Cheetah
may hold the record for traveling the longest runway from product preview to rollout. I
first wrote about Cheetah in a post “Can Wolters Kluwer Get Its Groove Back?”, back in December of 2013. At that time  the product had been in development for years
and I believed that release was imminent. In July 2014 the Wolters Kluwer booth at
AALL was one of the most buzz-worthy exhibits and almost everyone in the
exhibit hall was sporting Cheetah design sunglasses. Even though Cheetah
generated a lot of interest, Wolters Kluwer executives were not ready to launch.They continued to drive enhancements in design and functionality. Greg
Samios, who was appointed CEO of Wolters Kluwer Law & Business In August
2014 offered this comment on the design strategy. “Our goal was to create the kind of simple, elegant, seamless experience
that is comparable to our customers’ favorite consumer websites. We
specifically designed Cheetah in close collaboration with our customers to
create a product that supports and streamlines their legal research workflow.”

The Cheetah Dashboard

 

 

 

• Aesthetically the colors and
  design are more appealing
• Implemented a new
  dashboard design to improve access to critical, high-value
  content — things like Smart Charts
• Restructured
  content to improve discovery of content items  such as Rules,
  Regulations and Treatises
• Increased the breadth of the
  available content by adding new practice areas and expanding the content
  available on existing practice areas
• They have added functionality to
  allow users to easily search across things like selected jurisdictions or
  specific content items (e.g., search across Folk and Balotti)
• Improved the search
  experience  by allowing users to
  easily append and remove search terms to their queries
• Improved tracker, newsletter, and daily
  sign-up/management to make it easier for users to access these features.

 

• Blue book citation format
  displays adjacent to the text
• Entities and roles searching so
  you can focus on the law that applies to certain entities e.g. board
  member of a benefit corporation
• Contextual orientation. Since
  Cheetah searches across all types of legal content, it labels the material
  type: statute, regulation, caselaw. I think this type of “tutorial
  orientation is especially important for younger lawyers. One of the
  benefit of learning research in books is that your brain experiences the
  different ways that content is organized. On a computer all of the content
  is normalized and it is less obvious that regulations and statutes arise
  from different legal processes and have different weight.
• Users
  can easily search across the firm’s entire subscription or just within a
  selected Practice Area.
• The Table of Contents presentation  reflects the structure of document, Users
  have access to the Table of Contents from anywhere in the document, which
  eases navigation to any section or chapter.
• The
  Search Scope panel allows users to filter by Document Type, Jurisdiction,
  Court, Governing Acts or Entities/Roles.
• They have added a customer feedback feature! Since
  all digital products are “works in progress” it makes sense