Westlaw law school is a part of a giant legal venture called Westlaw which is owned by the Thompson Reuters group. A US venture, it consists of a host of websites which are devoted to providing resources to law students and lawyers for research, acts as library sources with updates on cases, journals and others.
Westlaw has a host of websites, some educational such as the Westlaw Education Network as well as many international ventures such as the Westlaw UK, Westlaw China, Westlaw Canada and others.
The websites of Westlaw law school, Westlaw International and others have some key features whcih are common characteristics of the Westlaw sites in general.
KeyCite is one such feature which checks the status of citations and updates the same at most of the relevant sites. Citations are very often referred by lawyers and law students for research on cases and also for classroom assignments. The citations are often reversed, revised, modified and so on and the latest status of a citation needs to be known by a lawyer or student who is referring to it at any point in time. KeyCite offers such services to citations available on the various Westlaw websites.
Westcheck is another feature of these websites which helps one to extract citations from any of the Westlaw websites and puts it forward to KeyCite for updation of the same. westcheck.com is such a standalone program which performs these functions as well as provides word processing software for editing or working on citations.
Brieftools is another feature of Westlaw websites which allows one to extract citations as per one’s requirement and other types of files can also be retrieved.
The West Key Number System is one of the most reconised forms of legal taxonomy and is a comprehensive classification system in the US legal scene. This system has the most highly classified index which consists of over 110,000 topics as well as related sub topics.
WestCiteAdvisor is a feature which allows one to form citations on these legal sites and Westlaw CourtExpress is a featurewhich allows one to search for docket numbers related to court cases and so forth. Westlaw Watch monitors the updates and news in the legal arena and adds to databases accordingly.Westlaw web plus is a feature whereby one can search for relevant topics over the world wide web.
Thus, Westlaw law school and other legal websites are dedicated in offering comprehensive services to the legal community across countries.