Westlaw

research and advisory.

So it's tempting to look at platforms like Westlaw, LexisNexis, Walters, Kluwer, and conclude that legal and tax research has already experienced this technological transformation that view mistakes retrieval for synthesis.

For 30 years, database providers gave practitioners faster digital filing cabinets.

A keyword search still required an associate to pull 40 authorities, cross-reference revenue rulings, reconcile jurisdictional conflicts, and spend dozens of billable hours drafting an explanatory memo, right? So the current inflection point shifts the cognitive burden.

So I would say like I had a really like core moment of stability right when I got here.

And then when that discrete task had completed, you enter more of that downtime where you're then trying to, it's not just using Westlaw to figure out what the law is.

It's a little more strategic thinking.

And you said legal research.

But did you find that legal research was different in some ways when you were doing it in practice versus doing it for a law school assignment?

Yeah, definitely.

When I was a law student, I remember like my first year legal writing course, I would treat Westlaw like Google.

I would put in my key terms and hit enter and like read a bunch of cases.

That is, in 1999, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal were associates at Covington, a big law firm, And they said, why are there only two options for this? We should democratize the law.

We should have a third option where we could have, you know, solo small lawyers don't have to pay Westlaw bills or Lexus bills to do this.

So they in 1999 started democratizing the law.

And then fast forward to, you know, case text before they got acquired from Times Reuters.

But it's worth noting that, I mean, there have been various different iterations of Dr. Lama over the years.

When I was younger and I started off in this business after practicing, I worked for LexisNexis and I worked for, when I first started with them, we were doing CourtLink, which is a very similar way of being able to provide documents and documents.

I believe it's still a product that Lexis has and Westlaw came out with a similar product as well.

But what you had done with this, you're The way that you are talking about this in 2026, 20 years ago, I remember having this same argument with lawyers that how do you argue a case before a judge without the appropriate level of data? Data is what's going to drive a lot of the success.