A newsletter from West providing Westlaw® search tips for corporate counsel and staff

Suppose you want to see whether a case, statute, regulation, or other legal authority is good law. You would use KeyCite on Westlaw, which would help you find the answer quickly.

But what if you need to check a long list of citations, e.g., in a memorandum or brief? Is there any alternative to plodding through the list one by one?

In fact, there is-WestCheck.com.

WestCheck.com is West's Web-based citation-checking service that automatically extracts all the citations from your document and uses KeyCite to check the status of every authority on your list. (In the alternative, WestCheck.com can check a list of citations that you manually type or copy and paste in the appropriate text box.)

Your results are displayed in a single, easy-to-read document, which you can read online or deliver to the destination of your choice (e.g., your printer or e-mail address). At the top of the document, the Summary Report section lists each citation with the applicable KeyCite status flag. You can quickly jump to the complete KeyCite history result of any citation by clicking its link. Your result can be saved or delivered to the destination you designate.

You can also use WestCheck.com to retrieve Table of Authorities results or retrieve the full-text documents.

To use WestCheck.com to check all the citations in a brief, memorandum, or other word-processing document, complete these steps:

1. Go to westcheck.com and choose Extract citation(s) from a document. Click the Browse... button to identify on your computer a word-processing document from which you want citations extracted. Then click Next.

2. A list of extracted citations is displayed. If you want to check individual citations within the citations list, select the desired check box next to each citation under the service in which you want to check that citation. If you want to check the entire citations list in the same service or services, select the KeyCite, Find, or TOA check box at the top of the list.

3. Select KeyCite options, if applicable, and select a report option. If necessary, enter any additional information (e.g., e-mail address) in the appropriate text boxes.

4. Type your Westlaw password and client identifier in the appropriate text boxes.

5. Click Go.