Westlaw tips for associates

Suppose you need sections of the United States Code Annotated® (USCA) that governs the duties of a credit reporting agency. Suppose you have no idea which title of the USCA applies. Now what?

The United States Code Annotated database (USCA) on Westlaw contains features that can shrink this giant work to a manageable size.

With the Table of Contents service, you can browse the headings of the entire publication in seconds, view potentially relevant sections by clicking section names, and determine—at a glance—whether nearby titles, chapters, or parts are worth investigating, too. To access the Table of Contents service for the USCA, click Table of Contents at the USCA Search page or on the Links tab for any USCA section you are viewing.

You can browse or search an alphabetical index for a topic heading, e.g., Credit Reporting Agencies, and click the heading. Direct links to relevant USCA sections are displayed in an easy-to-scan list. Don't worry if you didn't choose the best heading on your first try: All subtopics and cross-references are displayed there, too, as well as user-friendly links to the full-text sections. To access the index for the USCA, click Statutes Index at the USCA Search page.

A good way to get more relevant search results is to restrict your search by field, i.e., to search only for documents that contain your terms in the title, heading, or other portion you designate. Among the more useful fields for searching the USCA are the prelim (pr) and caption (ca) fields, which contain only the major statute headings and section titles. Terms that are central to a statute are likely to appear in those locations.