CRIV / Bloomberg Law Semiannual Call

Jeanne Frazier Price
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs & Director of the Wiener-Rogers Law Library
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Date: Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Participants: Jeanne Frazier Price (CRIV Liaison to Bloomberg Law), Lauren Kaplan (Head of Strategy, Bloomberg Law), Michelle Hook Dewey (AALL Executive Board Liaison to CRIV) & Ross Pendley (Customer Experience Manager, Bloomberg Law)

Updates from Bloomberg Law

Mike Bernier, former Director of Library Relations at Bloomberg Law, had long served as Bloomberg’s liaison to CRIV. Mike retired at the end of November 2022. While we very much miss Mike’s helpfulness, good nature, and kindness, we look forward to working with Lauren and Ross.

The update on Bloomberg Law products centered on (1) improvements in findability and accessibility of materials on Bloomberg; (2) enhancements to docket information and the discoverability of information about dockets and the documents in them; (3) additions to practical guidance resources; and (iv) an increased presence on the part of Bloomberg Law in trending issues important to the legal community. Highlights from Bloomberg Law follow.

Improvements in Findability/Accessibility

  • Users can now search by phrase within a document, rather than having to sift through appearances of the individual words that make up the phrase
  • Sorting options have improved
  • Recommendations based on past use are suggested

Docket and Litigation Enhancements

  • New courts added (additional state and local courts; Puerto Rico Court of First Instance) and some progress on lifting access restrictions in other courts
  • New filtering options for search results (e.g., resolution, settlement noted, class action, county court)
  • Patent Trial and Appeal Board cases can now be filtered by inter partes review, covered business method, post-grant review
  • Improved docket search functionality from the initial search option
  • New fields for filtering within docket search results: case outcome, case settlement, potential class action, case status, case length in days
  • Causes of Action field and complaint summaries added to Docket Alerts for federal district court cases

Practical Guidance Improvements

  • Labor & Employment
    • New customized chart-builder functionality for local paid leave and local minimum wage information
    • Enhanced practical guidance on pay equity
    • Updated 8th edition of ABA-jointly published The Developing Labor Law: The Board, the Courts, and the National Labor Relations Act
    • Additions to resources on employee immigration issues, including docket tracking and updated practical guidance on employee hiring
  • Transactional Drafting Tools
    • Additions of different types of agreements to the Draft Analyzer
    • Additions to sample contract clauses to cover trending issues related to, among other things, supply-chain challenges
  • Environmental, Social, and Governance Issues
    • New toolkit for the health industry, including specific information focused on drug retailers, health care delivery and manager care
    • New toolkit for the manufacturing industry, including specialized guidance for companies engaging in mining, oil and gas activities, electronics-related activities, and technology
  • Privacy and Data Security
    • Updated home page and enhanced alert features
    • Enhancements to functionality for building state bill proposal searches for biometric and consumer privacy initiatives
    • Enhanced access to information on Edgar filings and transactional precedents, dockets and court opinions, state privacy resources, international materials, and federal statutes, regulations, and agency materials
    • Enhanced client alerts related to the General Data Protection Regulation, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
  • Banking and Finance
    • New practice pages on fintech compliance and the UCC
    • Updated practice center features including new state banking and finance regulation and federal banking and finance regulation trackers, each with alerting and filtering functionality
    • Improvements to state and federal securities coverage and enhancements to the functionality of the Rule 506 Form D Filings Chart Builder
  • Emerging Issues
    • Three new In Focus features
      • One that enables discovery of A.I.-related information and documents across practice areas, including an interactive state map linking to a comparison table of A.I.-related legislation and regulations
      • A second focusing on federal and state developments in abortion law arising out of the Dobbs decision
      • And another on pay transparency at state and local levels

Engagement in Current Issues

Bloomberg continues its support of both:

  • The Law School Innovation Program which identifies and honors law schools and faculty that implement programming designed to advance new methodologies in teaching
  • The DEI Framework which recognizes law firms that meet standardized and transparent criteria in measuring diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Requests for Assistance

