Saturday, October 3, 2009

WestCast Shows How Headnotes are Generated

Here's a somewhat revealing video posted to YouTube by West. This one describes how the headnotes for District of Columbia v. Heller (the DC gun control case) were generated and then assigned Topics and KeyNumbers.

ThomsonReuters is calling this a WestCast. This is clearly an attempt by West to utilize Web 2.0 to push their products. Despite the fact that the West employees seem like a pretty bland bunch this marketing device could be effective.

In the late 1970's, just when Westlaw was starting up, being chosen to go to Minneapolis to write and classify headnotes was a big deal.

No comments: