Today Thomson Reuters is announcing the release of a new AI enabled enhancement for WESTLAW Edge. Quick Check enables a lawyer to “drop and drag” a brief or motion into the Quick Check AI portal and retrieve a thorough analysis of the cited or missing authority. The Quick Check process takes one minute on average. Michael Dahn, SVP Product Management, Carol Jo Lechtenberg, Westlaw Product Management and T0nya Custis, Sr. Director Research Center for AI and Cognitive Computing hosted a webinar demonstration earlier this week for members of the legal press which I attended.

Quick Check use cases include:  Updating an old brief, quality checking a  working draft and  performing final check before submitting a brief to a court. Lawyers can also examine  an opponent’s brief and motions to gain insight into “omitted authority” or vulnerabilities.

According to  Dahn, Quick Check was designed to reduce the amount of time lawyers spend on research while also increasing their confidence in their research results. The product has been under development since 2016 and was originally slated for release with the launch of Westlaw Edge in 2018.   Custis described Quick Check as “the most ambitious AI problem Thomson Reuters has tried to tackle“

Attorneys and technologists at the Thomson Reuters Center for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing worked together over the past year to optimize the Quick Check results. The technology behind Quick Check simultaneously analyses the structure of the document while executing several search strategies, crawling primary and secondary sources and following citation networks, leveraging the key number system, court and other data attributes. Quick Check  normally completes its analysis in less than a minute.

The Quick Check report enables and attorneys to quickly see a multitude of tags and indicators which validate the cited authorities or suggest additional or better precedents for each issue. The thing that most distinguishes Quick Check from its competitors is that results are organized around the structure of the document. So precedents are listed under the section heading of the native document providing important context.

Westlaw Edge Quick Check

Features worth noting:

  • Results are organized by the heading in the document. The researchers will understand exactly the issue and the context in which a case is being recommended.
  • Quick Check doesn’t recommend any case which has previously been cited.
  • Security is assured because documents are encrypted when they’re uploaded and then destroyed as soon as the processing is completed.
  • Whenever possible they indicate the outcome of the cited cases. Indicate if the outcome wasn’t favorable on appeal on a specific issue.
  • Warnings for cited cases include Keycite flags and “overruling risk.”
  • Recommendation tags (most cited, high court and most recent two years) can be used to filter results.
  • Recommendations of new authority points to “highly relevant’ and can include cases, briefs or secondary sources.
  • Previous interactions with documents e.g. viewing, foldering and annotating are indicated.
  • Uploaded documents can be in either Word ore text based PDF format.
  • A table of authorities feature lists all cases cited in the document and will allow lawyers to download the full text of all the cited authorities.
  • “Potential weakness tab” indicates vulnerable authorities in an opponent’s work.
  • “Omitted authority” tab includes highly relevant cases omitted by the opponent.

 

Case Outcomes. One of the most impressive features  in Quick Check is the “case outcomes” feature which helps researchers understand whether a cited case had favorable outcomes on the issue for which it is being cited. According to Lechtenberg,  65-70% of the cited cases will include a “case outcomes” indicator.  Quick Check represents an advanced citation system which can deliver insights that were virtually unknowable in an analog, text based research world.

Availability Westlaw Edge Quick Check will be available to Westlaw Edge subscribers on July 24 at no additional cost.

 

Westlaw Edge Quick Check Report With Filters