Skill: Westlaw deep research or AI-assisted research - Search & summarize Practical Law
Category: Research
Ask a legal question and get a concise response, grounded in primary legal authorities from Westlaw, for example, statutes, regulations, and case law. Results contain linked citations to authorities.
- Deep Research or AI-Assisted Research(primary research): Uses primary resources from Westlaw, for example, case law, statutes, and regulations, to answer your legal questions.
- Search & Summarize Practical Law(secondary research): Uses secondary resources from Practical Law to answer your legal questions.
Features and benefits
- Ask any legal question and receive a concise response grounded in trusted primary or secondary legal authorities.
- Review issues alongside linked citations and quoted authority language.
Practice tips
- Write clear, concise, and focused user prompts that are 1-2 sentences long.
- Ask your questions in everyday language. Don’t use conventional database query techniques like Boolean terms and connectors.
- Provide relevant facts, but include only facts that are material to the question. Each term in a prompt should be essential to finding relevant information.
- Consider adding information, such as practice area, cause of action, governing law, remedy sought, intended outcome, or material facts to provide better context for your user prompt.
- Focus on a single issue or question. Where it is easy to distinguish separate issues, ask about those issues in separate user prompts, rather than combining them.
- Avoid including proper names of people or parties. Using a proper name can artificially focus the search on results that may contain the name but may not be relevant.
- Select theFollow upbutton to ask follow-up questions to narrow, expand, or clarify your user prompts. For example, you can expand or narrow the jurisdiction or date range, or you can focus on different facts or legal issues.
- Provide feedback on the results, whether positive or negative. Feedback doesn’t directly train the system, but it is anonymously routed to the teams that are working to improve the service.
Limitations to keep in mind
- To ensure high-quality responses, CoCounsel only permits 5 follow-up questions per chat. If you want to ask more follow-up questions, go back to the chat.
- Responses are AI-generated and may contain errors. They should always be validated for accuracy and relevance.
- Deep ResearchandAI-Assisted Researchare tethered to Westlaw's primary authorities.Search & Summarize Practical Lawis tethered both to Practical Law's secondary sources and Westlaw's primary authorities.
- Avoid asking these tools to do things other than answering discrete legal research questions.
- Other CoCounsel skills (or Westlaw) may be able to help with other tasks, for example, drafting documents using relevant authorities or searching for cases by citation.
- Each of these skills requires an additional subscription beyond CoCounsel but is available to subscribed users in the CoCounsel user interface.
Examples of user prompts
The following are some example user prompts, which are labeled
beginner
and expert
.- Eachbeginneruser prompt will likely not yield the best results. A user prompt that lacks sufficient details may yield only a basic overview of the law. Which is OK, if that is your intention.
- A prompt that contains extraneous or irrelevant details, for example, the names of parties in a specific matter, may yield irrelevant results, because CoCounsel will have instructed the AI model to return results using those details as search terms. Returning irrelevant results may further lead to some relevant results being omitted.
- Eachexpertuser prompt will likely provide more relevant results, because it is precisely tailored to the core legal question. Each expert prompt will enable CoCounsel to ask the model only for information that is relevant to the legal question.
- Precision in formulating user prompts is something that will benefit you with every CoCounsel skill. It is also something with which you will gain expertise as you practice.
Example 1: Write clear and focused prompts
- Write a clear, concise, and focused user prompt that is 1-2 sentences long.
- Consider adding information, such as practice area, cause of action, governing law, remedy sought, intended outcome, or material facts to provide better context for the user prompt.
Beginner user prompt - not detailed enough
What are the defenses to a securities fraud claim?
Expert user prompt - contains enough detail to establish the precise legal question.
In a suit under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and SEC Rule 10b-5, an investor alleges that the company made false representations regarding the company's future earnings, but the company claims it didn’t know that the statement to the investor was false or misleading when it was made. What defenses are available to the company?
Example 2: Provide relevant facts only
- Provide relevant facts.
- Don’t include extra background facts that are not material to the question. Each term in a user prompt should be essential to finding relevant information.
Beginner user prompt - contains details irrelevant to the precise legal question.
An employee who has a disability returns from leave after sustaining a back injury. They are unable to return to their previous hospital position that required lifting patients and other heavy objects, so they request an open clerical position. They are only minimally qualified to perform the clerical work, though they could be trained. Is the employer required to offer the position to the returning employee who has disabilities under the ADA?
Expert user prompt - contains only the details necessary to establish the precise legal question.
Does the ADA require an employer to reassign an employee to a vacant position as a reasonable accommodation?
Example 3: Focus on a single issue
- Focus on a single issue or question.
- Where it is easy to distinguish separate issues, ask about those issues in separate questions dedicated to the issues, rather than combining them.
Beginner user prompt - contains 2 separate legal questions, one of which lacks sufficient detail.
Does the ADA require an employer to reassign an employee to a vacant position as a reasonable accommodation and has an employee satisfied their requirement of providing notice of their disability to the employer by asking to be reassigned to the vacant position?
Expert user prompt - contains only 1 discrete legal question, with sufficient detail.
Does the ADA require an employer to reassign an employee to a vacant position as a reasonable accommodation?
Expert user prompt - contains only 1 discrete legal question, with sufficient detail.
Does an employee's request to be reassigned to a vacant position because it requires less physical strength constitute providing notice of their disability or condition under the ADA?
Example 4: Avoid proper names
- Avoid including proper names of people or parties.
- Using proper names can artificially focus the search on results that may only be moderately relevant but contain the same name.
Beginner user prompt - contains details irrelevant to the precise legal question.
Is Dave Jones, as CEO, personally liable in a stockholder action against Acme Co?
Expert user prompt - contains only the details necessary to establish the precise legal question.
Can a company executive be held personally liable in a shareholder derivative action?
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