Today
Wolters Kluwer Law and Business is announcing the release of  “Cheetah for Tax.” Ben Snipes
the Product Line Director for Tax provided me with a preview of the new
platform. The Cheetah Tax Product has a clean intuitive look and  offers a
boatload of new functionality.  The U.S. tax code has been the rigid
backbone of all prior tax products. That backbone is this there, Cheetah also
offers flexible alternative approaches to research. Cheetah offers a high level
personalization as well as a variety of options for search, navigation and
display.
Today’s press release quotes Dean Sonderegger, Vice President & GM, Legal
Markets Group:  “With Cheetah we built a platform that is specifically
designed to support the attorney workflow and we will continue to add new
capabilities and practice areas to this platform to help a new generation of
attorneys re-envision the way they work.”
The Code Rules CCH
has held a firm grip on Tax research for over 150 years. When CCH launched
their original tax product in 1913, it was considered rather revolutionary,
offering weekly news of  regulatory updates (by mail.)  For most of
that time the Internal Revenue Code was the central organizing principle of all tax
research. Wolters Kluwer/CHH has been chasing the right technology for decades.
They migrated from the multi-volume print  Standard Federal Tax Reporter,
to cd-rom, to online dial-up , to web based (and much maligned) Intelliconnect and now Cheetah for
Tax.
Cheetah
for Tax
 is the second product to launch on the Cheetah platform.  The
Securities law product was released in 2015. Cheetah is not a revision of
Intelliconnect—It is a whole new platform. The Cheetah team took the 7.5
million tax documents from Intelliconnect and de-duped,  re-coded and enriched
each document with meta data. A major goal was to move beyond the book paradigm
and allow lawyers to cluster  all related content, no matter where it was
originally published.
Although
tax lawyers can continue or organize their research around tax code sections,
in Cheetah they have many more options. Topic, Entity type (LLC, partnerships,
nonprofits etc.), jurisdiction, subject can be selected for inclusion on a
personalized “home page” or used as filters.
The Cheetah Home Page – Before Personalization
Cool
Tools:
Cheetah is loaded with new functionality:

  • ·        
    There
    is prominent citation search box in the right corner.
  • ·        
    Content
    includes, primary law, analysis, legislative history  and news.
  • ·        
    All
    of the Smartcharts have been migrated.
  •       
    All
    of a subscribers content can be accessed from home page.
  • ·        
    Customize
    the page to see only what you want. Select code sections, topics and
    jurisdictions of importance to you.What you use will be there in one click.
  • ·        
    All
    the quick reference tools are in the same location on each page.
  • ·        
    Red
    envelope – give feedback. Send your recommendations directly to Editor Ben Snipes.
  • ·        
    Seach across all subscribed content:
    federal, international and state and local.
  • ·        
    International
    content covers 270 jurisdictions which can be both searched and compared by
    country using “smart charts.”.
  • ·        
    Entity
    type search allows a lawyer to focus on tax impact on an LLC, partnership a
    corporation, nonprofit?
  • ·        
    “Content
    flags” Tell you clearly what kind of content you are looking at e.g. a statute, a
    temporary regulation, a treatise. This feature assures that a new lawyer always understands
    what kind of document they are reviewing. It clearly shows which documents have
    the force of law and which are interpretive.
  • ·        
    A-Z
    lists are coming so lawyers can navigate to a specific titles.
International Smartcharts

Existing
Subscribers
:
All Intelliconnect subscribers will have the option to migrate to Cheetah or
remain on the Intelliconnect platform. They will see all the same CCH and Aspen
content which was availableto them  on Intelliconnect.
Will
Cheetah entice the majority of print Standard Federal Tax Reporter subscribers to
give up their books?  Since Cheetah  will offer both the code
structure and  topical research, they  will now be clearly in direct
competition with  RIA Checkpoint from Thomson Reuters which offers a
topical approach to tax research. Will more tax lawyers be willing to go will a single online source since Cheetah offers both topical and code views?
Wolters
Kluwer along with their competitors, Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and
BloombergBNA are in a fierce competition to control practitioners desktops by
offering not only content but workflow enhancements.The winners are the lawyers who can count on the continuing development of faster, better and more integrated desktop tools like Cheetah.
More information at: Cheetah For Tax Law