Feature Spotlight: Highlight and Annotate Lexis® Results

Were you the 1L with six different highlighters…like, yellow for holdings, green for facts, pink for dissents? Did you tend to jot down important notes in the margins?

Flash forward 15 years, and you probably still highlight and annotate key passages in documents to jog your memory,  jumpstart drafting and share insights with colleagues.  You can keep pulling out those highlighters—but that can be pretty inconvenient if you’re working from home, away from your office and its nearby printer with colleagues two doors down.

The document-review options in the Lexis service still make it easy to mark up and save/share notes for cases and most other important search results documents. (And there’s no “highlighter headache” from the marker fumes either.)

Choices Display Automatically

Highlighting and annotating is as simple as highlighting text with your cursor. Options display automatically.

Here’s how it works:

For highlighting, just click the down arrow next to Highlight and choose one of seven colors. Then you’re good to go. Continue to copy text and click Highlight. Change highlighting colors whenever you like.

When you’ve finished highlighting a document, save your work by saving your document to a Work Folder. Use the folder icon that displays with the delivery icons at the top of your results screen. Screen tips walk you through the process. 

Annotate and Save for Later

Adding notes is just as simple. Copy text and choose Annotate. Note the primary holdings as well as fact patterns that match your matter. Paraphrase arguments for later review. It’s much easier to find key passages for cutting and pasting into your draft.

You have room to add your thoughts. Each annotation can be up to 4,000 characters so you can record your best insights. And just like highlighting, to save your annotations you need to save your document to a Work Folder.

Once you’ve saved, the marked-up version is the one that displays in future search results or when you retrieve the document by citation or through your History. You’re always reminded of your work. You can add to it and save the additions.

Plus, you can share your insights when you share the folder document via email, download or print. Just select the delivery formatting option to include highlighting and annotations.  

Available Across Content Types

Highlight and annotate more than case law. With few exceptions, you can mark up and save documents from across your subscription, including:

• Those important news articles your Lexis Alert provided.

• Law reviews or treatises that cover an area of law where you need to come up to speed.

• Briefs, pleadings or motions text you’d like to repurpose later.

• Code sections or bill text you may need for a future compliance matter.

Need to Save a Slice of Text? No Problem

Sometimes you find exactly what you need in a few well-placed paragraphs that you’d like to save, instead of a lengthy document. That’s simple too, though the steps are slightly different from the highlighting and annotation options. Highlight what you’d like to save with your cursor and select the Add to Folder option. Just follow the screens to move the text to a new or existing Work Folder.

Once your selected text is in the preferred folder, you can open the text slice and then add notes while in the folder. Those notes will re-display if you review the document later in search results.

If you’re a Lexis subscriber, you can log in to your Lexis account and start using these tools right away.

(Oh, and you can take highlighters off your office supply list while you’re at it.)

Log in to Lexis