Patents Assigned to West Services, Inc.
  • Patent number: 8010893
    Abstract: An electronic file such as an HTML web page accessible via a browser by a user. The electronic file may include one or more textual field descriptors for display within the browser; one or more editable data fields associated with the textual field descriptors, the editable data fields for receiving data for the user of the browser; and a module having a view mode and an edit mode, the view mode for displaying the textual field descriptors, the edit mode for permitting the user to enter data in the editable data fields. In one example, the view mode may be invoked when the electronic file is open in the browser. The edit mode may be invoked only if the browser contains a control for activating the edit mode. In this way, the user is able to edit the data in the document and retransmit the document to other users who can only view the data as read-only data.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 23, 2004
    Date of Patent: August 30, 2011
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Kevin Koch, Grover Mundell
  • Patent number: 8001457
    Abstract: Software that automatically locates and marks specific portions of a document and defines hyperlinks including at least a portion of the marked text. An exemplary implementation, tailored for legal citations, processes the portion of the marked text as a search term, and allows completion of hyperlinks without the necessity of including complete file addresses. This implementation also defines a portion of the hyperlinks based on the cost or time of executing the hyperlink, to reduce the cost or time of executing the hyperlink.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 6, 2006
    Date of Patent: August 16, 2011
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Douglas T. Rosenoff, Anthony Mario Medina, Craig Runde
  • Patent number: 7984053
    Abstract: The American legal system, judges and lawyers are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past judicial opinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of new disputes. To facilitate these searches, some companies collect and publish the judicial opinions of courts across the United States in both paper and electronic forms, with some of the cases containing references to prior cases from other courts that have previously ruled on all or part of the same dispute. Identifying the prior cases is problematic, because, for example, conventional computer text-matching not only suggests too many non-prior cases, but also misses too many actual prior cases. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that generally facilitate identification of one or more documents that are related to a given document, and particularly facilitate identification of prior cases for a given case.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 16, 2009
    Date of Patent: July 19, 2011
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Peter Jackson, Khalid Al-Kofahi
  • Publication number: 20110171621
    Abstract: A system and method of providing an electronic course to a mobile device, comprising: capturing at least an attribute of a student for a student registration; correlating the attribute to at least a first set of course content related to that student; Providing the first set of course content related to the student; Measuring a component of the students interaction related to the first set of course content; and Delivering at least a second set of course content to the student based on the component of the students measured interaction.
    Type: Application
    Filed: November 3, 2010
    Publication date: July 14, 2011
    Applicant: West Services Inc.
    Inventors: Michael K. Sims, Heidi Larson, Lee Ann Enquist, Roger Mesler, Moneesh Arora
  • Publication number: 20110055206
    Abstract: Exemplary systems for processing a corpus of documents, such as legal contracts or agreements, are disclosed. The systems include a phrase discovery engine which derives statistics and phrase equivalence classes, groups of phrase equivalence classes, and uberphrases (clauses) bounded by phrases. These can be used to determine origins of phrases or clauses within given legal contract or to suggest alternative phrases and clauses.
    Type: Application
    Filed: September 3, 2009
    Publication date: March 3, 2011
    Applicant: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Kingsley Martin, Trace Liggett, Gary Berosik, Thomas Zielund, Dietmar Dorr, Jochen L. Leidner
  • Publication number: 20100312764
    Abstract: Systems and techniques are disclosed to rank documents by analyzing a query log generated by a search engine. The query log includes data relating to user behavior, queries and documents. The systems and techniques distill query log information into surrogate documents and extract features from these surrogate documents to rank the documents.
    Type: Application
    Filed: June 4, 2010
    Publication date: December 9, 2010
    Applicant: West Services Inc.
