Thomson Reuters and WestLaw today announced the release of an enhanced legal research platform called Quick Check as part of their WestLaw Edge suite of products. Quick Check uses sophisticated algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning to search and find better and more relevant cites and authorities to use in legal writing.
It works like this: you upload your document securely into the WestLaw Edge cloud and Quick Check then searches for and provides citations and authorities that you did not include. It arranges these by various headings and into a relevancy hierarchy. It also will tell you whether the citations you have used are troublesome or perhaps not totally on the mark, perhaps triggering some more thought about those citations. According to WestLaw, Quick Check will find highly relevant authority, secondary sources and other related briefs and memoranda to ensure that its customers find what they might have otherwise missed. It will also prepare a Table of Authorities, a pain in the ass portion of any brief no matter who does it.
With Quick Check you can evaluate the work product of a colleague or outside counsel, or repurpose an old document to quickly identify the newest authority. It can be used to check your own work, and to prepare for oral argument and any other situation where citations and authorities might become important like client meetings, mediations or even conferance presentations. I really like this last use case since it could prevent you from being blind sided in front of a judge or even client by some new case or one you may have missed. The tool looks to be easy to use and pretty intuitive which will make it popular.
According to Khalid Al-Kofahi, vice president of Research & Development at Thomson Reuters, “Westlaw Edge