Westlaw Edge Feature Update: Jurisdictional Surveys
This week, Legal Current is showcasing how customer feedback shaped last year’s Westlaw Edge launch and how listening to customers continues to inform the enhancements Thomson Reuters has added to the platform in the past 12 months.
We shared how customers helped shape Litigation Analytics and Regulations Compare. Today we’ll look at Jurisdictional Surveys, the most recent Westlaw Edge enhancement.
Jurisdictional Surveys address a time-consuming problem for customers conducting multi-jurisdictional research: gathering the appropriate materials to begin. 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.
“Researchers needed to know what terms to use for an issue and account for the variances in terminology across jurisdictions,” explained Lisa Mulrooney, director of Westlaw Product Development, who led this Westlaw Edge initiative. “In addition, constructing the appropriate search query to incorporate these variables was challenging.”
She added that 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 would provide a simplified search experience optimized for compiling a curated list of topically relevant statutory sections that accounts for varying terminology across all jurisdictions.
With just one query, a Westlaw Edge user can establish the best starting point to expedite the creation of a survey, allowing the user to focus on identifying and analyzing statutory variances and similarities for a topic from state to state.
Added just last month, Jurisdictional Surveys is the latest enhancement on Westlaw Edge. Additional improvements include the automatic display of Inline KeyCite Flags to help users instantly see the status of a cited case. Also, the Procedural Posture filter makes it easier to narrow search results to specific stages of litigation, and the new thesaurus enhances terms and connectors searches.
Watch for more enhancements as Thomson Reuters continues working closely with customers to help make their legal research even more efficient.
To learn more about Jurisdictional Surveys, visit WestlawEdge.com. And visit our booth at the 2019 American Association of Law Librarians (AALL) Annual Meeting & Conference for a demo and to attend a theater session.
