Thomson Reuters Introduces Westlaw Edge UK

UK News

22
Jul
2020

Editor

Thomson Reuters is introducing Westlaw Edge UK, its next-generation legal research system for the UK market. Westlaw Edge UK is built upon the foundation of more than 200 years of legal content.

Powered by the legal industry expertise and leading technology of Thomson Reuters, it delivers an innovative new set of features that allows users to stay ahead of regulatory change and navigate the legal divergence with the EU.

Legal professionals are under more pressure than ever before to produce quality results efficiently. Westlaw Edge UK was developed in partnership with customers to not only answer their need for faster, more accurate legal research, but also provide the confidence that they have done everything possible to meet the ever-increasing expectations of clients or their business.

“Westlaw Edge UK is a standalone legal research service for firms or organisations that are looking to use innovative features, technology and superior content to improve their efficiency, identify deeper insights and stay ahead of regulatory change,” said Lucinda Case, head of Legal Professionals Europe at Thomson Reuters. “Even before work from home became a necessity, customers were feeling enormous time pressure from both their organisations and their clients. Westlaw Edge UK provides customers the latest workflow technology tools to continue collaborating and meeting the expectations of their organisation for quality, transparency and speed, while also delighting clients.”

Westlaw Edge UK combines data visualisation and other advanced technologies with the quality and authoritativeness of Westlaw’s content to expedite legal research and offer new insights that would have otherwise taken significantly more time to uncover. Its user interface has been streamlined based on extensive research to display the right tools in the context of the legal research session, including new filters, updated toolbars, documents optimised for easier scanning, and more. In addition, the new user interface incorporates modern accessibility features to better serve all customers.

Features of Westlaw Edge UK include:

• Legislation Compare helps users understand how a law may affect a client, organisation or industry at various points in time and allows customers to easily compare versions of historical, current and prospective legislation across UK, English, Welsh, Northern Ireland and Scottish jurisdictions with the key differences marked. Additionally, Legislation Compare provides a view into what the law may look like in the future to help users anticipate what its impact may be.
• UK-EU Divergence Tracker enhances the capabilities of Legislation Compare and provides a side-by-side comparison of EU and UK content to help users understand how legislation diverges and deviates, ensuring clients and legal organisations remain compliant. UK-EU Divergence Tracker will be available in September 2020.
• Case Analytics transforms case research through data visualisation and is invaluable in classifying, digesting and summarising each judgment and law report, along with Westlaw UK’s treatment flags and links to legislation, journals and texts. The precedent map in Case Analytics provides a view to how the case has been cited and enables tracing back lines of authority to ensure customers are relying on good law and that no line of argument has been missed. Its Citations in Context feature provides a review of relevant extracts of case text where a case is mentioned in relation to the user’s issue.
• Westlaw Questions allows users to find commonly asked questions and return succinct results with key paragraphs highlighted. Based on content curated by Thomson Reuters editorial teams, Westlaw Questions allows users to find up-to-date and authoritative information quickly and easily, with suggested relevant research and resources tailored to the legal researcher’s needs.
• Legislation Alerts allows users to anticipate the likely impact of legislative change so they can deliver the best advice. By sending notifications of changes to legislation to a user’s inbox, they can move away from manual checking and focus on the work that matters most. With additional notifications for citing references, a user can be sure that if anything changes, they’ll be instantly notified and can pre-empt demands.

7 Harrington Street Chambers barrister Tim Kenward said, "This will transform legal research. Rather than having to trawl through a list of cases, the interactive analytics enable the lawyer to locate and marshal cases with great efficiency, both saving time and providing the material for a better end product.”

Added Case, “Westlaw Edge UK is the most significant innovation we’ve made to legal research in the UK since 2007. We’re delighted to offer a premium solution for researchers who want the convenience and speed of the most advanced legal research system.”