Enhance Legal Drafting with Thomson Reuters' Locate Authority Tool (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi everyone, my name is Rachel Thorson, Senior Product Manager for Drafting Assistant at Thomson Reuters and a licensed attorney in the state of Minnesota. This is my ninth year with the company and we are located in our Egan headquarters here in Minnesota. In this ongoing series of videos, we'll be taking a look at some of the tools and features within Thomson Reuters Drafting Assistant and how you can incorporate those tools into your workflow to improve accuracy and efficiency. Today we are going to take a look at Locate Authority, which is available in the software version of Drafting Assistant for Microsoft Word and Windows. Using Locate Authority, drafters can quickly identify the leading cases for a particular proposition of law stated in their document. You may have a brand new document and you need to find the right case to cite, or you may need to update your cited authority because a case is no longer good law. To search using this feature, you can select the text in your document, click mark to grab the text, and then search within the Locate Authority pane on the left-hand side of your screen. The algorithm used by Locate Authority is unique to Drafting Assistant. From our cases and briefs content on Westlaw, we've collected a database of legal propositions and the cases cited in support of those propositions by judges and opinions and attorneys in court file documents. As new content is added to Westlaw, the Locate Authority search will learn which cases are cited most frequently for specific legal propositions. As your results display, you can select one or more results and insert the formatted citation directly into your document. You can also click into a result to review the full-text case before choosing that case as your desired authority. With Locate Authority, you can be sure that the cases identified are the leading case for the arguments made within your legal filings. Thanks for your time and attention. I hope this has been a helpful overview of Drafting Assistant. Look for additional videos in this series focusing on other tools and features so that you can get the most out of Drafting Assistant. If you have any questions or would like free one-on-one training, please contact your account team or the reference attorneys who are available 24-7.