Transactional Attorneys - Westlaw/Lexis use? Forum

[typeslowly300]

Hello TLS,

This is my first time posting, my apologies if I am not properly adhering to the posting standards on this forum. I am going to be an upcoming summer associate with a biglaw firm in their corporate transactional practice (not doing any litigation work). I am unsure if it will be primarily m&a, capital markets, private equity, etc. Regardless, do transactional attorneys often use Westlaw/Lexis? It recently dawned upon me that transactional junior associates may not be researching on those platforms as much, and instead are focused on the contract precedents, updating agreements, reviewing reps and warranties, that sort of thing. I would appreciate anyone's advice or knowledge on this. Thank you!

-typeslowly

[LaLiLuLeLo]

Yes, I use Practical Law a decent amount. They have some useful guidance for corporate questions that pop up and some securities stuff. If you do public company work, corporate counsel and section16 will be very useful as well. I’ve never actually used the “normal” parts of westlaw or lexis, just PLC.

[gregfootball2001]

I use Westlaw once every couple of months to make sure that a particular contract provision (indemnities, mostly) isn't void under a particular state's law. That's about it.

[papermateflair]

As a tax attorney, I haven't really used westlaw/lexis in a couple of years, although we do have some tax research sources (like BNA) that I use all the time. If you're just doing basic contract drafting or doing reps and warranties, you probably won't use much of lexis/westlaw.

[Yugihoe]

Probably better served learning how to use the search function on your firms systems as you'll be mostly looking up comps from other deals your firm has done. You'll generally have some sort of corp. librbary resource too who can search broader public deals/ databases for you if you're looking for specific deals with specific characteristics in an industry or something. In sum, no west law etc. won't really help and you can always google general basic things.

[JHP]

I actually use Westlaw and Lexis quite a good amount. Not so much for case research as much as I do for statute research/confirmation and (for Lexis), to use Lexis Securities Mosaic to pull SEC filings with more targeted parameters than just searching on EDGAR. The latter type research will be more relevant if you do public companies work, cap markets, and the like.

[RedGiant]

You will use things like EDGAR and Intelligize and Corporatecounsel.net far more than you use Lexis and Westlaw, with the exception of PLC (which is a Westlaw-owned product nowadays). You can and should get training on what you need as a summer.

I am 100% transactional, and you do research on the securities side for sure, often using the resources I mentioned above. I used Westlaw and Lexis extensively in corporate only when I was working with activist hedge funds and was doing actual research on event-driven M&A (which is a really random use case and didn't come up ever before or since, and I was a transactional paralegal for nearly a decade before I went to law school.) Far more likely you'll use PLC to find sample clauses or think about what kind of checklist you need for a type of deal, etc.