Thomson Reuters is launching Westlaw Edge, its next-generation legal research system, for the UK market. Edge was previously released in the US with a big razzle-dazzle, so the giant legal tech maker doing this for the world’s second largest legal market is a big deal, at least for a lot of customers this side of the Pond.
And, given that this is a very function-heavy legal research product, it’s best to simply to let Thomson Reuters set out what it does:
- ‘Westlaw Edge UK combines data visualisation and other advanced technologies with the quality and authoritativeness of Westlaw’s content to expedite legal research and offer new insights that would have otherwise taken significantly more time to uncover.
- Its user interface has been streamlined based on extensive research to display the right tools in the context of the legal research session, including new filters, updated toolbars, documents optimised for easier scanning, and more.
- In addition, the new user interface incorporates modern accessibility features to better serve all customers.
Other features of Westlaw Edge UK include:
- Legislation Compare helps users understand how a law may affect a client, organisation or industry at various points in time and allows customers to easily compare versions of historical, current and prospective legislation across UK, English, Welsh, Northern Ireland and Scottish jurisdictions with the key differences marked. Additionally, Legislation Compare provides a view into what the law may look like in the future to help users anticipate what its impact may be.
- UK-EU Divergence Tracker enhances the capabilities of Legislation Compare and provides a side-by-side comparison of EU and UK content to help users understand how legislation diverges and deviates, ensuring clients and legal organisations remain compliant. UK-EU Divergence Tracker will be available in September 2020.
- Case Analytics transforms case research through data visualisation and is invaluable in classifying, digesting and summarising each judgment and law report, along with Westlaw UK’s treatment flags and links to legislation, journals and texts. The precedent map in Case Analytics provides a view to how the case has been cited and enables tracing back lines of authority to ensure customers are relying on good law and that no line of argument has been missed. Its Citations in Context feature provides a review of relevant extracts of case text where a case is mentioned in relation to the user’s issue.
- Westlaw Questions allows users to find commonly asked questions and return succinct results with key paragraphs highlighted. Based on content curated by Thomson Reuters editorial teams, Westlaw Questions allows users to find up-to-date and authoritative information quickly and easily, with suggested relevant research and resources tailored to the legal researcher’s needs.
- Legislation Alerts allows users to anticipate the likely impact of legislative change so they can deliver the best advice. By sending notifications of changes to legislation to a user’s inbox, they can move away from manual checking and focus on the work that matters most. With additional notifications for citing references, a user can be sure that if anything changes, they’ll be instantly notified and can pre-empt demands.’
So, there you go. Good to see that the UK is not being left out by the giants.
P.S. Lucinda Case, head of Legal Professionals Europe at Thomson Reuters, said : ‘Westlaw Edge UK provides customers the latest workflow technology tools to continue collaborating and meeting the expectations of their organisation for quality, transparency and speed, while also delighting clients.’
Let us know if you are delighted or not.