WestlawNext is the latest offering from Westlaw. The service is offered as a premium add-on for subscribers at certain levels, for a premium add-on fee (which was unclear to me how it was computed). The service goes way beyond the old Boolean search that I learned when in law school, and even the more recent natural language search, and instead applies a sophisticated algorithm to search terms, eliminating the need to specify databases, and instead ranking results from all databases by relevance, both from the search as well as the number of times the result has been cited and downloaded by others, so you are likely to get more relevant results than words alone would provide. I inquired about the cost of the service, and the price computation seemed a little cryptic to me, but essentially, my current $79/month plan that is limited to estate planning databases does not even qualify for the service, but if I added my state plan, then I could get the service for around $200 per month. The search results will indicate whether a particular document is within my plan or will cost extra to retrieve. This is neat technology, but it seems to me a little ironic, since the pricing seems to be geared toward larger firms, who almost always bill hourly, rather than small firm practitioners who are more likely to be using an alternative fee method. Accordingly, West is going to save time for lawyers who get paid by time, meaning that the lawyer will make less (and West will make more), while lawyers who are more inclined to want to save time will be less likely to use the service because pricing discourages it.
