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Westlaw is one of the primary online legal research services for lawyers and legal professionals in the United States and is a part of West, a part of Thomson Reuters. In addition, it provides proprietary database services. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 40,000 databases of case law. state and federal statutes. administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources.

Most legal documents on Westlaw are indexed to the West Key Number System. which is West's master classification system of U.S. law. Westlaw supports natural language and Boolean searches. Other significant Westlaw features include KeyCite, a citation checking service, which allows customers to determine whether cases or statutes are still good law; and a customizable tabbed interface that lets customers bring their most-used resources to the top. Other tabs organize Westlaw content around the specific work needs of litigators, in-house corporate practitioners and lawyers who specialize in any of over 150 legal topics.

Westlaw was originated by West Publishing, a company whose headquarters have been in Eagan, Minnesota since 1992; West was acquired by Thomson Corporation in 1996. Several of Thomson's law-related businesses outside the United States have their own Westlaw sites, and Westlaw's international content is available at www.westlawinternational.com. For instance, Westlaw Canada from Carswell includes the Canadian Abridgment and KeyCite Canada, [ 1 ] and Westlaw UK provides information from Sweet Maxwell and independent law reports. case analysis and case status icons. [ 2 ] More recently, Westlaw China was introduced, with laws and regulations, cases, digests, and status icons (similar to KeyCite flags), for the law of the People's Republic of China. [ 3 ] In total, Westlaw is used in over 68 countries.

West’s chief competitor in the legal information retrieval market is LexisNexis. Since West and LexisNexis are so pervasive in the legal research marketplace, some customers have jokingly imagined an organization called Wexis. [ 4 ]

Most customers are attorneys or law students but other individuals can also obtain accounts. A credit card site [1] allows anyone with a credit card to retrieve primary law documents by citation.

West introduced Westlaw Next on February 8th . The main advances are that a user can start a search without first selecting a database, and the search screen allows one to click checkboxes to select the jurisdiction and nature of material wanted. A new search algorithm, referred to as WestSearch, claimed to be the world's most advanced legal research engine executes a federated search across multiple content types. Users can either enter descriptive terms or boolean connectors and select a jurisdiction. Documents are ranked by relevance. WestlawNext also supports retrieving documents by citation, party name or Keycite reference. An overview page enables users to see the top results per content type or they can view all results for a particular content type. Filters can also be applied to refine the result list even further. On the results page, users can also see links to related secondary sources relevant to their research.

Westlaw Next also provides folders for storing portions of the research selected by the user. [ 5 ]