Thomson Reuters and WestLaw today announced the release of an enhanced legal research platform called Quick Check as part of their WestLaw Edge suite of products. Quick Check uses sophisticated algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning to search and find better and more relevant cites and authorities to use in legal writing.
It works like this: you upload your document securely into the WestLaw Edge cloud and Quick Check then searches for and provides citations and authorities that you did not include. It arranges these by various headings and into a relevancy hierarchy. It also will tell you whether the citations you have used are troublesome or perhaps not totally on the mark, perhaps triggering some more thought about those citations. According to WestLaw, Quick Check will find highly relevant authority, secondary sources and other related briefs and memoranda to ensure that its customers find what they might have otherwise missed. It will also prepare a Table of Authorities, a pain in the ass portion of any brief no matter who does it.
With Quick Check you can evaluate the work product of a colleague or outside counsel, or repurpose an old document to quickly identify the newest authority. It can be used to check your own work, and to prepare for oral argument and any other situation where citations and authorities might become important like client meetings, mediations or even conferance presentations. I really like this last use case since it could prevent you from being blind sided in front of a judge or even client by some new case or one you may have missed. The tool looks to be easy to use and pretty intuitive which will make it popular.
According to Khalid Al-Kofahi, vice president of Research & Development at Thomson Reuters, “Westlaw Edge Quick Check achieves [this] through a combination of features, including the eyeglass symbol on previously viewed documents, case outcome, and context provided by other cases cited in the document. It’s bolstered by additional AI capabilities such as the relevant snippets that help users quickly determine whether a recommended document warrants closer review.” Lots of ways Quick Check can save time and effort.
The beauty of the product lies, of course, in WestLaw’s massive data base of cases and authorities. The biggest issue of AI in law is data availability: few companies can match the WestLaw data base when it comes to case, regularity and statutory related data and materials. WestLaw has been around a long time, is a well known provider and, as I previously discussed, jumped into litigation AI and data analytics about a year ago with its WestLaw Edge product which enables data analytics not just of citation and authorities for research purposes but for behavior of lawyers and judges. Quick Check is the next step to suppling these analytics across the litigation framework and is a fine tuning of WestLaw’s legal research offerings.
Westlaw Edge Quick Check will be available to Westlaw Edge subscribers on July 24 and will be included in the standard WestLaw Edge subscription.