I think "natural language" search sucks - am I a geek?

[TurdFerguson]

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Natural Language searches can be great for looking up case law on Westlaw and Lexis.

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From my experience, I find this to be true if I'm researching an area of law or particular type of case with which I'm not readily familiar or don't know the key "buzzwords". For example, in the environmental arena (where I work) if you're looking for a particular type of Clean Water Act case you might not know to search for such technical terms/acronyms as POTW, outfall, or WWTP.

So a natural language search might be more useful in that instance because your search terms would be general enough to get you where you want to go, whereas with a boolean search you might miss important hits by not using the right key terms. Conversely, boolean is great if you're looking for authority on a specific topic and you know the key buzzwords (e.g. I need to find cases involving this statute and this type of company or industry).

[Written like a lawyer, in far too verbose a fashion...]

[beenben]

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Natural Language searches can be great for looking up case law on Westlaw and Lexis.

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if you cant' find it with Boolean / terms / connectors then try natural language and vice versa. there's only about a 25% overlap among the results.