copyright notice at the top of its § 487 that reads "Copyright © 2009 West Group," and its Source Information page for Cal. Jur. states the following:
COVERAGE: Current
FREQUENCY: Annually
UPDATE-SCHEDULE: Within 1 day of publication
All of this suggests that the Lexis version should be up to date. Did the updates simply slip through the cracks and not make it into the system? Or did West fail to submit its updated text to Lexis? Or is it something else?
I sent an email to Lexis Librarian Relations earlier today explaining the problem, so hopefully there will some sort of explanation or resolution soon.
Who says grading can't be fun?
By - Tuesday, August 25, 2009 - 11:17pm
Yesterday saw a lot of outrage from the law librarian community, thanks to a new (albeit short-lived) promotion from Thomson West that read in part:
Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, chances are, you're spending too much time at the library.
(Click here to view the full ad)
Let me say up-front that I don't think this was a smart marketing strategy for West. Law librarians certainly play a role in throwing a sizeable chunk of change West's way, even if we aren't their biggest audience. Yet, while the ad isn't as disparaging on its face as some have complained (e.g., it doesn't really say anything negative about librarians), singling out a customer constituency in this way would be ill-advised for any company.
With that out of the way, let's look at this from a legal researcher's perspective. I tend to agree with the premise in West's ad that self-service research from one's own office is preferable to any situation that requires help from a librarian. Why do patrons talk to librarians? Because they can't find what they're looking for. As Terry Martin -- a law librarian -- said at a 1996 AALL "Town Meeting:"
Inevitably, there will be instances when people have got to ask a librarian for assistance. Now, I always think that this is a systems failure to some degree. We trained them improperly; we haven't designed a good catalog; and we haven't arranged materials well so that they can't help themselves.
Reprinted in Towards a Renaissance in Law Librarianship (Richard A. Danner, ed. 1997).
In a perfect (though certainly non-existent) world, if everyone involved in creating the system (law librarians, legal publishers, research database vendors) does his or her job right, a legal researcher would never need to ask a librarian for help.
That hardly means law librarians become irrelevant, but to remain a vital part of the system, we need to put as much effort in continuously re-designing and re-implementing that system as we do in helping lost researchers, because reducing those systems failures will save researchers time and frustration. Expressing outrage towards West for suggesting that self-service research is a good thing seems to indicate more concern on our part for the collective law librarian ego than for our patrons' needs.
You want to be angry at West for that ad? Be indignant at the suggestion that their online systems are comprehensive enough or designed intuitively enough to eliminate the need for librarian (or West's own customer support) assistance. Be outraged that they charge so much for their services that, no matter how well designed, our library budgets are the only thing that makes it possible for researchers to use them.
But never forget that if West, Lexis or some other legal database vendor ever fixed these problems, the need for our expertise, at least in its current form, would be reduced dramatically.
If West rethought its pricing structures and realized it could make a lot more money selling, to name one example, a Black's Law Dictionary iPhone app for $10 than it does for $50, a lot more patrons would buy their own research tools instead of relying on our deep pockets.
And if West put the energy and UI expertise responsible for its Black's Law Dictionary Digital software to work redesigning the Westlaw interface from the ground up (rather than simply dumping voluminous full text resources into its system with little regard for how they're used), there'd be a lot fewer questions at the reference desk about how to find something on Westlaw.
Are either of these things likely to happen anytime soon? History suggests they won't. But as I said yesterday on Twitter, I don't like relying on someone else's incompetence in order to stay relevant.
Truth is, West's questionable promotional piece advertised a world that, I believe, most researchers find appealing. Not because librarians are bad or unhelpful, but because research becomes far more efficient when someone finds what they're looking for without needing to ask for help at all. As Martin said, some system failure is inevitable. But that doesn't mean it can't be reduced. If an ad suggesting that such a reduction is positive scares librarians so much, my only question is, "Why?"
