West's Legal News
BackgroundWest's Legal News (WLN) was the daily online
current awareness service of West Publishing. A demo of WLN is available here.
WLN was developed in 1994, launched on the web in
1995, and began publishing on WESTLAW in 1996. WLN ceased publishing on
January 17, 1997.
WLN was designed to serve as a daily source of
substantive legal news for lawyers and other business professionals. Each
story was written to be understandable to a wide professional audience
with citations and links to related information, designed to be a valuable news
and research tool.
WLN served as both a
substantive current awareness service and as a news front-end that
"merchandised" the diverse databases on Westlaw.
Organized by topic
area, the service was written and designed to be marketed to and used by
all business professionals working in topic areas such as human resources
and employment law, real estate, intellectual property, environmental law,
torts and insurance, and criminal justice.
The service and the
information architecture were designed and developed by a team made up of
staff from editorial, marketing and IT. Several consultants were also
used.
WLN looked to two publications as models of accuracy and
good writing that used wit and irreverence appropriately: The Wall Street
Journal and The Economist magazine.
The challenge of dealing with a
topic across jurisdictions while not diminishing state-specific coverage
was dealt with by the use of a tagging and indexing scheme that included
both jurisdiction and subject matter terms. This tagging and indexing was
designed to allow a user, or the publisher, to rapidly create a wide
variety of topic- and state-specific products.
One of the major
assumptions in WLN's underlying information architecture was stable
document identification and citation, allowing the creation of links to
related information across media and time.
The WLN document
identification (e.g., 1-10-97 WLN 12345) served as the document citation
and incorporated the document's publication date (e.g., 1-10-97) and brand
(WLN). Because the citation was a separate element but made part of each
WLN document, WLN documents could be disseminated and retrieved across
print and electronic media and across time.
Because the article
citation appeared as part of each article, articles could be rapidly
identified and retrieved from photocopied and emailed versions. The WLN
Style Guide required that all cited law and articles and Internet links be
human readable and displayed so that copies printed from electronic
displays contained sufficient information to allow a reader of a
photocopied article to have sufficient information to retrieve all cited
materials. Remember - this was 1995-1997, when the web was
just starting to become widely available.
WLN was
designed to scale up to as many as 500 writers with numerous specialties
and sub-specialties. A bureau in Washington, DC, was planned.
One
goal in the system design was to allow staff writers and editors to work
at any location as a way of reducing costs and to make it easier to
recruit people across the country (the Twin Cities is a great place to
live, but difficult to recruit people who live in warmer climes).
Each topic area was covered by an attorney editor
(usually in conjunction with a staff writer) who scanned as many as 500
items each day:
- new cases and hearings
- legislation
- news
stories
- law review articles
- web sites
- Internet-based
discussion lists
- business and trade publications.
This
scanning was facilitated by using WESTLAW, the Internet, newsgroups, and
other resources.
WLN published many articles written by outside authors.
WLN's publishing agreement specified that all electronic rights were
transferred to WLN. The electronic rights included archiving on the WLN
web site, archiving on WESTLAW, CD-ROM publishing, and distribution and
licensing, for print reproduction only, to newspapers that were licensed
to carry WLN material.
WLN covered the Supreme Court using an
internal editorial staff and experts across the country to write analytic
pieces. Selected oral arguments were covered live by a correspondent in
Washington, DC.
An SGML-based editorial system allowed WLN staff to
write and tag material once. The writer was required to tag and index (an
enormous challenge with journalists), and this tagging was reviewed as
part of the editorial process.
Stories were published
simultaneously on the web, on WESTLAW, on a proprietary HTML-based
network, and via email. The architecture was also designed to allow print
publishing, but the initial focus was on electronic publishing. WLN
stories did appear in print in various legal newspapers.
Although
WLN web pages were not designed specifically for print, they were designed
to be printer friendly, allowing readers to easily print out copies for
paper files to send to colleagues and clients.
