SYSTEMS, METHODS, INTERFACES AND SOFTWARE FOR EXTENDING SEARCH RESULTS BEYOND INITIAL QUERY-DEFINED BOUNDARIES

摘要

To facilitate legal research, companies, such as Thomson West, providesubscription-based online information-retrieval systems. Seeking to improvethese and related IR systems, the present inventors recognized researchersoften overlook some types of documents, such as legal encyclopedias andtreatises that may be useful to them. Accordingly, the present inventorsdevised systems, methods, and software that automatically search for othertypes of documents not specifically targeted by user queries. One exemplarysystem automatically submits a user query for legal opinions to first andsecond databases, with the first storing legal opinions and the second storingnon-opinion documents, such as headnotes from the West Key Number System,articles from American Law Reports, and/or articles from AmericanJurisprudence.