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West has made a welcome addition to finding cases with their West Key Numbers system and also decided to have a little, er, fun with it as well.

First up:

Westlaw’s New Key Number Search

Finally, a way to make searching for key numbers, and thus finding cases, much easier. Westlaw is replacing the seemingly little used KeySearch with a new Key Numbers Search. Located at the top of every Westlaw screen you’ll now find a link to Key Numbers.

Clicking the Key Numbers link brings you to a nicely simplified screen that gives you the choice of searching for Key Numbers by term (let’s call them keywords, without the West key), or browsing the Key Number Digest – the table of contents for all 400+ topics of the West American Digest System.

To search for Key Numbers just enter your terms, choose a jurisdiction, and press ’search.’ You’ll receive a list of related Key Numbers with their brief definition. For example, a Key Numbers search for grandparent visitation in Oregon provides these results, all from within the Child Custody topic:

Clicking on any one of the results will pull you the headnotes from all cases in Oregon with that Topic and Key Number. Finally, an easy way to access cases on Westlaw by subject when you don’t already know the precise Topic and Key Number.

Not clear on what Key Numbers are? Here is the official West definition (via our friends at ZiefBrief):

Key Numbers help you search for legal concepts [in case law]. The American system of law is broken down into Major Topics — there are more than 400, including topics like Civil Rights, Negligence, and Pretrial Procedure. Each of those topics is divided, in greater and greater detail, into individual subtopics that represent specific legal concepts. Each specific legal concept has a unique number, called a Key Number. Every case headnote in Westlaw is classified to a particular Key Number, which allows you to find cases on any of the more than 100,000 Key Numbers. The whole outline, along with the case headnotes classified to it, is called the Key Number Digest System.

West Headnote of the Day

Speaking of Headnotes, we’d be terribly remiss not to note another new service from West, the “amusing, profound or otherwise interesting” West Headnote of the Day.

Each day the folks at Westlaw dip into their archive of headnotes (definition below) and try their best to highlight ones especially interesting. To truly get the most out of this service you’ll want to subscribe (it’s free). They even come with illustrations. You can always go direct to today’s Headnote of the Day.

Ah yes, the definition. Ahem:

A headnote is a concisely written definition of a point of law in a judicial case, and any given case can have more than 50 points of law. West attorney editors have written more than 24 million headnotes as part of West’s caselaw collection, and write some 500,000 headnotes each year.

Sources: ZiefBrief, West News Room, WisBlawg