Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters has enhanced its leading know-how service, Practical Law, by integrating a selection of content from its legal research solution, Westlaw UK. The closer integration bridges the gap between practical guidance and legal research and creates a seamless experience between the two products.
The integration provides access to cases, legislation and journals from Westlaw UK and enables legal professionals to delve deeper into underlying legal authority and find answers to their most challenging legal issues.
Following the launch of the enhancement, customers can browse and access a selection of full-text documents from more than 500,000 cases, as well as the latest changes in legislation and more than 100 journals from Westlaw UK, all within the Practical Law environment and without the need to navigate between different product interfaces.
In addition to this latest enhancement, we are also adding more content and improved functionality to our online commentary service from Westlaw UK.
Digitising books and looseleafs on Westlaw UK started in 2009 with twelve Common Law Library titles. Since then, the list of available commentary works has grown to over 300. The navigation and user experience have been significantly improved to accommodate our ever expanding library of texts and the growing needs of our customers. The new commentary service will allow our customers to benefit from an enhanced table of contents, intuitive browsing, personalisation features and an optimised reading environment. We prepared a video to help our customers understand this latest development.
These enhancements offer a more fully integrated experience across our know-how and legal research services. They allow Practical Law users, who also have subscriptions to Westlaw UK content, to easily move between know-how resources, legal research and online commentary.
To learn more about the latest development to Practical Law, visit TR.com/confidence.
Andrew Buckley is head of product management for research and commentary at Thomson Reuters Legal UK&I. Email andrew.buckley@thomsonreuters.com.
LexisNexis
In 2017 we have been working hard to enhance our Lexis products, not least in the area of search.
Lexis®Library, our flagship research tool, contains 11 million documents. How do you find the ones you want? Some people like to browse. Some love advanced search forms and complex algorithms. But most prefer a simple – but powerful – search. This is why we’ve upgraded the main search box on the home page and introduced a state-of-the-art engine driven by MarkLogic. It’s faster, it’s more relevant, and it searches over Lexis Library’s sister product, the practical guidance-based Lexis®PSL, at the same time. That’s the very best of LexisNexis content, served up all in one place. And watch this space – future seamless integration is to follow with even more enhanced search capabilities.
We’ve made similar improvements to the Lexis®PSL product itself. Lexis PSL has a single search box and we work iteratively to make that search better and better. In 2017 we have made many tweaks and adjustments including the addition of thousands of synonyms and the introduction of a spellcheck feature. We also ensure practical guidance takes priority in search results, boost recent news, and boost specific document segments such as document title to ensure you get the most relevant content faster.
The job of improving search is never complete and we know there is much to do. New advancements are ever upon us – Artificial Intelligence is everywhere right now and perhaps next year’s update will be written by the search engine itself. In the meantime we will press on. Please send feedback on any aspect of search in LexisNexis products to LNUKSearch@lexisnexis.co.uk and we will respond as soon as possible. We depend on feedback in all forms – increasingly we are able to measure the performance of our search engines using technology but there is no replacement for first-hand customer feedback.
Richard Allison is Senior Search Analyst at LexisNexis. Email richard.allison@lexisnexis.co.uk.
