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

The modern lawyer is likely to search news publications after the legal research is done. For a wide range of matters-including industry trends, company developments, and proposed legislation-there is simply no substitute for newspapers, magazines, press releases, and other news sources. These resources are essential when you are monitoring developments such as

But how do you quickly search news publications for articles that relate to a topic?

After all, those heavy news indexes in the library are cumbersome and often out-of-date. Further, news articles don't come equipped with West topic and key numbers, headnotes, tables of contents, or other West enhancements that help you search for cases, statutes, and regulations.

Westlaw offers a solution: Restrict your search to titles and lead paragraphs.

Here's why it works: In a news database, terms that are central to your topic are likely to appear in the title field, which contains the headline and subheading. Important terms also tend to be concentrated toward the beginning of articles, thanks to the inverted pyramid style of news reporting. By restricting your search to the title and the first two paragraphs of a news database, you increase the likelihood that your terms will be more central to the story. (You don't want to retrieve thousands of articles that mention your terms only in passing.)

To restrict your search to titles and lead paragraphs, access the appropriate news database, e.g., All News (ALLNEWS), and select the Search only the headlines and lead paragraphs check box at the Search page after typing your search terms. (In the alternative, you can select Hlead - HLD() from the Fields drop-down list and then type your search terms in the parentheses in the Search text box.)

For example, to retrieve news materials on the use of private debt collection firms by the IRS, access ALLNEWS. In the Search text box, type a query such as the following: private /5 collect! /p "internal revenue service" i.r.s. Select the Search only the headlines and lead paragraphs check box, then click Search Westlaw.