Since the last liaison call, CRIV had received only one request for assistance involving Bloomberg products. That request related to the sometimes unavailability of downloads from particular dockets; users would receive an error message to the effect that the particular document required courier retrieval (which was inaccurate – the document was available for download on PACER). Bloomberg had acknowledged the problem but had shared no timetable for resolution. Similar concerns had been voiced on the law library directors listserv. Mike Bernier was contacted, investigated the problem, and quickly got back in touch with both the CRIV liaison and the librarian who had submitted the request. The problem, which had to do with multi-part pleadings in particular courts, was identified and largely fixed. The requestor described Mike’s responsiveness and help as “fantastic.”

Questions from CRIV

The call concluded with questions raised by the CRIV liaison. First, with respect to print materials, Bloomberg continues to publish only tax materials in print. There are no current plans to change that approach. As to the availability of stand-alone access to the ABA/Bloomberg Law Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct, Bloomberg representatives believed that such access is available and intend to follow up with additional information. Some concerns were raised about the difficulty of accessing Bloomberg News / Bloomberg Terminal articles in the Bloomberg Law platform. Lauren and Ross acknowledged that this was a known issue, that improvements were underway, and that, in the meantime, there were work-arounds. Finally, the Bloomberg representatives were asked about the reception to the changes in access and pricing for Pacer materials for academic customers that were instituted some time ago in order to curb some unexpectedly high use. Lauren and Ross suggested that those changes seem to now be fairly well-accepted among the academic user community.

CRIV / Thomson Reuters Semiannual Call

Elizabeth Outler
eResources Librarian
LAC Group

Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Participants: Elizabeth Outler (CRIV Liaison to Thomson Reuters), Mark Baker (Director of Product Management, Thomson Reuters), Blythe McCoy (Thomson Reuters Information Management Consultant), Michelle Hook Dewey (AALL Executive Board Liaison to CRIV)

Thomson Reuters provided an overview of their new platform, Westlaw Precision.

  • Thomson Reuters developed Westlaw Precision because legal research still takes a lot of time and lawyers are often worried they’ve missed something important.
    • Searches inevitably miss relevant documents due to language variation because courts use different terms than your search to refer to the same concept.
    • How to improve research outcomes and time spent for researchers?
    • Addition of new Precision Attributes to improve case law research in Westlaw Precision: legal issues and outcomes, facts, motions and outcomes, causes of action, party types.
    • New and intuitive classification systems to use these attributes for searching, browsing results, and filtering.
  • Added 250 attorneys to editorial staff and trained them to capture the Precision Attributes from cases (in selected topics for the first phase rollout of Westlaw Precision).
    • Machines still can’t do it at the level of quality and reliability needed.
    • Attorney-editor tagging followed by extensive quality control process.
  • New Browse Boxes in search result display help researchers quickly and confidently determine whether to read each case – Browse Box includes legal issue and outcome, material facts from the decision, causes of action and motion types (with outcome) from the decision.
  • Build a Precision Search by selecting issues and facts in the Precision Search template (on the home page), or run a search in the main search box and then use the new Precision filters to limit your result to cases with your issue, facts, and outcome.
    • Can also use Precision filters to assist with issue-spotting (helpful for law students or more junior attorneys).
  • Launched with 8 topics (Antitrust, Commercial Law, Employment Law, Federal Civil Procedure, Federal Class Actions, Federal Discovery and Evidence, Federal Remedies, and Securities Law); post-launch released 3 more: Insurance, Arbitration and Real Estate. State Civil Procedure coming soon.
  • Back to 2010 for all published cases in each topic, plus older leading cases (frequently cited).
  • Results from a large test involving over 100 attorneys showed that Westlaw Precision users were twice as fast at finding relevant cases compared to Westlaw Edge.
  • Significant quality improvements – 90% of participants said Westlaw Precision helped them find cases they might not have found otherwise.
  • Rollout to law schools in January.
  • Developers are very interested in feedback from users.

