Westlaw By A Nose

The most recent Ambivalent Question® asked: “Do you prefer Lexis or Westlaw for your legal research?” After two weeks of voting, the final results were:

• 32.6% of respondents said “Weslaw is da bomb.”
• 27.9% said “Impeach Bush.”
• 25.6% said “Lexis rocks.”
• 11.6% said “They both suck. I prefer free online sources.”
• 2.3% (one person, I think) said “Neither. It's all about the books.”

So Westlaw seems to hold a slight lead in your preferences. To no one's surprise, I am again in the minority here: I prefer Lexis b/c it's just so much faster in my experience, it doesn't force me to turn off pop-up blocking in my browser, and I've learned to find what I'm looking for with it. As others mentioned, Westlaw's drawbacks include its horrible design, frequent timeouts, poor behavior with tabs, and glacial performance—especially on anything less than the most recent browsers. At my internships and in my clinic where the computers are circa 1999, trying to bring up a case on Westlaw is just a joke. Plus, Westlaw is the 900-lb. gorilla in the legal research market, and I have a fairly deep-seated antipathy toward market bullies. For those of you who aren't aware, West owns all the page numbers for legal citation, meaning that its profits are basically assured by court rules all across the country which require citation to West reporters for all documents submitted to court. West also stole much of its online database from a taxpayer-created database of case law in the 1980s and I think it's pretty rotten of a corporation to steal from me like that. So West totally blows, as far as I'm concerned.

Given the choice, I actually use free online resources whenever possible. They're especially good for SCOTUS case law and are generally much faster than Wexis will ever be b/c you don't have to wade through all the click-tracking and fee-assessing code that bogs down those services.

Finally, I'm sad to say that the “Impeach Bush” vote seems to be shrinking from poll to poll. It's down from 28.6% in the cartoon poll, and 27.9% in the spying poll. This obviously may have something to do with the nature of the question, but it's disappointing, nonetheless.

Posted March 12, 2006 08:30 AM | ambivalent questions