Westlaw
A suite of editorial enhancements that makes Westlaw the preferred legal research tool
West attorney-editors empower, simplify, and enrich your research
West attorney-editors add over 20 distinct enhancements to all published (and most unpublished) court opinions. Start your legal research with nothing more than a plain-English description of your topic. Cases, statutes, treatises, forms, journal articles, and more are all brought to light by this initial word search.
Dig deeper, and you'll find unique enhancements that make the information on Westlaw more accurate, more relevant, and easier to understand.
Start your research with a plain-English search on your topic and we do the rest
Headnotes explain every point of law.
- As soon as a case is decided, West attorney-editors painstakingly craft an individual headnote analyzing and summarizing every point of law covered in the opinion
- West headnotes speed you through a long case and let you connect other cases on the same issue
- KeyCite any headnote to pull up just those cases on that point of law, complete with their history
Case synopses summarize and simplify.
- Rather than forcing you to wade through an entire 100-page opinion, Westlaw provides a short paragraph to help you quickly determine its worth:
- Subject of the case and its holding
- Procedural background and prior decisions
- Authoring judge and mandate
- Overruled or abrogated cases and any split in the court
- Integrated holdings, legal principles, procedural history, and related facts provide a term-rich field for your word search to pass through
Statute annotations speed your research and add insight.
- West attorney-editors add special features that help you locate the right statute, see its legislative history, understand it in perspective, and link to cases that interpret it
- West has 90 percent more annotations than other online legal research services
- The table of contents helps you find statutes without citations
- Notes of decisions list the cases that interpret your statute, with a brief summary of the cases and links to the full text for each case
- Historical notes show how your statute evolved; see the effective dates, language from session law, and legislative history
- Cross-references and library references lead you to key numbers, law reviews, treatises, and pertinent forms
Key Number System classifies the law.
- The West Key Number System is the master classification system of U.S. law and widely regarded as the cornerstone of effective legal research.
- West attorney-editors index cases into more than 400 topics and 100,000 points of law
- Only West Topic and Key Numbers enable you to find cases stating or applying a legal concept even if those terms aren't in the opinion
- Quickly find an on-point Key Number so you can identify and locate cases with the same or similar legal concepts and principles
- Use natural language searching to find what you need