Winning Research Skills - Westlaw

Chapter 8
There are several ways to add a date restriction to your Terms and Connectors search.
■ To restrict your search to documents issued during a certain time period ending with the date
of your current Westlaw research session, select a date restriction from the Dates drop-down
list at the Search page, (e.g., Last 30 days or Year to date). The restriction is automatically
included in your query.
■ You can also type da followed by a date or date range in parentheses in the text box at the
Search page.
The year in a date restriction must be entered as a four-digit year, e.g., 2008. Many date
restriction formats are acceptable:
da(3-1-2008)
da(before 2008)
da(bef 3/1/2008)
da(aft jan 1, 2008)
da(aft 1975 and bef 2008)
da(1998 2008)
When you want to add a date restriction to your Natural Language search, select a date
restriction from the Dates drop-down list.
When you have accessed a tabbed page with a Search section, you can use the Dates drop-down
list to add a date restriction to either your Terms and Connectors search or your Natural
Language search.
By Date Added to Westlaw
An added-date restriction (ad) allows you to update the result of a Terms and Connectors search
you previously ran on Westlaw. For example, suppose you ran a search on February 1, 2008. In
March, you want to see whether the same search retrieves any new cases. To do this, enter the
same search with an added-date restriction using January 31, 2008, the date one day prior to the
day you most recently ran the search.
To include an added-date restriction in your Terms and Connectors query, type ad followed by
the date in parentheses, e.g., ad(aft 1/31/2008), in the Search text box. Be sure to connect your
date restriction to the rest of your Terms and Connectors query with the AND connector (&).
The added-date restriction is not available when you are using the Natural Language search
method.
Step 5: Review Your Result
Westlaw provides several tools that will help you quickly and easily review the information you
have retrieved. Refer to Chapter 9 for detailed information on how to move within and among
documents on Westlaw.
90 Winning Research Skills