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Out with a Classic, in with what’s Next

By: JESSICA STEPHEN//August 27, 2015//

Out with a Classic, in with what’s Next

By: JESSICA STEPHEN//August 27, 2015//

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The sky did not fall. The world did not end. And, figuratively, at least, only a few heads popped.

Yes, from law schools to big law, the legal world seems to have survived the day Westlaw Classic retired.

All except Westlaw Classic, of course, which defied the odds of Internet life expectancy, going on for 17 years (that’s about 120 in tech years) before a more Google-like model came along.

The demise wasn’t unexpected.

Thomson Reuters announced five years ago that WestlawNext, recently re-dubbed WestlawOnly, would eventually replace Classic. The prediction came to pass Aug. 10. That was the day when Thomson Reuters began shutting down access to Westlaw Classic, the granddaddy of all legal databases; retirement for all accounts came Aug. 31.

Although many have welcomed the final transition to the next generation of search engine, others couldn’t help looking back and remembering the original innovator. Classic took the world by storm when it brought legal research to the World Wide Web in 1998.

“It was a game-changer in so many ways,” said Mary Koshollek, director of information and records at Godfrey & Kahn in Milwaukee.

Looking back, many say it was obvious where it was all headed.

After all, Westlaw was among the first to digitize law libraries, putting out a collection of computerized headnotes in 1975. That was two years after its rival, LexisNexis, first ushered in the idea by releasing a searchable database of full-text cases.

Back then, Westlaw was housed on a single IBM 870 computer at West Publishing headquarters in St. Paul, Minn., and was accessible only on weekends and through the use of a telephone link. The entire database consisted solely of headnotes for eight years of state cases and 15 years of federal cases.

With so little content, Westlaw was nearly driven out of the market.

But the ever-appealing offer of a free trial — and the eventual addition of a full-text database — helped tip the scales. Westlaw moved from being a distant second to a primary competitor to Lexis. As a result, along came everything from the West Automated Legal Terminal, a dedicated Westlaw terminal with a built-for-Boolean keyboard commonly known as WALT, to WIN (Westlaw is Natural), a “natural-language” search system that allowed users to go beyond the and-or-not-driven world of Boolean searches.

The good ol’ days

By 1998, Westlaw was ready to take its biggest leap yet, bringing the popular Westmate software to the Web with Westlaw.com. That interface eventually became known as Westlaw Classic.

“We had modest expectations,” said Lance Odegard, former product manager for the website and, most recently, director of the Thomson Reuter’s technology team in charge of moving users from Westlaw Classic to WestlawNext.

“The World Wide Web was relatively new,” Odegard said. “We had been intrigued with the Internet since the days of Gopher (protocol) and the introduction of FTP and information sharing. But, with the advent of the Web, the strong question was: Is this where our customer will ultimately go? And will they expect us to be there with them?

“Frankly, it felt to be a bold move,” he added. “There was not mass adoption of the Internet and the Web experience at that time, so what we were struggling with was: How do we take the relatively rich experience we had with Westmate and Westmate for Windows, in particular, which was more advanced than our DOS version, and present a comparable feature set with then-Web technology?”

In the end, Westlaw Classic would be adopted at about triple the expected rate.

That’s not to say, according to Odegard, that there weren’t struggles.

“One of the biggest challenges we encountered was we were not going to support command line,” which allowed users to enter DOS commands.

That feature was all but missing from Westmate for Windows. The loss did not sit well with Westmate diehards, many of who relied solely on a keyboard rather than a mouse and continued to clamor for DOS commands.

The feature has been resurrected somewhat in WestlawNext, which allows users to enter commands in a search box.

Classic, though, had more or less killed that possibility off for years. Users weren’t exactly pleased.

“People were still very wedded to the commands they knew,” Odegard said.

tablet-screen-copyThe masses, though, followed Westlaw into the new age, and Classic quickly became the new standard.

“It was a law school staple when I was teaching,” said Koshollek, a law librarian who taught legal research at Marquette from 2001 to 2007. “It was one of those things you had to introduce students to. It was a tool you knew they were going to be using.”

“Litigators loved it,” said Jenny Zook, a reference and instructional services librarian at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “That was their database of choice — the headnotes, the case law, the way it was set up, the fact that they already knew the print resources. Westlaw had put out all their books. They had done so much to hand-hold, especially with that practice area.”

It helped that Westlaw was efficient, saving attorneys time — and ultimately — money. Those advantages could be claimed despite users’ having to pay subscription fees and various per-search charges.

“Along came this product, and it would pull up every citation in your brief,” said Zook, who had been used to tagging printed cases. “I would just hit ‘print’ and every single one would print out, or you could do the KeyCite instantaneously. It saved everyone so much time, and it really resonated with everyone. Being able to do those very quick things so cheaply and so thoroughly, it just changed the way people did research. It sped up the process of the nuts and bolts of what lawyers do with legal research.”