    Inventors: Wenhui Liao, Khalid Al-Kofahi, Isabelle Moulinier
  • Patent number: 7849103
    Abstract: A computer implemented method of processing data containing information about relationships between contacts and a community of contact owners, includes: collecting data having contact information, contact owner information and one or more values related to the strength of a relationship between the contact and the contact owner; evaluating the strength of the relationship based on the one or more values; and storing the collected data and evaluated strength in a computer database.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 10, 2004
    Date of Patent: December 7, 2010
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Geoffrey Hyatt, Michael Yoon, Wilbur Swan
  • Patent number: 7809738
    Abstract: A system for determining changes in the interest of a subject over a time period. The system measures the volume of news articles for a subject over a time period and makes a comparison to a previous volume of news articles for the same subject over a previous time period.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 17, 2004
    Date of Patent: October 5, 2010
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Daniel F. X. O'Reilly, John L. Moss, Pasco Gasbarro
  • Patent number: 7711738
    Abstract: Systems, methods and computer-readable media using the Internet for submitting search requests for court case records and retrieving court items or documents associated therewith. Users specify a number of search criteria and each search request is stored in a memory to be executed by a server. Stored search requests are selected for executing by the server based on several factors, including the number of times the search request failed, how old the search request is, how busy the court database is and how many phone lines the court database has available for access. When search requests are selected, the server seamlessly accesses the court databases associated with the search requests regardless of whether the court databases are accessible through the Internet or through dial-up connections. Once court databases are accessed, the server executes the search request.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 15, 2000
    Date of Patent: May 4, 2010
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Harold Kraft, Phyo Win, Charles DeLauder
  • Patent number: 7707492
    Abstract: Systems and methods are provided through which data parseable against a document type definition by generating a list of a possible paths of an input element that is not encoded against the document type definition, determining the path that is the best fit with the document type definition, and then generating the element in the syntax of the document type definition. Determining the path that is the best fit includes parsing the path against the document type definition. The best fit is expressed in a scoring scale, in which the best score indicates the best fit. Thereafter, the path with the best fit is translated in accordance to the document type definition or markup language.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 14, 2001
    Date of Patent: April 27, 2010
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventor: Michael S. Zaharkin
  • Patent number: 7620626
    Abstract: The American legal system, judges and lawyers are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past judicial opinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of new disputes. To facilitate these searches, some companies collect and publish the judicial opinions of courts across the United States in both paper and electronic forms, with some of the cases containing references to prior cases from other courts that have previously ruled on all or part of the same dispute. Identifying the prior cases is problematic, because, for example, conventional computer text-matching not only suggests too many non-prior cases, but also misses too many actual prior cases. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that generally facilitate identification of one or more documents that are related to a given document, and particularly facilitate identification of prior cases for a given case.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 30, 2006
    Date of Patent: November 17, 2009
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Peter Jackson, Khalid Al-Kofahi
  • Patent number: 7593920
    Abstract: The American legal system, judges and lawyers are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past judicial opinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of new disputes. To facilitate these searches, some companies collect and publish the judicial opinions of courts across the United States in both paper and electronic forms, with some of the cases containing references to prior cases from other courts that have previously ruled on all or part of the same dispute. Identifying the prior cases is problematic, because, for example, conventional computer text-matching not only suggests too many non-prior cases, but also misses too many actual prior cases. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that generally facilitate identification of one or more documents that are related to a given document, and particularly facilitate identification of prior cases for a given case.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 4, 2002
    Date of Patent: September 22, 2009
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Peter Jackson, Khalid Al-Kofahi
  • Patent number: 7567961
    Abstract: Every year, professional classifiers at West Group manually classify over 350,000 headnotes, or abstracts of judicial opinions, across approximately 82,000 separate classes of the Key Number System. Although most headnotes are classified from the memory of the classifiers, a significant number are difficult and thus costly to classify manually. Accordingly, the inventors devised systems, methods, and software that facilitate manual classification of headnotes and documents generally and hard-to-classify headnotes particularly. One exemplary system provides a graphical user interface that concurrently displays an unclassified headnote, a ranked list of one or more candidate classes, a candidate class in combination with adjacent classes of the classification system, and at least one classified headnote that is associated with one of the candidate classes.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 24, 2006
    Date of Patent: July 28, 2009
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Bokyung Yang-Stephens, M. Charles Swope, Jeffrey Locke, Isabelle Moulinier
  • Patent number: 7529756
    Abstract: A system and method for automatically determining a plurality of pieces of different information about a textual document from the text of the textual document are provided in which one or more particular characteristics of the text of the textual document are identified to generate a file containing the text of the textual document with the particular characteristics marked up within the text.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 22, 2000
    Date of Patent: May 5, 2009
    Assignee: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Bob Haschart, Jack Conrad, Forrest Rhoads, Dan Dabney, Howard Turtle, Kinley Larntz, Po Yang Bokyung Yang Stephens, Dan Gannon
  • Publication number: 20070156674
    Abstract: Some known medical terms may function as non-medical terms depending on their particular context. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that facilitate determining whether a term that is found in a medical corpus is likely to be a medical term when found in another corpus. An exemplary embodiment receives a term and computes an ambiguity score based on language models for a medical and a non-medical corpus.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 4, 2006
    Publication date: July 5, 2007
    Applicant: West Services, Inc.
    Inventors: Christopher Dozier, Mark Chaudhary, Ravi Kondadadi