Speaker 1: This video demonstrates basic navigation of the major legal research platforms WestlawEdge and LexisPlus. After watching, you should be able to identify individual sources and use the pre-search filters to limit the scope of your searching. We will start on the WestlawEdge homepage. From here you will see the global search bar at the top of the page and the options for pre-search filtering under the menus in the center of the page. From this starting place, I want to draw your attention to the gray lettering in the global search bar at the top. This tells you that a search from here will search the entire WestlawEdge platform, so carefully consider whether this level of searching best suits your research plan. A search from this place will retrieve the highest number of results across the most varied content and include cases, statutes, regulations, secondary sources, everything Westlaw has to offer. You have a few options though for limiting the universe of information to search before you begin. First is the most direct. If you have a precise title of a publication or the name of a database, you can call it up from the global search bar. So for example, I could call up Black's Law Dictionary by slowly typing the title, then choosing it from the suggested items. You may also type a citation to a primary source in the search bar to directly retrieve a specific document. This is the fastest way to access known content. If you're conducting a broader search across more than one source, you will use the pre-search filters below. Under the Browse menu, first choose the content type under the Content Types tab, or choose between state and federal materials. As an example, I will choose to filter my search only to secondary sources. Notice that at the top of the page, the gray lettering in the search bar is now reminding you that you are only searching secondary sources. Now my choices are to choose between content type, jurisdiction, topic, etc. If I know that I'm researching an area of developing law, for example, then I would consider a search in Law Reviews and Journals. Any search performed from this page is limited to the 1,041 Law Reviews and Journals on the Westlaw platform. As an example, a basic search for the terms Bitcoin and Currency will retrieve about 1,200 results. Now it's time to consider post-search filters to narrow these results further. I may choose to introduce a new search term, limit by jurisdiction, date, or any of the other options on the left side of the page. I'm going to try adding an additional term, Cryptocurrency, and now I see that there are about 800 of the original search results that also contain my new term. Continue using the post-search filters in this way until the results match your needs. Let's take a look at how this same search process looks on Lexis Plus. This is the Lexis Plus homepage. In a similar fashion to the Westlaw homepage, we have a global search bar in the middle of the screen. A search from here will retrieve results from across the entire Lexis Plus platform, including all types of sources from all jurisdictions. Again the most direct way to access known content on the platform is to call it up in the global search bar. So if you have a precise title of a publication or the name of a database, you can begin by slow typing that title, then choose it from the suggested items. So for example, I'm going to type AmJR, which is a common abbreviation for American Jurisprudence and Encyclopedia, and I can select AmJR from the suggested sources below. You may also type a citation to a primary source in the search bar to directly retrieve that specific document. And again, this is the fastest way to access known content. If you're conducting a broader search across more than one source, you will use the pre-search content filters below the global search bar. In the explore menu, first make a selection under the content tab. As an example, I will choose to filter my search only to secondary materials. Now my choices are organized by jurisdiction, content type, publisher, practice area, and others. If I know that I'm researching a developing area of law, again, I may choose to point my search to law reviews and journals. For comparison, I will run the same search that we did on the Westlaw Edge platform. A basic search for the terms Bitcoin and currency returned 1,192 results. Note the slight difference here between Westlaw Edge and Lexis Plus. The two platforms contain different journals, and the contents of those journals for different spans of time. Sometimes in your research plan, you'll want to consider using both. Now's the time to consider post-search filters again to narrow these results further. I can choose to introduce a new search term, limit by jurisdiction, date, and some similar options to the ones I saw on Westlaw. I'm going to try adding an additional term again. So I'll choose search within results, and add my term cryptocurrency, and this tells me that there are 718 of the original results set that contain this new term. I can continue filtering in this way until the search results match my needs. Use this video as a reference when performing searches in Westlaw Edge and Lexis Plus going forward, and check in with your legal research professor with any questions about navigating these two platforms.