Additional features available in Westlaw Precision rollout:

  • KeyCite Cited With – what other cases are cited alongside my case?
    • Adjust how closely together the cases are cited.
    • Citing relationship filter – allows you to filter out cases that don’t cite your case or are cited by your case.
  • KeyCite Overruled in Part – attempts to solve the “red flag problem,” where a red flag makes a case look like bad law just because one point was overruled.
    • Helps navigate directly to that point of law and highlights the operative language so you don’t have to hunt for it.
  • Graphical view of research history
    • Helps navigate research history so you can reconstruct your steps.
    • Highlights documents where you spent a lot of time or returned multiple times.
  • Keep list
    • Each item in search result you can bookmark to add to your list (up to 50).
    • Remains across research sessions – move to folders if you want to organize or retain.
  • Hide details
    • Click and it will minimize the info displayed in search results so that you can tell you already looked at the case.
  • Outline builder
    • Create a research outline in Westlaw and drag language from a case or other document into it.
    • Can submit it to Quick Check and find related case law.
    • Can export to Word.

Summer Associate & Intern Guidance from Vendors

The three leading legal research vendors – Bloomberg, LexisNexis, and Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) – each offer free online guidance and resources to help law students and new graduates use their products in the legal workplace.

These resources are current for summer 2022 and may be helpful as a complement to on-the-job training or as a refresher on platform-specific research tools and tactics. Consider sending the links below to your students, associates, or interns for their preparation and reference this summer.

Keeping Up with the Vendors – In Their Own Words

Tracking developments in legal information vendors’ products and policies is an important part of many law librarians’ jobs, and it’s a valuable pursuit for keeping current in the profession.

While the major legal database and content providers all offer a variety of access points and formats for news about changes to their platforms and offerings, being aware of them all, let alone connecting with them regularly, can be a challenge.

To help, the list below brings together resources for staying abreast of announcements and product-related communications from Bloomberg, Fastcase, HeinOnline, LexisNexis, Westlaw, and Wolters Kluwer. Be sure to bookmark, subscribe, follow, etc. whichever are useful to you, and/or save this blog post for future reference. Please email me at christensena@wlu.edu if you know of anything missing; I’ll plan to keep it updated.

Bloomberg Law

Fastcase

HeinOnline

LexisNexis

Thomson Reuters Legal / Westlaw

Wolters Kluwer

Lexis+ “Legal News Hub” Tracks Headlines, Trends from Law360

In case you missed it (like me, admittedly, until a chat with our academic account rep this week), LexisNexis has recently incorporated a valuable feature to Lexis+: Legal News Hub.

Accessible from the tool and task icons at the left of the Lexis+ homepage, the Legal News Hub provides a continuously updated stream of headlines and content from all of Law360’s topical news areas and Law360 Pulse, the specialized news platform that focuses on the business of law.

It is available to all Lexis+ subscribers, and those who additionally subscribe to the Law360 platforms can view entire articles in either the Legal News Hub or Law360 environments.

The Lexis+ Legal News Hub provides access to:

  • Top Stories: The main page shows headlines and concise summaries for the top 20 recent articles across all Law360 and Law360 Pulse areas.
  • Trending: The Trending section lists the articles currently receiving the most views on Law360 and Law360 Pulse.
  • Practice Areas and Industries: News coverage for all 76 topics, industries, and practice and geographical areas provided by Law360 and Law360 Pulse.
  • Searching: Users may search all Legal News Hub content for the most recent 20 stories that match their search terms.

While the Legal News Hub most clearly enhances the Lexis+ platform for those without access to the Law360 and Law360 Pulse products, all users can benefit from this interface in an age when headlines—and a brief summary to boot—are often enough to stay up to speed on developments across the legal landscape.

For more information, see the LexisNexis website, their July press release, or their short YouTube video introduction to the Legal News Hub.

A screenshot of the Legal News Hub, accessible from the icon at the left of the Lexis+ homepage.