Westlaw Fixes-- Better Citations and the Promise of Rapture

I'm on the email lists and mailing lists for Westlaw's updates.

The pamphlet I got in the mail today offers the promise of their citations being in Harvard Blue Book form or Texas Green Book form when one copies them out of their database, which has long seemed to me to be the most pointless inconvenience of Westlaw.

I hear that West made this upgrade because of competition from Lexis-- a fine organization-- love their LexisOne emails and service. Still, though, however frustrating West is, I don't know how to do a Texas statutory search straight from one's computer to printout that meets Green Book standards using Lexis alone (To meet Bluebook form for a federal statute, you should really use the Government Printing Office's volumes of the United States Code no matter what computer search base you are using.).

That the main image for the advertising campaign seems to be a beautiful young brunette woman, eyes closed or downcast, hair rapturously windblown gives me mixed feelings. My hope that some day good computer legal research will run as fast as Google is not unrealistic. But even for me, who loves a Westlaw searching almost as much as chocolate, I do not expect to be swept away with joy-- the way the advertising girl seems to be-- whenever I log on to the ThomsonReuters website. Work is work.