Legal Research

10 tips for common research tasks on Westlaw®. Many of these tasks can be done from a single location – the search box

You use Key Cite to instantly verify whether a case, statute, regulation, or administrative decision is still good law, and to Find citing references to support your legal argument.

Here are some tips to ensure you make the most of these features and make your Westlaw research more cost-effective.

A OnePass profile is the online record of the username and password you personally select to access Westlaw

Westlaw contains a wide variety of secondary sources such as legal encyclopedias,treatises, and law reviews and journals

At the home page, you can retrieve a case by citation or name, or search for cases using the
Search box at the top of the page

At the home page, you can retrieve a statute by citation or search for statutes using the Search box at the top of the page

On Westlaw, you can search for documents by either typing a Boolean Terms and Connectors query or
typing a plain language query in the Search
box at the top of the page. Westlaw recognizes whichever search format you use

Each legal issue in a published opinion is identified, summarized in a headnote, and assigned a topic and key number in the West Key Number System. If you are fortunate enough to find a case on point early in your research, you can use the topic and key numbers from that case to search for other cases discussing the same legal issues

The Secondary Sources Library page contains a listing of secondary source publications available on Westlaw and allows you to easily browse and search those secondary sources most relevant to your needs

Westlaw Find & Print™ provides an efficient way to retrieve up to 100 full text documents on Westlaw and send them to a printer or email address, or download it to a file. To access this feature, click on Tools
in the Browse pane and select Find & Print
. Enter your queries to have full-text documents or KeyCite® results automatically emailed, printed, or downloaded. You can also request a PDF image of a case exactly as it appears in a West Reporter.