WestlawNext Preview
2010
On Friday I attended the WestlawNext preview breakfast where Thomson Reuters unveiled its new product to the Philadelphia legal information community. Designed to revolutionize the way legal professionals search, WestlawNext only requires the entering of some key terms and the selection of a jurisdiction, unlike the database driven format of traditional Westlaw. WestlawNext then runs a search in cases, statutes, regulations, treatises, briefs, etc. The results come back clustered, so that you can see how many hits you had in each category. Warning screens will alert you if you try to click on something which is outside of your contract. This product definitely encourages you to just put in a few terms (like Google) and see what happens. Behind the scenes, WestlawNext is making use of all West's proprietary content, such as indexes and topic & key numbers, to try to bring back results that are right on point.
I love the idea of making use of all that stuff, like 'see also' entries in indexes, which has gotten a little lost in electronic searching. As a searcher, though, it makes me feel a bit as if I am giving up control. I am trusting Westlaw to make the connections, and I don't get to see exactly how the new search algorithms are doing that. I think because West anticipated that those of us who are used to 'terms and connectors' or Boolean searches would have trouble letting go, they are still allowing these types of searches in WestlawNext, and I do appreciate that.
The big question mark for me with WestlawNext is the pricing. It was not discussed at the breakfast, but WestlawNext is a separate product from traditional Westlaw. It presumably requires its own contract and has its own pricing structure.
Overall I think WestlawNext looks clean and intuitive to use. I am really looking forward to giving it a try. In the next few weeks, I hope to get a test password, so I'll let you know what I think as I actually start playing with the product.
Comments
The big ponder apostle for me
The big ponder apostle for me with WestlawNext is the pricing. It was not discussed at the breakfast, but WestlawNext is a unconnected product from traditional Westlaw. It presumably requires its own hire and has its own pricing structure.
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mary scott
You can find an extensive
You can find an extensive discussion of my experience negotiating an "upgrade" from Westlaw to WestlawNext at http://tinyurl.com/y8exfkv.
In response to Firm Librarian, my West rep's supervisor told me that I cannot maintain both a Westlaw and a WestlawNext account at the same time. In other words, WestlawNext is not an add-on to a current Westlaw contract.
One more note on WestlawNext:
One more note on WestlawNext: For access, firms will have to pay an additional contract price (i.e., will renegotiate their contracts or add it on to existing contracts).
Thanks for your WestlawNext
Thanks for your WestlawNext review. From a conversation with my rep, it looks as though the pricing will be the opposite of traditional Westlaw pricing: I.e., instead of paying for the *search,* you will be paying for each document you view (plus a small charge for each search--$60, I think). Westlaw has apparently done some research and the overall price of using WestlawNext is intended to be just a little bit higher, based on how many documents they presume users will look at, than traditional Westlaw. Personally, I have long felt that once this paradigm shift occurred--i.e., we paid not for the searches we ran but for the results we downloaded or viewed, that that would be truly revolutionary development. If you think about it, this is how Google Scholar already works and it is clearly the paradigm for the future.
For librarians, of course, it still means we have to subscribe to large databases or to the Jenkins Law Library so our users can have access without having to pay for each article they retrieve using a credit card. (In fact, Lexis results are now available on Google Scholar and individual docs can be purchased using a credit card. It is unclear how much of the LexisNexis universe is retrievable on Google Scholar, but results I have seen largely overlap with Heinonline coverage.)