Thomson Reuters Introduces Westlaw Edge Quick Check

Global News

12
Jul
2019

Editor

Westlaw Edge users can quickly and securely review motions, briefs or text with citations to instill more confidence in their legal research and ensure they haven’t missed anything important by using Westlaw Edge Quick Check.

“We meet regularly with customers to discuss problems and explore how to mitigate them with innovative applications of technology,” said Carol Jo Lechtenberg, director, Westlaw Product Management. “Even using our leading legal research products, legal professionals still sometimes fear there is an authority they haven’t considered in their argument or that there may be a hole in their work. The Westlaw team is always looking for opportunities to make legal research faster and more on-point, giving legal researchers more confidence that they have left no stone unturned. These efforts led to Quick Check.”

Quick Check, the latest addition to the Westlaw Edge legal research suite, quickly reviews a user’s motions, briefs or other legal documents to find highly relevant authority, secondary sources and other related briefs and memoranda to ensure that Westlaw Edge customers find what they may otherwise miss in traditional legal research.

Westlaw Edge users simply upload a document through Quick Check. The application combs the text, citations and structure of the brief or motion to detect the legal issues covered. It then identifies recommendations highly relevant to the issues included in the input document, but not otherwise cited. Once the Quick Check report is securely generated, users can filter cases they have recently reviewed, saved to a folder or annotated. Additional indicators, known as recommendation tags, are assigned to surfaced documents for categories such as relevant cases from a high court, cited frequently or available within the last two years. Quick Check is fully integrated with KeyCite to flag cited cases that are bad law, distinguished or criticized so users are sure to be relying on accurate law. 

Quick Check allows users to not only perform quality checks on their own completed briefs or motions, but also to examine an early draft of a brief or memo to finish research faster. Customers can evaluate the work product of a colleague or outside counsel, or repurpose an old document to quickly identify the newest, most relevant authority.

Also, Quick Check allows Westlaw Edge users to reveal weaknesses in an opponent’s briefs or motions. Legal professionals can review whether an opponent has cited an invalidated, overturned or abrogated case and quickly see if the point of law impacts their matter. Users can also use the Omitted Authority tab to find cases that are highly relevant to the issues in an opponent’s document but that they chose not to cite. 

Westlaw Edge was developed with attorneys and technologists at the Thomson Reuters Center for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing working together to apply cutting-edge AI technologies to attorney-authored content and powerful legal research tools, including KeyCite and the West Key Number System. According to Khalid Al-Kofahi, vice president of Research & Development at Thomson Reuters and who leads the Center, Quick Check represents the next milestone on the journey of empowerment and simplification. “We've built Westlaw Edge Quick Check to be very sophisticated in terms of selecting which language and citations to extract from motions and briefs, and it executes several search strategies, sifts through primary and secondary law results, follows citation networks, and finds and filters by Key Numbers, courts and other data attributes. In doing so, it often considers hundreds of thousands of possibilities - far more than any researcher could go through, even if he or she had all day to do it - yet it returns a concise report of relevant material that might have been missed in a traditional research process.”

All of this is driven by a focus on the legal researcher and a desire to help mitigate the problems inherent in legal research. “The last piece of the puzzle is the user experience, which, among other things, should reduce the user’s burden of sifting through recommended documents,” said Al-Kofahi. “Westlaw Edge Quick Check achieves that through a combination of features, including the eyeglass symbol on previously viewed documents, case outcome, and context provided by other cases cited in the document. It’s bolstered by additional AI capabilities such as the relevant snippets that help users quickly determine whether a recommended document warrants closer review.”

Thomson Reuters launched Westlaw Edge one year ago, touting its powerful AI, built upon more than 100 years of editorial enhancements, to drive search and next-generation analytics and bringing speed, insight and confidence. Westlaw Edge also provides exclusive warnings for law that is no longer valid and sophisticated research tools that help legal professionals deliver results to clients faster and more accurately.

Working closely with customers, Thomson Reuters has since added Regulations Compare, Procedural Posture Filters to narrow search results to specific stages of litigation, waves of new content and new tools for Litigation Analytics, as well as enhancements to KeyCite, among other innovations – all included in Westlaw Edge subscriptions. Just last month the company introduced Jurisdictional Surveys on Westlaw Edge, which allows users to quickly retrieve a customized and relevant compilation of laws across all U.S. jurisdictions on virtually any topic.  

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) named Statutes Compare and Regulations Compare on Westlaw Edge as its 2019 New Product Award winner. Thomson Reuters will be recognized for the honor at the upcoming AALL Annual Meeting & Conference in Washington, D.C., held July 13-16, 2019. 

Westlaw Edge Quick Check will be available to Westlaw Edge subscribers on July 24.