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Thomson Reuters Westlaw is the legal research service that generations of attorneys and legal teams have depended on to work more efficiently and with total confidence. Law firms today are competing against one another to provide high-quality results at a lower cost to meet client expectations for efficiency. In ongoing research with customers, Thomson Reuters found that complex legal research tasks take an average of six hours, with some taking substantially longer. Attorneys also report that with deadline-driven work, they often felt that they may have missed something important. “We’ve been working with hundreds of attorneys to deeply understand how some research tasks can still take many hours to complete, as well as how mistakes are made, even by experienced lawyers,” said Mike Dahn, senior vice president, Westlaw Product Management.
“We brought together a team of Thomson Reuters research scientists with expertise in AI and legal data with our attorneys who best understand our exclusive collection of law summaries, legal classifications, and legal citation relationships, and had them work with our most talented product designers to address the areas where both new lawyers and experienced practitioners want better tools,” added Dahn. “The result is Westlaw Edge.”
In order to give law firms a leg up in the competitive legal environment, Thomson Reuters created a new version of Westlaw to enable lawyers to move through routine work much faster and help even experienced practitioners avoid mistakes when working on something complex. In addition, Westlaw Edge offers attorneys new insights they’ve never had access to before.
Westlaw Edge represents Thomson Reuters’ largest investment in AI since 2010 and was developed with attorneys and technologists at the Thomson Reuters Center for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing working side-by-side. By combining artificial intelligence and data with the experience, knowledge, and judgment of modern lawyers, firms and legal departments can take their work to the next level.
Multiple Am Law 100 firms, including Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, Shearman & Sterling, and Locke Lord have already started using Westlaw Edge. According to Wendy Butler Curtis, Orrick’s chief innovation officer, “As part of our innovation strategy, we are continually looking at new ways to streamline processes, adopt technologies, and empower our teams. Westlaw Edge is an important part of our innovation toolkit.”
Westlaw Edge is the latest advancement in legal research, providing legal professionals with the next generation of AI-driven legal search, exclusive new warnings for laws that are no longer valid, unrivaled litigation analytics, and sophisticated new research tools that help legal professionals deliver results to clients faster and more accurately.
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