LawMoose founder initially skeptical of WestlawNext
Feb 5th, 2010 by Mark Cohen
- LawMoose founder LaVern Pritchard
I shared a few frothy thoughts yesterday about Thompson Reuters’ announced launch of WestlawNext, the next generation of Westlaw (in case you didn’t get it from the product’s subtle name). As more attorneys start using it, we will follow up in Minnesota Lawyer with some more reviews from folks who have actually used it.
In the meantime, a man with his finger on the pulse of legal technology, LawMoose founder LaVern Pritchard, was kind enough to share with me his initial thoughts on the product announcement, which (with his permission, of course) I share with you today:
My initial thoughts:
Four criteria against which to evaluate this:
1. Better usability
2. Lower cost
3. Broader range of “all the world’s legal knowledge”
4. Better conceptualization of the underlying domain
WestlawNext sounds successful on criteria one. One might say usability is what people should expect all along in a premium service?
2, 3, and 4 are not mentioned.
2 is actually higher cost for a service many lawyers in the real world can’t afford already.
Apparently 3 and 4 are unchanged.
But what do I know, except what I’ve read about it.
These are useful criteria.
As for #1, I agree that the update in usability was long overdue. The use of a global search and than filtering by source is really how I think it should have worked all along. The old way of choosing a database up front was really a pain. I’m surprised it took this long for them to change it.
But I dislike the deemphasis on terms and connectors. Maybe that’s because I’m a programmer. The syntax doesn’t bother me and I like the power. I’m not ready to give up terms & connectors, and I’m skeptical of relying in any way on natural-language queries. A.I. hasn’t come far enough yet.
The ability to organize searches and add notes is lost on me, because I can do all that stuff far more flexibly on my own machine, which is available to me offline. I wish Westlaw would provide a desktop app (cross platform using Eclipse, please) that broke out of the limitations of HTML and web pages. Wait, scratch that, I’ve seen West’s desktop UI products … Maybe someone else can step up and do it right.
As for #3, I don’t have enough experience to know what I’m missing out on.
On #2, YES, the cost needs to come down significantly given the number of free alternatives popping up. It is only a matter of time until the mark-up of legal documents is crowd-sourced. It is becoming harder and harder for me to understand Westlaw’s long term value-add …
Finally, criteria #4 is what I was most disappointed about in WestlawNext. I could excuse the other three criteria if #4 had been enhanced. But this is the most valuable subject of them all, so West can figure it out themselves. 8-/
I’ll add that #4 is likely being enhanced, behind the scenes, to facilitate the natural-language search capabilities. And I could understand not exposing the associated mark-up and other such data to the end-user from a trade-secret protection standpoint.
But it takes a leap of faith, on my part, to trust the natural-language parser and search capabilities to act as a black box from which I am to trust the results.
If you read closely the analysis of WestlawNext’s features by legal bloggers and journalists who have both used the service and been briefed directly by West (you can find a comprehensive roundup of posts at http://thoughtfullaw.com/2010/01/29/westlawnext-other-perspectives/), you will see that West did *not* eliminate the ability to do boolean searching (although the ABA Journal incorrectly reported, early on, that it had). While the default is natural language, if the system sees boolean connectors, it will run a boolean search.