6 reasons to put your mind at ease, with Quick Check

2. Because nobody’s perfect – including your opponent

Litigation is competitive, requiring knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses in your opponent’s arguments. Of course, no attorney would hope to find a mistake in their opponent’s work. Quick Check allows you to analyze opposing counsel’s court filings to identify potential gaps in their arguments and citations with a mere upload.

Without Quick Check, reviewing your opponent’s document requires pulling citations individually to see whether something was overlooked. Quick Check pulls all those potential weaknesses into one place, showing you any negative treatment so you can address them in your response. The Quotation Analysis feature within Quick Check provides another level of insight into your opponent’s work. Quotation Analysis identifies differences between case quotes in an uploaded document and the cited case language on Westlaw Edge, and produces a side-by-side report of the quotation analysis so you can quickly determine whether the errors or omissions could be used to your advantage. Lawyers may not hope for an opponent’s mistakes, but nothing provides such justified satisfaction as finding a citation to subvert opposing counsel’s arguments.

3. Because you’re a team

If I’ve learned anything from the many (many) “how many lawyers does it take…” jokes I have heard since law school, it’s that legal work is as much a team effort as an individual one. At least, I think that’s the point of those jokes.

With Quick Check, you finally have a tool that allows you to conduct an exhaustive review of your colleague’s work so you can provide substantive feedback without hours of additional research. Use the report to review recommended authority quickly, check the validity of cited cases, and email yourself a copy of the table of authorities. Think of the extra hours you can spend coming up with pithy responses to bad lawyer jokes.

4. Because starting from scratch is a pain

The feeling of juggling multiple projects as a recently licensed lawyer—losing sleep and practically vibrating from too much coffee—never really leaves you, even if you no longer have the pressure of newly bestowed attorney-hood on your shoulders. And nothing brings that feeling rushing back, in all its panicked glory, like a senior partner tossing a case file on your desk, with a rapidly approaching brief due date.

Sound familiar? When a new case comes across your desk, it is worth checking whether it bears similarity to one you’ve handled before, since Quick Check gives you an easy method to review your past brief and jumpstart your research for the new case. This will help you quickly determine if the cited authority is still good law and review any new authority that Quick Check recommends. I can’t promise you won’t still need caffeine at 4 pm, but maybe you can manage a little more sleep that week, knowing your case isn’t quite as unfinished as it was this morning.

5. Because you don’t know what you don’t know

I would consider myself a generalist when it comes to knowledge of the law, but not even eight years as a Reference Attorney – where I live and breathe legal research – can make me an expert in everything. While many attorneys may know a lot about one or even a few types of law, they cannot know everything about the many varieties of law and all their nuances.

While you may feel you have a grasp on the relevant law for your case, using Quick Check allows you the luxury of identifying sources that you may not have seen yet. Whether you are researching an area of law that is new to you, or you need additional citations to support further an issue you’re quite familiar with, Quick Check can help you capture new resources to include within your document.

6. Because your judge or opponent might be using Quick Check

If you, too, felt glee at the prospect of finding a case to subvert your opponent earlier in this article – karma is coming back around. No lawyer wants to be called out by an opponent (or, more excruciatingly, their judge) because they misquoted or missed an obvious case with a stronger holding or better argument.   

With Quick Check Judicial, it’s easier than ever for courts to find these missteps. Quick Check Judicial gives judges and law clerks the ability to review up to 6 documents regarding a single matter at once and gives them an easy-to-read report that highlights any errors. It also gives them insight into your strategy by emphasizing the cases you chose not to cite.

You want to have every advantage and tool in your back pocket before walking into a courtroom or filing a brief. Avoid making critical mistakes that could harm your reputation—and be confident that you haven’t missed anything that your opposing counsel or judge could use against you and your client—by checking your documents with Quick Check.