Westlaw is a useful tool for legal research. It is really easy to search here when you have citations to things like regulations, statutes or cases. KeyCite is an additional easy to use tool tool that lets you see other authority or explanatory materials. To KeyCite a document after retrieving it, simply click the colored KeyCite flag. Green flags mean all available citing authority is supporting. Yellow means there could be some negative treatment. Red means there are definite negative references that you should probably look at if you are going to cite the document as authority.
When searching materials like cases, codes, or secondary sources, you can choose BASIC or ADVANCED. Basic is more like performing a Google search. You can list terms and find the documents that most closely match the terms. Advanced searching is keyword searching based upon terms and connectors. BASIC searching results are relevance ranked. ADVANCED search results are listed most recent first.
