A student asked me this question. Since I live and work in the beautiful bubble known as Stanford University,and have no idea how things work in the Real World, I turned to outside help to answer the student’s question.
I first asked our Westlaw representative, who provided this interesting and useful piece of information:
Based on a recent article about Thomson Reuters revenue, “The WestlawNext legal database has been sold to more than 18,500 customers since its launch in February 2010, representing 34 percent of Westlaw’s revenue base.”
http://us.mobile.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSTRE73R2OI20110428
But I knew that our students would want to know more specific information, so I sent out a quick request on the Northern California Association of Law Libraries (NOCALL) listserv. I received 21 replies — 6 from Biglaw law firms, 8 from small/midsize firms, 2 from county law libraries, 4 from the courts (U.S. District, United States Court of Appeals and California Appellate), and 1 from a state agency. Of the 6 Biglaw law firms, 4 have WestlawNext (although one, at present, is only making it available to firm librarians — see comments below) and 2 do not.
Of the 8 small/midsize firms, 5 have WestlawNext and 3 do not.
None of the public sector law libraries have WestlawNext. The state agency reports that it might be added this summer. I did find it a little ironic that the court libraries do not have WestlawNext — didn’t West get started by wooing the judiciary and treating judges extra special nice?
The comments I received were also very useful and I read many of them to my students, since they contain some great research tips and insights.
Here are a few of the comments:
I know that when firm librarians first saw the marketing materials, we were worried that the quality of search results would go down due to the one-box searching, but if anything the opposite has happened. The result ranking is much better than it was previously, and you can see a lot more information before clicking into a document, which is great.
Our firm has a flat rate contract, so even though there is a cost for the original search ($50), the amount billed back to the client is significantly lower. They shouldn’t be scared to use the resource due to the cost (at our firm anyway). It’s in line with Lexis and the old version of Westlaw. But of course, books are still cheaper.
Of course, they should still use good search practices so we’re not charging the client needlessly – searching broadly and then narrowing the focus, thinking before clicking into documents, checking before getting material from outside our pricing plan. You can refer back to materials saved to a folder for a year, for free. I’m saving a ton of material to folders.
The “price triggers” that incur costs: initial search, opening a document, clicking on the keycite materials.
Our firm’s flat-rate contract doesn’t cover the PDF images of reporters – that’s the only place where you’re not warned before getting material outside of our contract.
We did a firm survey last year, and honestly, most of our attorneys start their research process on Google because it’s free. Once they have useful information (like a case name or a statute or a law review article), they’ll go online and find all the related documents and secondary sources. WestlawNext does a really good job of that, and the new format for KeyCite makes it easy to trace between material types.
One more caveat: Keycite and Shepards both may say a case is good law when underlying statutes or cases have been invalidated (not always, but sometimes). They don’t always catch it when a case has been invalidated by new legislation, as well. Knowing how far to trust citator services is important.
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Only librarians have been given permission to use WLN. We will be offering mandatory class(es) on the product before attorneys are given passwords to access it. We are aware that the law school students have been exposed to WLN & will likely expect to use it upon entering into the firm environment, so our window to get up-to-speed is fast approaching.Caveats: Not everything has been loaded into WLN, so it could be frustrating to attorneys when prompted to transition in the middle of their research to go to Westlaw. We’re also not sure if the costs will increase since clicking on any results keeps adding up the total. I know we librarians have had conference call discussions about some of the quirky searching & results . . . . Do I like it? I had a trial ID & have not used it much since our contract went into effect in January. I’m still “on the fence” about it, but realize it is the wave of the future in this Googlish society.
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The federal courts do not have WestlawNext at this time, and my understanding is that while the Administrative Office in D.C. has discussed it with Thomson-Reuters, there is no plan to purchase it for the federal judiciary in the near future.
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We are using it. The attorneys really like it. One thing I’ve learned about it is that you should never choose the hourly setting on WestlawNext. Always use it in transactional mode since the nature of it promotes lots of browsing time. Most law firms are turning off the hourly feature and forcing transactional mode, but if not it can wreak havoc with your flat-rate contract client allocation.
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My advice for students: Know how much the search costs are before you do it. And always call the research attorneys — they know their tool better than any of us ever will.
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We aren’t using it in the [state] Judicial Branch. It’s way too expensive and we can’t afford it! And if Westlaw itself becomes too expensive for us we may be forced to use just one service. Since Lexis has the official reporting contract, we must have access to them.
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We do not have WestlawNext. We did a trial of it and it has potential, but we are not willing to pay extra for it.
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I see other problems besides cost for WestlawNext in law firms. To oversimplify: Google on new steroids represents WestlawNext’s research model. That model shows remarkable detachment from application to real-life research problems in law firms. The stock examples used in WestlawNext’s demos fit TR’s marketing well enough, but I could not translate them into everyday, online research done in law firms. I also see evidence of algorithmic anomalies – possibly widespread – that have only begun to be explored.
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We have been using WLN for the past year. We hopped on the band wagon pretty early due to a demo seen here by our litigation partners. The litigation attorneys like it a lot. Power users of regular Westlaw have a big learning curve so do not like it quite as much. It is great, however, for researching an area you may be unfamiliar with since it will give you the most relevant cases up front. Our attys like this feature. The attys also like the cost..they can figure out how much their research will cost them before going in since a search runs about $65
and then you can open as many docs as you want until you hit your research budget ($15/doc. or so). It relieves some the pressure they feel when going in. I think it is here to stay. Even [after] I have cancelled Lexis access here, cut my print budget and staffing, the WLN contract was added without blinking an eye. . . .
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We require everyone to be trained first on regular Westlaw. We will then train them on WestlawNext. There a cost pitfalls with both. Searching is cheaper and broader with WestlawNext, but if you want to look at lots of documents, you will run up the costs. Initial searching Westlaw is probably narrower (have to select a database), but then the documents don’t cost additional to view.
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I would recommend that students avoid WestlawNext like the plague until they have a solid grasp on doing research on their own. You do not want to be dependant on an algorithm created by a corporation to be able to do an essential part of your job.
I think Next can be a valuable tool and time-saver for attorneys who understand what the algorithm is doing and what the resources are it is returning in the results, but I worry if students start learning how to research using Next, they will not be able to do any research when they leave school unless they are using, and paying a steep price for, Next.
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The two main reasons [we don't have it] is that Westlaw would require us to have a separate contract for WestlawNext (we see this as paying for Westlaw twice), and WestlawNext does not have all of Westlaw’s content. . . .
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Though honestly we haven’t embraced it completely and probably won’t until West tells us they are pulling the plug on classic. I think it is a good product. I like the $60.00 search and the left-hand screen that guides you to your hits. The biggest issue is the pricing per document. Those clicks just add up. I am planning on asking our summer assoc. class if they are using Classic or NEXT, then based on the response, the rep. will concentrate on one or the other for the orientation. It will be interesting to see where the product stands with this first summer class who have potentially been using it at school.
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We at the California Appellate Courts are not. We have Westlaw and Lexis . . . [and] should be rolling out LMO [Lexis for Microsoft Office] soon, but that is as fancy as we are getting.
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