Legal Research

Get Organized!! (with Westlaw)

By Alison

The Tabs feature on Westlaw is useful for organizing frequently used groups of databases. To add a Tab to your Welcome screen  click on ?Add a Tab? in the upper right hand corner of the Welcome Screen.  You can select an existing Westlaw Tab that contains many of the basic databases on various topics, types of practice or jurisdictions or you can create your own ?custom? tabs. Tabs of interest to law students are ?Law Review?, ?Law School Classic? and ?Summer Associate?.

Another example of how to use Tabs is if you are in the Indian Legal Program and want to pull together all of the databases on Native American Law, you can select the Native American Law tab. Although it has a lot of the databases that you?ll want, it doesn?t have all of them. You can customize the tab by adding any other databases you want to it or you can create your own tab from scratch. You can also e-mail the customized tab to whoever you want.

To add a folder to the tab, you select “Individual Databases and Folders” from the ADD CONTENT TO THIS TAB section below. Or, you can just click on “edit” and then add a database identifier of a database you want to add. Then you can just click on “E-Mail” under TAB OPTIONS to e-mail it to someone. The e-mailed tab can be added to the recipients Westlaw just by clicking on Save Tab. For more complete information on the use of Tabs in Westlaw go to: http://west.thomson.com/productdetail/1-6822-5/40776332/productdetail.aspx

Full post as published by Ross-Blakley Law Library Blog on November 19, 2008 (boomark / email).