Westlaw Edge Canada: What’s Your Favorite Feature?
Westlaw Edge Canada, introduced earlier this month, provides Canadian legal professionals with new tools including Judicial Consideration for Statutes, KeyCite Overruling Risk, Common Queries and Legal Topic Suggestion, among others. Legal Current asked Thomson Reuters colleagues who contributed to product development to choose their favorite new feature and share how it will help Canadian legal professionals expedite complex and time-consuming research tasks. Below are their top picks and insights.
“Legal Topic Suggestions is my favorite feature because it combines technology and editorial expertise to provide customers with access to a valuable classification scheme, in the way they like to search, by presenting suggestions matching their key terms, using predictive type ahead,” said Kristin Brook, online product development manager, Thomson Reuters. “It also increases the visibility of secondary source content, which can be very helpful in understanding and adding context to a legal issue or subject, but is oftentimes overlooked.”
“Select Term Highlighting is one of my favorite new features because it’s deceptively simple, yet surprisingly versatile,” said Alvin Ng, manager of End User Applications. “We’ve taken a basic, core feature of online searching that has been around for decades – namely, term highlighting – and leveled up on it. Allowing users to choose different colors for various query terms in their results seems like a minor, almost trivial, change. However, it turns the functionality that merely showed you where your hits were into a visualization tool that allows a researcher to flag, categorize and scan results in more meaningfully complex ways.”
“I want everyone to know that the transition to the improved legal research experience on Westlaw Edge Canada is seamless,” Brook added. “Many of our Westlaw customers have been using the product since law school and have become very skilled and familiar with the platform. We know that our customers are busy and don’t have a lot of time to get up to speed on new tools and technology. The changes that we’ve introduced with Westlaw Edge are intuitive and feel both modern and familiar, so that customers can benefit from the efficiency gains made possible by the new features, without a learning curve.”
Visit Westlaw Edge Canada here.
