Law Firms Have No Idea Why In-House Counsel Fire Them -- Westlaw's Newest Product Aims To Help Firms Stay On The Job

With its new platform, Westlaw brings complex tools to bear to provide straightforward solutions.

At a summit of top legal technology commentators earlier this week, Thomson Reuters unveiled its newest platform, WestlawEdge, offering a sneak peek into the future of legal research. Of all the features demonstrated and testimonials presented, the most striking visual wasn’t a screenshot from the product at all, but a pair of graphs laying out the gulf between in-house and outside counsel.

When asked why they get fired by clients, the overwhelming majority of law firm attorneys pointed to cost overruns with only a handful considering their own lack of value or efficiency. At least their egos remain intact. Meanwhile, when asked why they fire firms, the in-house folks, by almost the exact same overwhelming majority, pointed to a lack of value from their outside counsel, with only a paltry number really worried about the budget.

Ironically, both sides believed they had good communication.

Thomson Reuters hopes that WestlawEdge can cure these inefficiencies and give firms the advantage they need to stay in their clients’ good graces.

The technology behind WestlawEdge is impressive. When Khalid Al-Kofahi, the Robert Ford of Westlawworld, offered a “simplified” explanation of how the platform performs all the AI-assisted tasks it offers, the flowchart filled the screen with arrows and text going every which way. Thankfully, lawyers don’t really have to understand how it works, only that it works.

As he put it though, the key to being an answer company is understanding the questions. As we advance farther and farther from the cleverly crafted boolean searches of yesteryear, WestlawEdge revamps its natural language search capabilities to look beyond the key terms in the search and divine meaning from your query. When a user asks about the elements of a claim, they aren’t necessarily looking for a case that has the word “elements” within some proximity of a given term, they want an answer to their question. Armed with extensive usage logs, Thomson Reuters built a system that gets lawyers answers to the questions they need by arming their system with a sense of how lawyers ask questions. That makes for a shorter distance between question and answer, and that’s the precious efficiency the client craves.

With its new orange flags — which, for some reason aren’t “flags,” but we’re all going to call them flags anyway — machine learning saves attorneys from potential disaster by identifying potentially bad law that direct history citators could never find. Thomson Reuters demonstrated the critical importance of this distinction by walking us through a Florida procedural quirk that the Florida Supreme Court overruled, but that was cited as a given for decades — often without even mentioning the original case. That’s not going to reveal a red flag or even a yellow flag, even though the cases are just as problematic to a litigator trying not to embarrass themselves in front of their client.

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To be honest, the legal tech market’s enthusiasm for analytics can come off as gimmicky. Does it really matter that a judge denies motions to dismiss 10 percent more often than the district average? How does that have to do with your case? On the other hand, WestlawEdge’s robust and user-friendly analytics get to the heart of what a lawyer might want from this data. The system lets you drill down to find all the motions to dismiss involving the specific area of law at issue and — for federal and some key state jurisdictions — allows the user to read the judge’s opinions and the underlying briefs to draw lessons from those who’ve tackled these matters in this courtroom before. Those are searches many lawyers already conduct manually — WestlawEdge makes these searches nearly instantaneous and incredibly convenient to conduct from one screen.

If delivering value is the key to sustaining a relationship with a client, WestlawEdge offers users a powerful tool with a simple interface to get the job done. As an Am Law 100 attorney who has tested WestlawEdge put it, “You would be stupid not to use it.” Based on the demonstration we saw this week, this lawyer has a point.

Earlier: Move Over Westlaw – Meet the Next-Generation Westlaw Edge, With Advanced AI and Analytics


HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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