2019 Highlights: Making Westlaw Edge Even Better
As 2019 wraps up, Legal Current is revisiting milestones and key accomplishments from the Legal business of Thomson Reuters this year. Today, we look at Precedent Analytics, Jurisdictional Surveys and Regulations Compare – enhancements Thomson Reuters added by integrating customer feedback into the product development process to make Westlaw Edge even better.
Precedent Analytics
The addition of Precedent Analytics gave Westlaw Edge users the ability to unlock judicial information as never before. Researchers can now derive key insights into a judge with the ability to easily find what citations, other judges and jurisdictions their judge relies on when drafting opinions.
Precedent Analytics offers visualizations and insights around how individual judges cite to prior case law by leveraging the capabilities of the West Key Number System and KeyCite. Information presented through Precedent Analytics can help determine drafting strategy and act as an additional measure to ensure that critical judicial insight hasn’t been missed.
Jurisdictional Surveys
Jurisdictional Surveys addressed a time-consuming problem: gathering the appropriate materials to begin conducting multi-jurisdictional research. The feature saves users time by allowing them to quickly retrieve a customized and relevant compilation of laws across all U.S. jurisdictions on virtually any topic.
It helps researchers know what terms to use for an issue and accounts for the variances in terminology across jurisdictions. It also makes it easier to construct the appropriate search query to incorporate these variables.
Getting a term wrong could mean missing an on-point statute – or getting a number of results so large that the list would be unmanageable. This understanding drove product developers to make sure Jurisdictional Surveys provides a simplified search experience, with a curated list of topically relevant statutory sections that accounts for varying terminology across all jurisdictions.
Regulations Compare
The addition of Regulations Compare, unveiled late last year, has helped Westlaw Edge users keep up with the tens of thousands of changes made each year to federal regulations. The feature lets users see the most recent changes to a federal regulation and compare any two versions going back to 2005.
A recent addition to Regulations Compare is state regulations for 39 states and the District of Columbia.
Regulations Compare saves significant time by eliminating the arduous task of manually comparing historical versions of the Federal Register. It’s similar to the Statutes Compare feature that allows users to investigate the evolution of a statute. Within both Statutes Compare and Regulations Compare, researchers can simply navigate to the next and previous change within the document.
The Statutes Compare and Regulations Compare features were recognized by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), which honored Statutes Compare and Regulations Compare on Westlaw Edge as its 2019 New Product Award winner.
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