As the semester has gotten underway, and you’ve logged into Westlaw, you may have noticed that things look very different. There has been a lot of handwringing about how the new platform design centers its artificial intelligence to do legal research on your behalf. Rightfully so? That’s more complicated than it seems at first glance and deserves some in-depth consideration. Why has Westlaw made this choice? One that seems to upset legal research experts so much? It’s worth looking at the history of the company and what guided similar changes in the past to glean some insight.
John B. West, and his West Publishing Company (founded with brother Horatio) began publishing The Syllabi in 1876. It was originally a weekly news sheet that reported on cases decided in the Minnesota courts. The unmet need was timely information about developments in the law, as publication of the opinions took much longer otherwise. It was wildly successful and their efforts soon expanded into Wisconsin and the product was renamed The Northwestern Reporter. This is what eventually developed into the West National Reporter system as we now know it.
But there was a problem. That’s suddenly a whole lot of case law to digest (no pun intended). How do you find the opinions relevant for your case? The West American Digest System was the key (no pun intended) that unlocked the puzzle. Each case was evaluated by an attorney-editor, who summarized the points of law present. These are the headnotes you see at the beginning of a West published opinion and still see on the database today. Those headnotes are then assigned a topic and key and arranged accordingly in a multi-volume set of books called Digests. In this way, you had a subject index of sorts to find specific points of law and you still do!
And that was how research was done for close to a century. Until the advent of … dun dun duuunnn … the computer. While Lexis was founded as the first company to get the law up and running on a terminal, Westlaw was hot on their heels. Law schools in 1990 first began giving students codes to create their own accounts and access the database on their own machines. And having the text of the law electronically available naturally opened up new ways of finding legal materials. But in the early days of these databases, the information was rigidly organized and to run searches you had to know how to communicate to the database exactly what you wanted using everybody’s favorite, Boolean Terms & Connectors. So, while the law was more directly available than ever before, you still had to know how things were organized and anticipate the kind of language you hoped to find, and craft your search accordingly. Also, again, still can to this day!
This started to change when I first went to law school with the launch of Westlaw Next. I was warned by my librarians at the time not to rely too heavily on the new interface because I might become addicted and my research skills would suffer as a result. Sound familiar? What exactly was on offer with Next that could potentially corrupt my future in the law? This is when Westlaw made the switch from making users make explicit choices about where and how to search, to putting a giant search bar at the top and telling them to give it a go with natural language searching. What had changed in the information environment that made Westlaw think this was the future? In the early 2000s, Google had become so popular that instead of searching the web, we started to refer to it as Googling. User expectations had shifted.
I find it ironic that here we are at a moment in history in which Google itself is threatened by the rise of generative AI and shifting its business models accordingly. Westlaw is simply following suit. While they have employed AI for years to power its relevancy ranking and who knows what else in the background, it has slowly but surely been releasing new AI forward products since ChatGPT came on the scene. Which lands us smack dab at the beginning of the semester and a new homepage that now loads with AI Deep Research front and center. Westlaw is betting that user expectations have shifted once again and wants to be the product that meets the need.
But does AI Deep Research actually meet the need? That’s the subject of a much longer blog, but I’ll just share from my own experience, I never got addicted to what Next offered because it was simply an additional tool to take advantage of on the database. I knew then, and still teach to this day, that all the major developments noted here are still available to us on Westlaw as it exists now, as you’ve already seen me highlight over and over again. Let’s hope that’s the message that sticks. Unfortunately, Westlaw has just made it much harder to find how to do so. At the end of the day, that’s my real beef. Not with AI itself, but making the full range of search possibilities harder to discover, because you should never be relying on a single technique to get the job done. If you need help navigating this new landscape, set up a 1-on-1 with the reference team from our homepage, library.law.uconn.edu, and we’ll be glad to show you the history of Westlaw in action from the convenience of your laptop.
