Call me naive, but I would have thought that entering the identical search query on, say, both Westlaw and Lexis Advance would return fairly similar results, at least among the cases ranked highest for relevance. After all, shouldn’t the cases that are most relevant to the query be largely the same, regardless of the research platform?

Turns out, the results they deliver vary widely — not just between Westlaw and Lexis Advance, but among several legal research platforms. In fact, in a comparison of six leading research platforms — Casetext, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Lexis Advance, Ravel and Westlaw — there was hardly any overlap in the cases that appeared in the top-10 results returned by each database.

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