Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Thomson Reuters Connection, a quarterly newsletter to get you up to speed on information you need to know to support and teach law students at your schools. Each edition will include highlights of key product enhancements, updates on the digital learning resources in our Knowledge Center, industry insights and other timely tidbits.

Quick Check on Westlaw Edge securely analyzes briefs to suggest highly relevant authority and ensure you haven’t missed anything important. Quick Check leverages advanced artificial intelligence to examine the text, citations, and structure of the uploaded documents to detect the legal issues covered. Simply upload the brief and it will then identify recommendations that are highly relevant to the issues in document, but not otherwise cited. You can double-check your work to see if you missed anything important and use it to identify potential weaknesses in your opponent’s arguments.

Launched to law schools in 2020, Thomson Reuters continues to invest in Quick Check to enable legal professionals to address their research challenges. In the second half of 2020, we introduced Quick Check Judicial, which allows you to upload and compare up to six documents from a single matter. It’s the only brief analysis tool that provides one report with analysis on multiple filings. You will gain an inside look at the same analysis that a judge or law clerk will see when they review the briefs filled by you and your opponent.

Quick Check Judicial creates a report where you can quickly compare citations relied upon by both you and your opponent and gain an understanding of what relevant authority was omitted by either party. This gives law students an edge by helping them strengthen their arguments and revealing an opponent’s weaknesses.

Quick Check Tip

Have you ever found the perfect brief for your questions of law and fact pattern, but wondered how the arguments have held up over time? Launched in January 2021, you can now instantly Quick Check millions of Federal and State briefs found on Westlaw Edge.

Widely used by AmLaw Top 200 law firms, corporate GCs, and thousands of small and mid-sized law firms  and government agencies,  Practical Law should be on your short list of resources to recommend to students this spring to help with assignments, finals, summer jobs, and the actual practice of law after graduation.

Practical Law is legal know-how: succinct, expert-written practice guidance that gives an advanced starting point on research, drafting, and other projects and legal matters.   Our full-time team of more than 300 experienced attorney-editors creates and continuously revises thousands of plain language resources to help you deliver better results in a lot less time.

Practical Law offers several core resources across 16 broad U.S. practice areas and international law:

• Practice Notes: get up to speed quickly with straightforward how-to guidance and clear explanations of current law and practice
• Standard Documents and Clauses: quickly draft agreements, pleadings, employment policies, and more, complete with embedded drafting and negotiating tips
• Checklists: get a bird’s eye view and ensure you’ve covered your bases with checklists, flowcharts and timelines
• Toolkits: one-stop-shops for core legal tasks
• State Q&A: Instantly understand and compare state-specific requirements on a variety of key topics

In addition to industry leading know-how, Practical Law also contains resources to help students understand fundamental legal concepts in many core curriculum classes. Within our curated Law School Resource Center, students will find Course Study Collections that demystify and simplify complex subjects. Guide your students to these complimentary resources this month to supplement their exam preparations.

To boost your ongoing transition to blended learning approaches, the Thomson Reuters Knowledge Center offers over 60 lessons across 6 different certification classes pertaining to legal research skills – ranging from foundational legal concepts to advanced Westlaw Edge research skills. With the pandemic pushing classes to virtual or hybrid for most law schools, usage of these lessons by Legal Research and Writing faculty increased sharply in 2020-21. Over 21,000 1L students completed at least one lesson this year – over a 50% jump compared to the prior year. Faculty commonly assign these bite-sized lessons to teach key concepts before classroom time (in-class or virtual) so that class time can be devoted to application activities and discussions. To learn more about the Knowledge Center lessons and how to assign to your students, see the links below or contact your Thomson Reuters Academic Account Manager.

Kurt Gruebling, JD, is the Law School Success Manager at Thomson Reuters. In this role, he partners with faculty and librarians on learning solutions to help develop the next generation of practice-ready attorneys and legal professionals.