Legal Research

Searching for people in Westlaw

By Pamela

Westlaw can provide a great deal of useful information about individual lawyers and judges and even law firms.  There are a couple of ways to make these searches more effective.  Take a look at the fields that are available in the particular database.  Many of these are targeted at people.  For example, in the case law databases, two fields are particularly useful for finding legal professionals.  The first is the Judge field [JU ( )] and the second is the Attorney field [AT ( )].  Searching in these two fields allows you to find opinions written by particular judges or cases in which particular attorneys represented parties.  When constructing your search, type the field identifier in the Terms and Connectors search box and place the name of the person inside the parentheses that follow the field identifier – like this:  JU(Sotomayor).

News databases are excellent sources of useful information about people.  There are several helpful fields available in the Westlaw news databases.  The Author field [AU ( )] targets your search to the reporter who wrote the article, in case you are looking for a particular article.  The News-subject field [NS ( )] searches for articles about a particular person or law firm.

You can always search the full text of any Westlaw database for the name of the person.  If you do that, I suggest that you use the following format [firstname +2 lastname] rather than this ["firstname lastname"].  If the person has a middle name or initial that may be used, the former instructs the search engine to retrieve references using middle names or initials as well as those using first and last names only.  (Post – PRM)

Full post as published by Cocky Law Blawg on July 13, 2009 (boomark / email).