| WestlawNext Preview |
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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. |
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Submitted by: Jenny Hohenstein, Research Services Manager
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Comments (3)February 8, 2010
| The Future of Westlaw and Lexis |
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Ever wish that computerized legal research could be more like searching Google? You’re about to get your wish fulfilled. For those of you who haven’t heard, Westlaw and Lexis are revamping their databases to make searching and finding legal materials much simpler and efficient. Westlaw recently debuted their new product called WestlawNext and Lexis is rumored to be unveiling their “New Lexis” later this year. Here at Jenkins we’re not too concerned about all the changes to come- hey we worked through the switch from dial up to the web! We’ll let you know what we think about WestlawNext after we attend a preview on February 19. Stay tuned! |
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Submitted by: Nancy Garner, Assistant Director of Knowledge Services
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December 3, 2009
| Malamud Says DOJ Pays $4 Mil For PACER. That Doesn’t Even Qualify As a Rounding Error, Budget-Wise |
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Wired has a story about how Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.org FOIA’d documents from the Department of Justice showing that it paid the U.S. courts system $4 million for PACER access. I think the work Malamud’s been doing is great. I’m a fan. But he *does* have an axe to grind wrt PACER. As the article says, “it’s not so odd for one agency to pay another one for services.” They charge each other for stuff all the time. And for a department with a $26 billion budget, $4 million is so small it’s beyond a rounding error. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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November 17, 2009
| Quick Hits |
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The New Oxford American Dictionary has anointed “unfriend” as 2009’s Word of the Year. Um … OK. Beats “tramp stamp”, I guess. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I wish him well. Lexis now has an iPhone app that allows you to search for a case by citation and review its Shepard’s Summary. (Link via ResourceShelf.) Google Scholar now searches federal and state cases, plus law journals. (Link via BeSpacific.) … And speaking of hits, here’s why I’m glad, apart from the cost, why my son has chosen cross-country/track over hockey. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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November 11, 2009
| Remembering the Great War. It Made Me the Man I Am Today. |
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The most important tools a search instructor has are good examples. You treasure the ones that best illustrate the concepts you’re trying to get across to your students. At the same time, you’re always trying to cultivate new ones for future classes. One of my favorites involves my dad. I use him whenever I discuss the Hidden Web, which is the term used to describe content that Google can’t index. My dad died in 1971, two decades before the Web was invented. A Google search for his name retrieves nothing about him. But it makes sense that he’s not in Google’s index, right? Wrong. There are at least 4 publicly-accessible databases containing info on my dad, one of which is the Ellis Island Records site. I often show students how much genealogical data I can acquire about him from just this one source. Recently I realized that I had been focusing for years on the mechanics of finding that data, but had never seriously bothered to analyze it. His record (registration required) says that 16 year-old Domenico Giancaterino arrived in the U.S. from Penne, Italy on January 26, 1916. That was about a month before his 17th birthday, I think. (I never got a straight answer from anyone about how old he really was, so I’ll take the government’s word for it.) And that makes me wonder: did his family ship him over here to spare him from the Italian Front? I’ll never know for sure. The people who could have told me have all died. But this could be my own personal butterfly effect. If not for the First World War, Domenico might never have crossed the Atlantic in order to become Dominick. And where would that have left me? |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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October 28, 2009
| FWIW: AccidentSketch |
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For your edification: Lifehacker has a short post about AccidentSketch, an online tool for drawing accident scenes. Speaking of edification, I am most amused by the comments section. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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September 11, 2009
| Now We’re Getting Somewhere |
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The Wall Street Journal reports (sub required) that the Practising Law Institute is offering Kindle versions of more than 2/3 of its titles: “The PLI said 67 of its 90 titles are now available in the Kindle format. ‘Our average book is easily over 1,000 pages, and a number are multivolume sets, so you’re talking about a lot of information,’ said William Cubberley, who oversees the PLI’s publishing program. ‘You’ll be able to carry an entire law library on your Kindle.’ ” Not only that, but no more filing! “Traditionally, lawyers buy PLI books whose binders allow them to insert new material and discard the old. PLI customers typically receive annual supplements priced at $125. With the Kindle, users will be able to delete old versions of their texts and substitute new books. The digital editions are also searchable.” Finally this whole Kindle thingie is starting to make sense to me. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 20, 2009
| Your Iris Scan Is Safe (For Now) |
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Wired reports that U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Holwell has barred bankrupt defunct airport VIP service Clear from “selling or otherwise transferring, disclosing to third parties or maintaining in an unsecure manner [hah!] any personal bibliographic or biometric information that was provided to it” by its customers. You may recall that back in late June Clear’s owners indicated that they were trying to find a buyer for the data so that the service could possibly continue. Judge Holwell ruled that the Clear Membership Agreement “expressly prohibits such unauthorized disclosure.” Of much more interest to me personally was the fact that I could retrieve Judge Holwell’s ruling from PACER for free, using RECAP. And I wasn’t like one of those BitTorrent leeches — I poked around for a bit, looking at some other PACER docs, and RECAP uploaded them to the service. Hotness! |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 19, 2009
| Free Court Dockets, But I Gotta Wonder … |
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Gary Price points to a new, free docket service for federal courts called FreeCourtDockets.com. According to a press release, “Free Really Means Free: To manage its data costs the site may at times limit how many dockets a user can retrieve in a single day, but no paid subscription or credit card information is required. As advertising revenue continues to increase this limitation will be increased or eliminated. At this time access is granted by invitation only, and anyone can quickly apply for an invitation on the site.” I haven’t used the site yet, but it appears to be legit. What bothers me, however, are all the Google ads they plaster on every available shred of white space. I know they’re trying to survive as a free service, but c’mon, 14 Google ads per page? |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 14, 2009
| Oh, I Get It Now … RECAP is PACER Spelled Backwards |
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I worked that out on my own. Only took me 40 minutes or so. Anyway, there’s a real interesting Firefox extension called RECAP that automatically uploads documents you view from PACER to a publicly-accessible database on the Internet Archive. RECAP also alerts you if the document you want to view is already in the IA database. That way, you save the $.08/page PACER cost. (I’m always amazed at how many people dislike PACER. I guess because it’s so much cheaper than Lexis or Westlaw, I assume everybody’s OK with paying what amounts to chump change for federal cases. But I’m wrong.) So if you install the extension are you, in effect, the law librarian version of one of those BitTorrent copyright violators? No, according to RECAP’s About page: “The court-created documents provided by PACER are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction. The question is a little bit more complicated for documents filed by third parties, so we asked a prominent legal scholar about it. He told us that such documents may be under copyright, but he thought redistributing copyrighted court documents was legal under copyright’s fair use doctrine. However, there is very little caselaw in this area, so it’s impossible to be sure. We certainly believe citizens ought to have the freedom to share public court documents, and we hope RECAP users will help to establish that precedent.” (But they do waffle a bit at the end, don’t they?) There’s a short video you can watch to get the hang of how RECAP works. I’ve just installed it, but I’m waiting to finish this post before I restart Firefox and give RECAP a test-drive. Link via TechCrunch. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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