From the “Westlaw Insider” blog comes a series of posts that detail how a Supreme Court case – here, the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act case – is dealt with by editors at West Publishing.
- Part 1 – Loading the electronic document – Technical teams prepared for loading the document; they even tested different scenarios since they weren’t sure how the Court would send the data.
- Part 2 – Keycite – An editor verified the procedural history and updated flags for related cases.
- Part 3 – Headnotes – Editors added the short restatements of legal issues that appear in the digest at the beginning of a case.
- Part 4 – Key Numbers – Editors classified the headnotes into a system of 400 major topics. For the ACA case, there was a team of 10 classifiers! Favorite line: “[W]hen you are classifying a monumental case, you feel like you are part of a historically significant event.”
- Part 5 – Codes validity – Editors from the “USCA team” added notes to all code sections affected by the original act and, after review, added a “Validity” note to the section that dealt with state plans for medical assistance.
There’s a huge amount of intellectual capital that goes into online legal research systems, and this series of posts gives some nice background on where all that information comes from.