The authoring
tool used was Adept Editor, an SGML tool.
The tagging of related
documents took advantage of stable document storage and identification on
WESTLAW and in the WLN publishing system. This meant that hypertext links
in WLN documents worked across long periods of time and in all media and
on all platforms that could accommodate hypertext links (i.e., Permanent
URLs, or PURLs).
WLN's policy on corrections: if a correction was
material or substantive, the correction was published separately the day
the error was identified. The archive was modified that day and a
correction statement and the correction were inserted into the archived
article, indicating what had been corrected.
If libelous, the
offending information would have been deleted but the correction notice
would have indicated what general information had been deleted.
If
a story contained a non-WLN URL, we inserted a standard notice in the
story that the URL was correct and working as of the date of the article.
We made no attempt to keep referenced URL's current in archived stories.
WLN Pathfinders, designed as ongoing research tools, were kept up to date.
Misspellings, other than names, bad cites (but only if of the typo or
transposed-number variety) and grammatical errors were corrected without
correction notices, unless the error changed the substance of a story
(e.,g., incorrectly inserting or leaving out a "not" for a court's
holding). (I happen to like Steve Brill's policy of naming the writer and
editor in corrections, but WLN did not take that approach.)
Corrections had their own tag in WLN's DTD, so it was easy to locate all
corrections in the database.
WLN had to insert fewer than 10
correction notices in its archived stories in its 18 months.
The
initial index scheme, like the initial editorial system, was designed to scale up to as
many as 5,000 documents each day. The design work on the index was
coordinated by a law librarian with law firm experience. The WLN index
scheme was designed to be flexible and practice-oriented. It differed
significantly from the West Topic and Key Number System.
In the
last quarter of 1996 and into January, 1997, WLN was logging over 1,000
hours of external WESTLAW usage each month. This usage was described by an
experienced WESTLAW marketer as "unheard of for a new database." When an
email version of the Top Stories page was introduced shortly before WLN
was shut down, more than 1,000 people subscribed in less than one week.
In its first year of publication, WLN was recognized as one of the top
legal news sources on the Internet.
West's Legal News ("The Syllabi* in
Cyberspace") mission: "Provide legal intelligence that is prompt,
interesting, full, and at all times thoroughly reliable."
WLN would
achieve its mission and save readers time and money by providing them with
topically focused legal intelligence that was accurate, well written with
wit and irreverence sprinkled throughout, rapidly scannable, with links to
related and underlying documents on the web and on WESTLAW.
WLN attempted to blend journalistic principles of timeliness, accuracy and
readability with solid legal analysis.
WLN Staff consisted of lawyers,
most with journalism training or experience, and journalists. The staff
numbered 27 at its largest. Staff were assigned by topical area.
WLN published hundreds of outside author pieces, including Supreme Court
analysis and coverage of oral arguments.
WLN was published Monday through
Friday, except on holidays, and published simultaneously on the web, on
WESTLAW, on a proprietary HTML-based service, and via email.
Utilized an SGML-based editorial system.
Archived on WESTLAW.
Began public email delivery of its "Today's Top Stories" page several
weeks before it ceased publishing.
WLN articles were carried by
legal newspapers across the nation, including:
- The (Houston) Daily
Court Review
- Detroit Legal News
- The (Philadelphia) Legal
Intelligencer
- Pittsburgh Legal Journal
"West's New Online
Service Ready For Debut," by Robert J. Ambrogi, legal.online, February
1996
*The Syllabi was the first publication of John B. West
Company. The Syllabi, first published on October 21, 1876, promised to
provide Minnesota lawyers with legal intelligence that was "prompt,
interesting, full, and at all times thoroughly reliable." This
"eight-page, weekly news-sheet" also carried advertisements. The first
page of the first edition carried an ad for "Mead & Thompson, Attorneys at
Law." The Syllabi evolved into the Northwestern Reporter, which evolved
into West's National Reporter System.
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