The Robb Report

Just one law student’s opinion. I’ll continue to update this as more differences occur to me.

LexisNexis

+1 Ability to request documents in single-column. I find this much more legible for fast reading and annotation.

+1 Ability to request documents with search terms highlighted. A single-column, keyword-highlighted pdf is awesome for fast reading and research.

+1 The online legal dictionary is accessible from the front page, and gives results with one click.

-1 Doesn’t work with Firefox (latest version, Mac.) So I use Safari, which seems to do fine.

+1 The research log (”history”) is much easier to use than Westlaw’s (”research trail”). One example: I did research in both systems an hour ago. I then logged out of both. Now I’m back online, and I log into both systems. I wanted to see the most recent items I had pulled up. In Westlaw, this required four mouse clicks and screens to wait for. In LexisNexis, this required one.

Westlaw

-1 Annoying single-threaded retrieval and notification system. Click a button too soon, and you get the dialog window, “Please wait while Westlaw completes the current task [Ok]”

-1 Westlaw has Black’s Law Dictionary online. This would be a huge plus. Except that the user interface renders it unusable. Searching for a single term can require several forwards and backwards clicks and scrolling through multiple pages searching in vain for a correct sub-entry.

+1 Can enter citations without spaces or punctuation. This is pretty convenient. LexisNexis’s input is a bit pickier.

Here’s a twist on the expert witness rules — Findlaw has an interesting article on ethics issues raised by lawyers serving as expert witnesses:

When a lawyer testifies as an expert witness on a party’s behalf, is an attorney-client relationship created? [...] The lawyer would have to serve as an objective witness and even provide opinions adverse to the party that calls her “if frankness so dictates,” the panel said.

Further, the lawyer as an expert would be subject to deposition by the opposing party, where any communications between the expert, the retaining law firm, and the client would generally be discoverable.

The panel decides no, there is no attorney-client relationship created, but:

…a lawyer serving as an expert witness remains subject to the rules that govern lawyers generally. The lawyer could not, for example, testify falsely. Further, she could not take on a new client in a matter adverse to the party for whom she is serving as an expert.

(Emphasis added.)

Ugh. I ran into another little exception when looking at one small part of modeling legal citing: Certain words receive one abbreviation when used in one sense, and a different abbreviation when used in another. One example is Northwestern. According to ALWD, the word is abbreviated differently depending on whether it refers to the geographic region, or the university. (!)

Now how in the world is this supposed to work? The problem here is that a piece of software — an “abbreviator” — can’t simply correctly abbreviate words “in a vacuum”, without more information about them. And that gets complicated — how should this information be represented and transmitted?

This lead me to the idea that maybe software ought to act like an intelligent high school student. That is, possessing a lot of ability, but not a whole lot of wisdom.

The program would act like someone you could delegate work to, but who would need to check back with you occasionally for judgment calls. And with a high school student as assistant, you’d want to have a protocol worked out for how questions will be asked and answered — so that the process is smooth and not annoying.

If you’re a programmer, you might see where I’m going with this: The “abbreviator” mentioned above is the high school student. It’d do the normal thing 98% of the time. And when there’s an exception to a rule that it doesn’t know how to handle, it’d have a way of responding back to the main program with a description of the extra information it needs. Maybe the main program would have the information (e.g., know whether the citation refers to the university). In that case, it’d answer the question, and the abbreviator would continue. But if the main program wasn’t designed with this piece of info, it’d in turn ask the human, the end user: “Do you mean the university or the area of the country?” And then it’d send the info back to the abbreviator subprogram.

So it sounds like I’m talking about designing an architecture based on a chain of intelligent high school students.