Westlaw Asia (new) Guide - Unlocking the value of FirstPoint, Australia's case law citator

Last Published: April 08, 2021

This guide explains key elements within a FirstPoint Australian case record in Westlaw Asia. Learn how to identify points of law, significant citing and cited references, and establish if a case is good law.

Key	FirstPoint feature	FirstPoint advantage
1	Case Status Flags: clear status flags inform you immediately if your case is good law (that it hasn’t been doubted or overturned). Status flags also appear in the Litigation History and Cases Cited and Citing blocks.	Within 2 business days of receipt, more than 90% of new cases receive point-of-law classifications, litigation history and, for superior courts decisions, case relationships. These relationships drive the flag status.
2	Classification to the FirstPoint Key, which is powered by the Australian Digest. You can use these classifications to browse within Westlaw Asia and find cases – including obscure cases – on the same point of law.	The online Classification Key is unique to FirstPoint. It’s simple and easy to browse, covering more than 19,000 points of law. Like the law, the Key grows and evolves every year.
3	Summaries: targeted on-point digest notes written by Australian legal editors with local legal qualifications and experience.	14 Australian legal editors work on FirstPoint. The editors have local legal qualifications, local experience and Australia-wide expertise. Their point-of-law summaries are a fast brief when users want more detail than just court catchwords.

Key	FirstPoint feature	FirstPoint advantage
4	Related Cases: click through to cases that are Cited by or Cite your case, including the treatment of that case within the judgment and the current case status flag.	FirstPoint is integrated with unreported judgments and the largest online library of authorised and specialist report series in Australia, including the Commonwealth Law Reports.
5	FirstPoint verified is a list of significant cases or legislation provisions that are referred to within the case. The case citation links to the full-text unreported judgment (via the media neutral citation) or law report (via report citation), where available.	To save users research time, the FirstPoint Legal Team has analysed the case and extracted a list of significant case and legislation references. The significant case references are also verified for correctness.
6	Other References: we also provide lists of other cases and legislation that are considered in the case to enable further research.	The Other References feature was developed in response to customer feedback. This recent feature complements FirstPoint verified, which displays significant references only.

Note: The above screenshots of the FirstPoint record for Attorney-General (SA) v Corporation of the City of Adelaide have been cropped in order to fit the FirstPoint features in this document. As a result, the images may show only part of the available FirstPoint content for some of the highlighted FirstPoint features.