Westlaw Review: Legal Research Software
Lawyerist Rating for Westlaw
Rating Breakdown
Our Rating: 3.8/5
Our rating is based on our subjective judgment. Use our resources—including our rating and community ratings and reviews—to find the best fit for your firm.
Community Rating: 1.3/5 (based on 3 ratings)
The community rating is based on the average of the community reviews below.
Composite Rating: 3/5
The composite rating is a weighted average of our rating and the community ratings below.
3/5
What is Westlaw?
Westlaw is an online legal research platform with a multitude of different subscriptions and services with various pricing tiers. Essentially, it’s a proprietary database of case law, statutes, treatises, and other secondary sources from legal technology heavyweight Thomson Reuters. Along with LexisNexis, it’s currently the industry standard for case lookup and secondary source searches. And, just like LexisNexis, many have found Westlaw’s pricing to be cost-prohibitive. However, firms needing comprehensive legal research are unlikely to find a more thorough database.
Starting Cost: $102.05/user/month
- Secondary Sources
- Citation Check
- Expensive
- No Integrations
- Not for Solos
Westlaw Review: Legal Research Software Features
Customer Experience & Support
/5
Price & Value
/5
Security
/5
Innovation & Future-Proofing
/5
Love to Hate Westlaw
Here’s the reality — as a litigator, you can’t afford to lose a case because your research missed something important. So, I regard access to a solid legal research tool to be non-optional.
Having said that, while I like the Westlaw service, I absolutely cannot stand the COMPANY. They are HORRIBLE. Westlaw’s contract terms are simply abusive. Example = if you sign a 12-month contract, it will automatically renew (with a significant increase) unless you cancel, in writing, within a narrow window of time. Also, can you cancel via email? NOPE. The ONLY accepted method of cancelation is to send SNAIL MAIL. In the year 2021, what company would do such a thing?
It’s like Westlaw is being operated by a group of greedy a-holes who learned their sharp business practices in the early 1980s and have refused to consider changing with the times.
Honestly, given the size of this market, I would really like to see someone like Google or maybe Amazon create a competing service that will simply drive Westlaw out of business….or at least force them to seriously change their business practices.
On that note, I am VERY close to giving CaseText a try. Their pricing is WAY more reasonable and the service seems good…..I just don’t like the format of their website (WAY too much white space on every page).
Bait and Switch
Lo and behold, a few months in (after using the product only a couple times) I managed to click on a different service that appears on my home page and incurred an extra $174 charge for “viewing a document” not in my plan. I have no idea what I did, but it took a couple weeks to get them to give me a “one time only credit” whereupon I was basically called a liar. I sent in a request to cancel my contract based on the horrible service experience and being afraid to use the product–still didn’t know how I incurred the extra charge.
The very snippy reply indicated that they believe both parties need to uphold the contracts, so I couldn’t quit until my year was up. Further, my request to cancel was not viewed as a “request to terminate” under termination clause so if I failed to make a request to terminate at least sixty days prior to the end of the contract, I would be re-renewed for another year at an increased rate.
You know what else this company doesn’t have in their pages of fine print? A non-disparagement clause.
In my opinion, they are the worst of the legal research options and I will never, ever recommend doing business with them.
Fake free trial