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19 Clearinghouse Rev. 1375 (1985-1986)
A Study in LEXIS and WESTLAW Errors

handle is hein.journals/clear19 and id is 1395 raw text is: duty, where he retired in 1962. Motion for summary judgment granted and complaint dismissed. Pacyna v. Marsh, Reprinted with permission from 617 F Supp. 101 (WD.N.Y 1984), Copyright © 1985 West Publishing Co. WELFARE Termination Standard. Adult and Family Ser- vices Division entered order terminating claim- ant's general assistance benefits, and claimant brought petition for judicial review. The Court of Appeals... held that medical review team report stating that there was no sufficient specif- J LJ ic data to support total unemployability of claim- ant, based on claimant's depression was insuffi- cient to support termination of claimant's general assistance benefits. Reversed and remanded. Brown v. Adult & Family Servs. Div. of Or., Reprinted with permission from 705 P2d 236 (Or. Ct. App. 1985), Copyright © 1985 West Publishing Co. l L ;h k J IJi L ZL b A Study in LEXIS and WESTLAW Errors by Kelly Warnken With the encouragement and assistance of James Sprowl, Professor of Law at UT-Kent Law School, and Kent Smith, an American Bar Foundation Fellow, a project was undertaken at the John Marshall Law School from 1983-84 to document discrepancies between LEXIS® and WESTLAW®'. This article reports the results of the study. It is not the purpose of this article to recommend one system over the other but merely to identify errors made by the two sytems while the study was underway. Attorneys familiar with LEXIS and WESTLAW are aware that computerized legal research systems operate on the principle of full-text searching.2 With the exception of a few Kelly Warnken is a law library consultant with Information Alternative in Chicago and Assistant Librarian at the National Clearinghouse for Legal Services. She conducted the searches when she was a reference librarian at the John Marshall Law School. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the John Marshall Law School and, in particular, the assistance of Ruth Nelson, a librarian/attorney, and students Douglas McMillan, Paul Gabriel, and Kathy LaMonica. 1. LEXIS® is a registered trademark of Mead Data Central, Inc. WESTLAW® is a registered trademark of the West Publishing Company. 2. It is of interest to note that, while attorneys are accustomed to full-text data bases such as WESTLAW and LEXIS, outside the legal field, full-text data bases are in the minority. Hundreds of non-legal data bases retrieve only those words that appear in abstracts, and it is up to the searcher to locate the documents in hard copy. dozen incidental words such as the, that, and the like, each word of an opinion or other document is rapidly read by the computer, and cases containing words chosen by the searcher are located and retrieved. It is obvious that printing and comparing every word of the hundreds of thousands of opinions and other documents contained in each system would be impossible. As a viable alternative to comparing each word, we chose instead to run 100 searches. Because coverage of U.S. Supreme Court cases by WESTLAW and LEXIS is comprehensive, not selective, as is coverage of the decisions of other courts as reported by these data bases, we chose to compare WESTLAW's Supreme Court data base with LEXIS's Supreme Court file in the GENFED library. In order to simulate real life searches, we assumed that an attorney involved in actual research would not read a large volume of cases, and set a maximum of 50 cases per search. Any search retrieving more than 50 cases was thrown out. Each of the 100 searches consisted of 5 or fewer search terms chosen at random3 from 10 legal sources.4 Use of the single connector and between search terms assured that all of the search terms located anywhere in a document would be retrieved. 3. For a full, and lengthy, explanation of the use of random numbers, see A MI.LON RANDOM Diorrs wrm 100,000 NoRMAL DEvIATEs, the table used in this study. 4. These sources are treaties, state statutes, state case law, the United States Constitution, the Federal Register, law review articles, the Congressional Record, U.S. Statutes at Large, federal case law, and NowAK, HANDBOOK ON CONSTITUIrONAL LAW. MARCH 1986 1375

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