What’s Next?

Still, Westlaw was reluctant to push Classic, deciding instead to allow for more of a natural migration.

A similar tact has been taken with WestlawNext, which introduced federated searching, essentially eliminating the need for a database by scanning all sources of information within the Westlaw archives. It also adds folders, which allow users to store and share documents, as well as a feature known as WestSearch.

WestSearch takes advantage of the breadth of the Westlaw digest system, which the company had introduced when it was founded in 1874. It does so by using direct and indirect search results, even when the query was made with Boolean search commands.

“It was a ground-up reinvention of the Westlaw experience,” Odegard said.

Hence the nearly five-year rollout of Next, and the nearly two-year phase-out of Classic. Even so, many people have been left wondering: Why change at all?

“There was some skepticism,” Koshollek said. “(People wondered) ‘How can you create a search that captures everything?’ But they had created a natural-language search. In my mind, it’s just part of the process; these products absolutely have to evolve. And Google was presenting a challenge.”

Actually, Google is still a formidable presence.

“I cringe a little bit, but we internally have talked about the Googlization of Westlaw,” Odegard acknowledged. “When we think about Google, we think about simplicity, the ability to ask for something and search for and find results. That’s the Google experience. But I would draw a significant difference between the search experience and the research experience, and I would take it one step further and add legal research.

“In traditional online systems, when you look at information, it’s as if you’re looking at it through a pinhole; you look at it on a screen and you receive what you ask for. But the legal-research experience is so contextual that when you do research you’re not just looking at a document. It’s as if you’re at a library table with multiple texts open to cross-reference, and you’re finding more than just a piece of the puzzle. You’re able to put together the whole picture.”

It’s a significant shift from Classic, which came close to requiring users to know what to search for before they could begin delving into Westlaw’s 40,000 or so databases.

“This is so nerdy, probably, but I had memorized database identifiers,” Koshollek deadpanned. “It was kind of like I had to drill into things, figure out the organizational tree. But the more you used it, the more you understood how it was structured. I could go right to information. I became very fast, very efficient.

“Now, with WestlawNext, you’re freed from those silos of information,” she added. “It kind of searches across information for you. And you can still see where your results are coming from, but you know it’s going across databases, whereas before you were going from thing to thing. And that’s not bad. But I know now it’s fairly seamless to look across information and get that big landscape.”

Seamless, but also a bit deceiving.

“I think what will frustrate me is that because it is so Google-like, people will think they will not need training. And that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Koshollek said. “It is straightforward, but the new look is not cosmetic. They really need to understand the changes.”

Which is why the extended rollout was probably an advantage, said Carol Bannen, director of information resources at Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren in Milwaukee, where associates have held at least three training sessions on Next since it was introduced in 2010.

The relatively slow rise of Next has also given users of longer standing an opportunity to hold onto Classic.

And hold on they have.

“It kind of reminds me when the dot commands were ending. We all thought the world was ending when you couldn’t string together your commands,” said Bannen.

Law schools also saw people hanging on to the bitter end. That phenomenon somewhat puzzled Kris Turner, a reference and technical services librarian who works with Zook at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

“I come from a different angle,” said Turner, who started with the law library in 2012, two years after Next was introduced. “I have used Classic, because some people fear change no matter if it’s good or not. But I’ve always lived in Next, so I look at Classic and see something that didn’t work as well. It was good, but the Googlization, the combination of Google and library searching with natural language, is great.”

All that, and users can still do Boolean searches.

“You know, they came out with Next, the revolutionary search engine, and they didn’t talk about the Boolean capability,” Bannen said. “But there is really nothing people could do on Classic that they can’t do on Next. I like the ability to do the terms and connecting, the Boolean like you can on Classic, but you also have the ability to do the natural-language search. You can do synonyms. You may not know the word — Minnesota may call it one thing, and Wisconsin may call it another — but it knows enough that you’re asking for the same thing. I also like that Next searches everything that’s in the database. You don’t have to choose that particular database. You can limit it, but it finds things you may not have thought of.”

With all those improvements, it might seem like Classic was substandard. But, Turner said, WestlawNext might not have been possible without its predecessor.

“I think the biggest credit for Westlaw Classic is it got lawyers onto the Internet for research, maybe kicking and screaming in some cases, but searching in browsers as opposed to a standalone computer with its own special keyboard. The whole profession needed to be more technologically advanced. … This stuff is so basic now, but it did not exist before Classic,” Turner said.

Judging by the number of subscriptions, Odegard said that users might just be ready for what’s next, even if that means letting go of a classic.

“We’ve reached the tipping point when it comes to our customers’ adoption rates with Next,” Odegard said. “Our customers have made a clear statement that they’re ready to move on.”

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