StatutesPlus Revolutionizes Westlaw

It was a rare instance of old technology being superior to new technology. Until the launch of StatutesPlus on Westlaw in February, legal professionals researching statutes were sometimes actually able to perform faster, more efficient research using books rather than going online. That's because statutes research involves covering many different areas - looking at how statutes relate to other statutes, consulting indices, and referencing case law and analytical materials - tasks that could be more easily accomplished by having several texts spread out across a law library table.

"StatutesPlus offers statutory researchers an effective way to find, verify, read and interpret statutes," says David Spencer, director, Product Development for West. "Statutory research is very complex. With StatutesPlus, you don't have to be a power user to find statutes. All of the tools are in one place."

Finding statutes can be a difficult task, but the Search Center in StatutesPlus organizes all of the finding tools for retrieval of statutes documents in one location. In addition, West's print index has been re-created online, allowing researchers to search, expand and collapse the index.

Statutes are affected by new legislation and case law, so verifying them can be challenging. StatutesPlus offers one location for text verification, so a user can easily see whether a statute has been amended or has been held unconstitutional, or whether the statute may be affected by pending legislation.

Prior to StatutesPlus, reading statutes online had several drawbacks. Text browsing was limited to one document at a time, and table of contents browsing, which offered a more complete view of hierarchical headings, contained no text. StatutesPlus allows researchers to browse, in one window, entire chapters or subchapters of statutes.

"It's difficult to know what a statute means until a court interprets or applies it," says Spencer. In order to develop an effective method for interpreting statutes, the StatutesPlus team came up with a streamlined, two-tab model - a Result List tab and a Links tab - that has been adopted across all of westlaw.com. This two-tab model organizes annotations to help users understand what a text means, including headnotes to read how courts have interpreted statutes. Also, it puts KeyCite, West's citation research service, up front in the display to instantly verify statutes and combines KeyCite and editorial references for more efficient researching.

An Overnight Success

Even before its release, the buzz around StatutesPlus was drawing new subscribers to Westlaw. Once StatutesPlus was introduced, legal professionals accessed statutes on Westlaw more than ever before.

"We have given the serious statutory researcher a reason to prefer electronic format to print format," says Forrest Rhoads, vice president, Strategic Product Development for West. "The array of information that is conveniently presented and instantly accessible from the StatutesPlus version of the statutory text makes legal research much simpler and more complete, and is far beyond anything else presently or previously in the electronic legal research marketplace."

That sort of innovation took a tremendous amount of teamwork and coordination. The development of StatutesPlus took more than 18 months. "The challenge was that there were a lot of moving parts," says Spencer. "We needed to rebuild the entire statutes aspect of Westlaw. Changing so many things all at once required extensive interdepartmental coordination, and everything was thoroughly tested."

Because the main components of StatutesPlus are exclusive to West, the service establishes clear market leadership in the statutory online market space and provides a launching pad for future enhancements. In the second half of 2004, additional StatutesPlus releases, including legislative history, improvements to accessing historical statutes and multijurisdictional research tools will debut on Westlaw.

"StatutesPlus was a huge investment that required fortitude," says Spencer. "It reinforces that we're growing organically. We're striking hard within the primary law space. This is not the type of thing that happens every day."

And thanks to StatutesPlus, legal researchers will automatically think of hopping online anytime statutory research needs to done.