Thomson Reuters Global Resources

Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre Gmbh

Thomson Reuters Global Resources Unlimited Company

Michael Dahn

Qiang Lu

Khalid Al-Kofahi

Jack G Conrad

William M Keenan

Peter Jackson

Thomas W Vacek

Matthew A Surprenant

Scott Francis

Thomas Zielund

Eric Milles

Eric Holten

Steven Sidwell

Ryan Kelly

Matthew Makosky

Patrick Slaven

Charles Elberti

The present disclosure is directed towards systems and methods for assisting with legal research and for aiding in the discovery of information and documents relevant to a user's research focus. The inventive systems receive identifications of relevant documents explicitly or implicitly from a user's research session and, based on issues relevant to those documents and other connections to those documents, recommends similar documents to the user for their consideration. Recommendations may be ranked and filtered and the recommendations and their ranking may be based at least in part on aggregated research session information from previous research sessions.

Legal research recommendation system

The present inventors devised, among other things, an online legal research system with improved user controls. One exemplary system allows users to enter a query in a query input region that automatically expands to accommodate the length of the query field. The exemplary system also responds to the query by automatically directing it to an appropriate database, saving the user from having to choose among the myriad databases within the system. The exemplary system also provides user-specific folders for not only selected documents or excerpts from documents, but also annotating these documents with notes. The system enables the user to determine whether to make the notes private or publicly available.

Graphical user interfaces for information retrieval systems

To facilitate legal research, companies, such as Thomson West provide subscription-based online information-retrieval systems. Seeking to improve these and/or related systems, the present inventors devised, among other things, an exemplary legal research system that performs a conventional search to identify a set of starter documents and then leverages the metadata associated with these starter documents to identify another larger set of relevant documents. Documents in this alternate set are then scored using, for example, a learning machine and feature vectors that account for metadata relationships between the starter documents and alternate documents.

Systems, methods, and software for identifying relevant legal documents

The present invention makes legal research more efficient by selecting clusters in response to the behavior of a user (e.g., a legal professional such as a paralegal, lawyer, or judge). The clusters, which are formed prior to the user accessing a legal document (and thus, providing user behavior to a system), are identified to the based upon a set of metadata associated with the legal document. At least two clusters are identified and a signal associated therewith is transmitted to the user. Each cluster is associated with a unique legal topic. Further, each cluster may comprise primary and/or secondary authority.

Systems, methods, and interfaces for extending legal search results

To facilitate legal research, companies, such as Thomson West provide subscription-based online information-retrieval systems. Seeking to improve these and related IR systems, the present inventors recognized researchers often overlook some types of documents, such as legal encyclopedias and treatises that may be useful to them. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that automatically search for other types of documents not specifically targeted by user queries. One exemplary system automatically submits a user query for legal opinions to first and second databases, with the first storing legal opinions and the second storing non-opinion documents, such as headnotes from the West Key Number System, articles from American Law Reports, and/or articles from American Jurisprudence.

Systems, methods, interfaces and software for extending search results beyond initial query-defined boundaries

Growing community of inventors

Farmington, MN, United States of America

Michael Dahn