Shanna is a solicitor with Paino and Robinson, who specializes in criminal, family and civil work. She graduated from Victoria University of Wellington with an LLB (Hons – First Class) in 2008 and was admitted in 2009.

Shanna is passionate about the court work she does. Most recently she’s been inspired by appearing with Paul Paino as his junior in the Supreme Court in a complex criminal matter, and when much younger, by watching endless episodes of Boston Legal.

Shanna uses Westlaw extensively. "I am a committed user! I’ve tried other legal research platforms but have found them clumsy, not particularly intuitive, definitely not user friendly and, lacking in content.

"In the course of my daily work, Sentencing Tracker is everything to me. It’s well edited, thorough, accurate, easy to use, and current. I also make full use of the Alert feature. That allows me to set up individually personalized alerts to receive the latest sentencing decisions across a broad range of topic areas.

"I love how much detail I can gather from making use of the refined search tools and in particular the related docs tab and the citation symbols. These are indispensable as they lessen the impact of getting it wrong in front of the bench.

"If you don’t know what’s there and available to you, you’re missing out. Do the training and learn how clever it is. Get the basics first and then build on them. Once you’re using it daily, you’ll become more efficient at pulling up the sort of results you need. To get the best from it you must take the time to explore and learn to drill down through your results."

"Westlaw saves me time by being more of everything I value in a legal research tool.

"For example I did a comparative search across Westlaw and another company’s legal research platform recently. After two hours of fiddling and refining, the yield from that other platform was a grand total of two cases. Exactly the same search in Westlaw returned me nine cases in fifteen minutes. That’s got to be a win-win situation. The time saving of 105 minutes by itself is significant but of more importance is the increased case result. A leap from two relevant cases to nine is major!

"I can use Westlaw wherever I am – at home, in the office, on a lap top, tablet or a desk top. It’s flexible and adaptable, working for me and lessening my stress rather than adding to it.

"I love that I can share what I’m doing with colleagues that we can collaborate - adding notes as we work and saving everything to a folder. The more I learn about its capability, the more efficient I am. It’s great!"