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West's Legal News West's Legal News (WLN) was the daily online current awareness service of West Publishing. WLN was started in 1994, launched on the web in 1995, and began publishing on WESTLAW in 1996. WLN ceased publishing on January 17, 1997. WLN was designed to serve as a daily source of substantive legal news for lawyers and other business professionals. Each story was written to be understandable to a wide professional audience with citations and links to related information, which meant each story was a valuable news and research tool. WLN served as both a substantive current awareness service and as a news front-end that "merchandised" the diverse databases on Westlaw. Organized by topic area, the service was written and designed to be marketed to and used by all business professionals working in topic areas such as human resources and employment law, real estate, intellectual property, environmental law, torts and insurance, and criminal justice. The service and the information architecture were designed and developed by a team made up of staff from editorial, marketing and IT. Several consultants were also used. WLN looked to two publications as models of accuracy and good writing that used wit and irreverence appropriately: The Wall Street Journal and The Economist magazine. The challenge of dealing with a topic across jurisdictions while not diminishing state-specific coverage was dealt with by the use of an tagging and indexing scheme that included both jurisdiction and subject matter terms. This tagging and indexing was designed to allow a user, or the publisher, to rapidly create a wide variety of topic- or state-specific products. One of the major assumptions in WLN's underlying information architecture was stable document identification and citation, allowing the creation of links to related information across media and time. The WLN document identification (e.g., 1-10-97 WLN 12345) served as the document citation and incorporated the document's publication date (e.g., 1-10-97) and brand (WLN). Because the citation was a separate element but made part of each WLN document, WLN documents could be disseminated and retrieved across print and electronic media and across time. Because the article citation appeared as part of each article, articles could be rapidly identified and retrieved from photocopied and emailed versions. The WLN Style Guide required that all cited law and articles and Internet links be human readable and displayed so that copies printed from electronic displays contained sufficient information to allow a reader of a photocopied article to have sufficient information to retrieve all cited materials. WLN was designed to scale up to as many as 500 writers with numerous specialties and sub-specialties. A bureau in Washington, DC was planned. One goal in the system design was to allow staff writers and editors to work at any location as a way of reducing costs and to make it easier to recruit people across the country (the Twin Cities is a great place to live, but difficult to recruit people to from warmer climes....) Each topic area was covered by an attorney editor (usually in conjunction with a staff writer) who scanned as many as 500 items each day:
This scanning was facilitated by using WESTLAW, the Internet, newsgroups, and other resources. WLN published many articles written by outside authors. WLN's publishing agreement specified that all electronic rights were transferred to WLN. The electronic rights included archiving on the WLN web site, archiving on WESTLAW, CD-ROM publishing, and distribution and licensing, for print reproduction only, to newspapers that were licensed to carry WLN material. WLN covered the Supreme Court using an internal editorial staff and experts across the country to write analytic pieces. Selected oral arguments were covered live by a correspondent in Washington, DC. An SGML-based editorial system allowed WLN staff to write and tag material once. The writer was required to tag and index (an enormous challenge with journalists). Stories were published simultaneously on the web, on WESTLAW, on a proprietary HTML-based network, and via email. The architecture was also designed to allow print publishing, but the initial focus was on electronic publishing. WLN stories did appear in print in various legal newspapers. Although WLN web pages were not designed specifically for print, they were designed to be printer friendly, allowing readers to easily print out copies for paper files and to send to colleagues and clients. The authoring tool used was Adept Editor, an SGML tool. The tagging of related documents took advantage of stable document storage and identification on WESTLAW and in the WLN publishing system. This meant that hypertext links in WLN documents worked across long periods of time and in all media and on all platforms that could accommodate hypertext links (i.e., Permanent URLs, or PURLs). WLN's policy on corrections: if a correction was material or substantive, the correction was published separately the day the error was identified. The archive was modified that day and a correction statement and the correction were inserted into the archived article, indicating what had been corrected. If libelous, the offending information would have been deleted but the correction notice would have indicated what general information had been deleted. If a story contained a non-WLN URL, we inserted a standard notice in the story that the URL was correct and working as of the date of the article. We made no attempt to keep referenced URL's current in archived stories. Misspellings, other than names, bad cites (but only if of the typo or transposed-number variety) and grammatical errors were corrected without correction notices, unless the error changed the substance of a story (e.,g., incorrectly inserting or leaving out a "not" for a court's holding). (I happen to like Steve Brill's policy of naming the writer and editor in corrections, but WLN did not take that approach.) Corrections had their own tag in WLN's DTD, so it was easy to locate all corrections in the database. WLN had to insert fewer than 10 correction notices in its archived stories in its 18 months. The index scheme, like the editorial system, was designed to scale up to as many as 5,000 documents each day. The initial design work on the index was coordinated by a law librarian with law firm experience.The WLN index scheme was designed to be flexible and practice-oriented. It differed significantly from the West Topic and Key Number System. In the last quarter of 1996 and into January, 1997, WLN was logging over 1,000 hours of external WESTLAW usage each month. This usage was described by an experienced WESTLAW marketer as "unheard of for a new database." When an email version of the Top Stories page was introduced shortly before WLN was shut down, more than 1,000 people subscribed in less than one week. In its first year of publication, WLN was recognized as one of the top legal news sources on the Internet. A demo of WLN is available as part of Chug's work samples. The information below is taken from the WLN masthead. About West's Legal News ("The Syllabi* in Cyberspace")
WLN articles were carried by legal newspapers across the nation, including: The (Houston) Daily Court Review Detroit Legal News The (Philadelphia) Legal Intelligencer Pittsburgh Legal Journal "West's New Online Service Ready For Debut," by Robert J. Ambrogi, legal.online, February 1996 *The Syllabi was the first publication of John B. West Company. The Syllabi, first published on October 21, 1876, promised to provide Minnesota lawyers with legal intelligence that was "prompt, interesting, full, and at all times thoroughly reliable." This "eight-page, weekly news-sheet" also carried advertisements. The first page of the first edition carried an ad for "Mead & Thompson, Attorneys at Law." The Syllabi evolved into the Northwestern Reporter, which evolved into West's National Reporter System. URL: http://www.LegalNews.Net/product/wln.htm |