Other tabs organize Westlaw content around the specific work needs of litigators, in-house corporate practitioners, and lawyers who specialize in any of over 150 legal topics.

[4] Westlaw Ireland (IE) was established in 2002, covering information found in Round Hall publications as well as legislation, books, cases, current awareness and full-text articles from many of the country's notable legal journals.

Westlaw is descended from QUIC/LAW, a Canadian computer-assisted legal research project operated by Queen's University from 1968 to 1973.

"[7] It was directed by Hugh Lawford and Richard von Briesen, and the original code was based on an internal IBM text search project called INFORM/360.

The earliest versions used acoustic couplers or key phones; then smaller terminals with internal modems.

It was based on Borland C++ around 1997, and then changed to a program compiled on a Microsoft platform that incorporated portions of Internet Explorer.

KeyCite leverages Westlaw technologies, West's attorney-authored case law headnotes and the West Key Number System to determine and immediately alert legal professionals that case law they are reviewing has been either overturned, or may have history that deems the precedential value of the opinion invalid.

"[15] In 2004, KeyCite was the most-used citation checking service in an annual survey of law firm technology use conducted by the American Bar Association.

The software consists of a standalone program and word processor add-in, either of which may be used, and a web site with the same functionality.

Westlaw Watch allows users to manage periodic monitoring of news and other databases for topics of interest.

Westlaw Today curates legal news and email alerts written by attorneys and Reuters reporters.

The index serves as the backbone for legal information published by West, which appears in the company's print publications, and now on Westlaw.

TWEN is also used for emailing, forum posting, live chats, polling, linking to CALI Lessons[24] and posting/submitting assignments.

Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) publicized the fact that Westlaw has a database containing a large amount of private information on practically all living Americans.

[26][27] While there is no known case of identity theft involving Westlaw, the company responded to the controversy by announcing it had eliminated access to full SSNs for 85 percent of its clients who previously could retrieve this information, mostly lawyers and government agencies.

[29] LexisNexis's "star pagination" system, a feature that let users of either research system find the printed page of a case without looking to the actual book, was found to infringe West's copyrights by the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota.