The landing page for Quotation Analysis, within the Quick Check tool of Westlaw Edge. Screenshot provided by Thomson Reuters. The landing page for Quotation Analysis, within the Quick Check tool of Westlaw Edge. Screenshot provided by Thomson Reuters.

 

Last summer, Thomson Reuters launched brief analysis tool Quick Check within its Westlaw Edge legal research platform. Quick Check applies artificial intelligence to the document process to analyze an attorney's own work or an opponent's work for case recommendations, warnings for cited authority, and more. Now, Thomson Reuters is set to expand Quick Check's capabilities to focus on one particularly important part of a document or brief: quotes.

Announced today, Quick Check's new Quotation Analysis capability provides analysis about a document's quotes. The tool pulls the quotes and matches their citations to Westlaw Edge's internal database; examines differences in quotes such as changes in language, additions and omissions like ellipses; and provides context for the quote from the original source from which it is pulled.

The Quotation Analysis tool provides a list of all quotes in the document and flags which ones have potential issues. Filtering allows those using the tool to sort by case name, as well as configure how unverified citations and the displayed level of detail are shown. These reports can be downloaded or sent via email, similar to the rest of Quick Check.

A tab within Quick Check labeled Quotation Analysis will appear for Westlaw Edge users today as a no-cost added feature to the platform. The tool is intended for legal researchers, as well as judges verifying quotes in documents submitted to the court.

Carol Jo Lechtenberg, director of Westlaw Product Management, told Legaltech News that, when the TR team spoke with both attorneys and judges, reviewing a brief's quotations arose as an all-too-common pain point.

"If you ask, 'What is it like to review quotations? Talk to me about what that process is.' It's always punctuated with a painful sigh of, 'Oh, it's so tedious and time-consuming. I know it's so important to do, but it takes so much time,'" Lechtenberg said. She added that "despite knowing that it's incredibly important work, they'll feel like they have better things to do."

The goal of the tool, she explained, is not to automate the entire quote review process but to point out where there may be issues and shave some time off the full review process. "As you can imagine, if you have 25 quotes, you've gone through all this tedium, and maybe you won't find anything," Lechtenberg explained. "Or maybe there's something wrong with one of the 25, but you still have to go through all 25 to figure that out."

The brief writing process has been en vogue with legal research providers in recent years: Bloomberg Law announced an automated brief analyzer at the American Association of Law Librarians conference soon after Quick Check's release last year, and Casetext announced earlier this year its own brief-writing automation platform earlier this year.

Where Thomson Reuters is hoping to set itself apart is the integration of all of its tools (its KeyCite technology is heavily baked into Quick Check already), as well as ease of use of the platform. Regarding Quotation analysis, Lechtenberg noted that "one of the nice things about it is, it's very intuitive and very easy for people to use. I don't think it actually requires a lot of training."

And, like any legal technology that hopes to achieve widespread adoption, TR is hoping to tackle real pain points. As Lechtenberg put it, "Any attorney you talk to, they will not say that reviewing quotations is their favorite thing to do, that is for sure."