MinnLawyer Blog

With all of the excitement of Steve Jobs going to the podium to unveil a new Apple product (well, OK, maybe not that much excitement), Thomson Reuters (or West as it will always be to me) earlier this week and unveiled WestlawNext, the new iteration of legal-research stalwart Westlaw, at the LegalTech show in New York City.

The new Westlaw will apparently (at least according to early reports) provide a more Google-like experience for searching West’s vast legal databases.

At first blush this might not seem like much. The company that practically invented computer-assisted legal research spends many years and many millions for its great minds to come up with … ta-da! … a product that has a search functionality similar to the one a couple of college-age kids came up with 14 years ago. OK, OK, Google swept the planet in the decade and a half or so since that date — but it seems a little funny that it took West this long to determine there might be something to this whole Google search thing.

Not that the change won’t be welcome. I recall thinking back in law school learning the various refining hoops that you had to click through to get to the search you wanted created a flow chart of branches that looked something like the heredity chart of the royal family that science teachers use to teach genetics. (Can you figure out which descendents of Queen Victoria would get hemophilia?)

But unlike the dreaded new Coke experiment (or was it marketing genius?), West is not jettisoning the old product in introducing the new one. WestlawOld (my term, not theirs) will still be available, so there will presumably be no angry cries from those addicted to WestlawOld to “bring it back!”

I haven’t had the chance to try the new Westlaw yet, so I can’t tell you how good it is. Those who have really seem to like it.

My one piece of feedback for West so far is that I don’t like the name. WestlawNext reminds me of its archrival, Lexis/Nexis. Of course, that is not nearly as bad as the name problem experienced by Apple, with the name of the new iPad reportedly leaving a lot of folks thinking it sounds like a feminine hygiene product.