Westlaw tips for associates

You might retrieve lots of relevant USCA or Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) sections by searching for terms within the same sentence or within a designated proximity. Unfortunately, the relevant sections might be buried under a big pile of irrelevant ones.

Q: How can you get the statutes or regulations you need without having to sift through lots of statutes or regulations you don't need?

A: Use field restrictions.

Almost all documents on Westlaw are composed of several parts called fields. 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 the USCA and CFR are the prelim (pr) and caption (ca) fields, which contain, respectively, the major headings and section titles. Terms that are central to a section are likely to appear in those locations.

To restrict your search to a field, type the field abbreviation in the Search text box at a database Search page, followed immediately by terms enclosed in parentheses. For example, to search the major headings found in the prelim field, type a query such as pr(deduct!).

To restrict your search to two or more fields simultaneously, type the field abbreviations next to each other, separated by commas. For example, to search for the phrase capital gains in the prelim and caption fields, type the following query in the Search text box:

This search retrieves all documents in the database in which the phrase capital gains appears in the major headings and section titles; it excludes documents in which the phrase appears solely in other portions of the document, such as notes of decisions or library references.

If you want to expand your search to the language of the text—but not search the notes of decisions or library references—use the substantive-doc field (sd), which contains the headings, section names, and the text of the statute or regulation. To restrict your search to just the statutory or regulatory text, use the text field (te).

For example, to retrieve federal tax statutes governing the alternative minimum tax, you could access the Federal Taxation–U.S. Code Annotated database (FTX-USCA) and type the following query, restricting your search to the substantive-doc field: sd("alternative minimum tax" a.m.t.). You would retrieve 21 documents. (If you ran the same search without the field restriction, you would retrieve 102 documents, few of which shed light on alternative minimum tax issues.)

(Note: In the alternative, you can change your print or delivery settings to restrict the delivery to statutory text only. Click a delivery icon, then select Statutory Text Only under Page Options in the dialog box.)

If you have questions about field restrictions or need search assistance, call the West Reference Attorneys at 1-800-REF-ATTY (1-800-733-2889).