If you are a budding lawyer and you are looking for a legal document, say, a public record or a federal statute you badly need for an academic paper, where do you go? Most law students actually find help from Westlaw, a legal research service center with over 23,000 databases of documents related to law, statutes, court cases, and publications. (1) A leading legal research center, Westlaw serves lawyers, other law practitioners, and law school students.
Westlaw-Law Schools: The Close Relationship
Aside from offering legal papers necessary for school, Westlaw also implements The West Education Network (TWEN) to help law school students and their professors in their quest for legal education. TWEN is actually a site primarily used by law school faculty members as the online version of their classes. With TWEN, faculty members can facilitate, post, and distribute assignments, quizzes, presentations, and discussion materials. (2) All these posted documents, of course, help the law school professors organize their teaching materials and disseminate important classroom information. Moreover, apart from its posting capabilities, TWEN also has chat rooms and forums to give the faculty members and their students a line of communication. To date, there are several law schools that are taking advantage of TWEN, some of which are Thomas McIntyre Cooley Law School, George Mason University School of Law, and University of Minnesota Law School.
Westlaw and Law School Access
Indeed, the Westlaw system and the different law schools work hand in hand in producing top-notch and skillful lawyers through the use of TWEN. To gain full access to TWEN, law school professors only have to sign up for an account, make a password, and log on to TWEN each time they will make some updates on their TWEN page or post another set of information, exams, announcements, or bulletin boards.
Westlaw Training
Westlaw is not only a legal research center; it is also a training ground for students desiring to hone their legal research skills. To pursue this aim, Westlaw offers online tutorials, seminars, quizzes as well as in-person trainings to any interested student. The student should only have to register for an account, or if already registered, log on to the Westlaw’s official site to maximize these training programs. (3)
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westlaw
(2) http://www.cooley.edu/library/public_service/faculty_adjunct_handbook.htm#twen
(3) http://lawschool.westlaw.com/shared/marketinfodisplay.asp?code=WT&id=1