CiteGenie™
Automagically copy text with correct citations from Westlaw, Lexis, and other websites.*
"We cannot impress too strongly upon counsel in all cases the importance to us of correct citations." Hughes v. Wyatt, 125 N.W. 334, 336 (Iowa 1910).

There are a few differences when CiteGenie™ is used on different services:

Type of document Westlaw WestlawNext
 Lexis
Case law see below
 see below see below
Statutes and regulations
 no significant differences no significant differences no significant differences
Law Journals Citation may include article titles, but no author name
 Author and title
 No author or article titles
Secondary Sources
such as ALR		 Citation may include article titles Citation may include article titles No article titles

If you see a trend here, it is that CiteGenie™ can not reliably determine the title of an article in a law review or secondary source such as ALR, when using Lexis. We hope to improve this as new versions are released.

In addition, there are some more specific differences in CiteGenie's™ performance on the different services when processing case law:

Feature
 Notes
Concurring and dissenting
opinion detection
 Lexis clearly identifies dissenting and concurring opinions, so detection by CiteGenie™ is a little more reliable in Lexis than in Westlaw.
Case titles
 Lexis often truncates long titles, adding "etc."  In Westlaw GiteGenie™ generally can find the longer, untruncated title.
Pinpoints
 Lexis has pinpoints for more reporters than Westlaw.
Capitalization of case titles
 Lexis appears to have processed some titles in ways that resulted in improper capitalization (see 513 U.S. 88) and CiteGenie™ can generally not correct these types of capitalization errors, but for commonly used acronyms, they can be corrected by adding them to your supplemental abbreviations (i.e. replace "Fec" with "FEC").
Paragraph numbers
 Lexis is more consistent with its presentation of paragraph numbers, and thus they are slightly more reliably obtained by CiteGenie™ in Lexis than in Westlaw.
Uncommon and obsolete court names
 CiteGenie™ is programmed to handle the vast majority of court names used in all state and federal court opinions (more are added with each new version).  However, there are a few uncommon and obsolete court names that CiteGenie™ does not know about.  In such cases, it will use the court name as presented by Lexis or Westlaw.  Lexis generally does better in providing a Bluebook compliant court name for those courts than Westlaw.
Acronyms in Case Titles
 Lexis will more frequently use acronyms for party names ("FEC" rather than "Federal Election Commission").  The user-defined supplemental abbreviations in CiteGenie™ can be used to make use of such acronyms more consistent if the user wishes.
Adversary proceedings
 Adversary proceeding citations (e.g. some bankruptcy cases) covered by Rule 10.2.1(a) can be complex.  In Westlaw, CiteGenie™ does well and provides both the adversary and non-adversary case titles per the rule in most cases.  In Lexis, only the non-adversary title is available.


Published by CiteGenie.com.  All rights reserved.  Copyright © 1997-2010 by the respective authors.

* Westlaw, Lexis, and other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.  They are used here only to denote the identity of services with which CiteGenie is designed to operate and do not indicate any endorsement or approval by those services.