Westlaw: retrieve a case as publisher-keyed DOCX

What this skill carries — grep references/ for any subject the names below miss: !d=${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}; command -v skill-toc >/dev/null 2>&1 && exec skill-toc "$d"; s=$HOME/.claude/skills/plugin-utils/bin/skill-toc; [ -x "$s" ] && exec "$s" "$d"; echo "(skill-toc unavailable: references and scripts are NOT listed here — install the plugin-utils plugin, or start a new session so its bin/ reaches PATH)"

Export an opinion from Westlaw Advantage as DOCX with star pagination, for use as the authoritative source text when excerpting. Feeds workflows:elide-case, whose first Iron Law requires authentic reporter text.

Everything below was measured 2026-09-09 in a live session against Westlaw Advantage, signed in as a UVA law faculty account.

Prerequisite

The user's own logged-in Chromium on CDP port 9222. Linux → mcp__chrome-devtools__*. Load the browser-automation skill first — it owns port and prefix selection. This drives the user's real session; there is no credential handling and nothing to store.

LexisNexis (Lexis+ with Protégé) publishes no MCP server as of 2026-09, and Thomson Reuters' CoCounsel connector returns synthesized research reports with citation links, not verbatim case text (and needs a CoCounsel package subscription) — neither replaces this browser route.

Step 0 — session preflight

Confirm the browser session is still signed in before driving it; an expired login presents as a missing selector or a stalled delivery queue several steps later. On any Westlaw tab, evaluate:

const r = await fetch('/V1/Delivery/Details?timeZoneId=Eastern%20Standard%20Time',
                      {credentials:'same-origin', redirect:'follow'});
const ct = r.headers.get('content-type') || '';
const body = await r.text();
JSON.stringify({status:r.status, host:new URL(r.url).host, ct, ok:(()=>{try{JSON.parse(body);return true}catch{return false}})()});

PASS only on: status 200 AND ct contains application/json AND the body parses as JSON AND host is 1.next.westlaw.com. Measured on a signed-in session: 200, application/json; charset=utf-8, body begins {"PollingIntervalInMilliseconds":0,"DeliveryQueueItems":[{"F. This is the same endpoint Step 5 polls, so it tests the capability the run needs.

Anything else — non-200, non-JSON content type, unparseable body, another final host, or a thrown fetch — is NOT SIGNED IN. STOP and tell the user to sign in to Westlaw in his own browser and re-run. Never attempt a login, fill a credential field, or touch a saved password; this skill handles no credentials and Step 0 is not the exception.

There is no DOM fallback: the API probe is the only session check. Measured on one live signed-in session, same browser, same moment: on /Document/…/View/FullText.html (case viewer) #coid_website_signOffRegion → 1 and #co_signOffContainer → 1; on /Advantage/Home both → 0, while the API probe passed on that same page (200, application/json; charset=utf-8, parseable, redirected:false) and its visible text read "… Client: HU EDWIN Help Profile Sign out …". Those IDs therefore indicate which page is loaded, not whether the session is live, and using them yields a false "not signed in" — the same false-negative class already noted for #coid_website_userMenu, #co_signOffLink, a[href*="SignOff"], #coid_headerLinks and .co_user (all measured absent while signed in). The only signal present on both tabs was the page's own visible text containing "Sign out"; it is not carried here, because user-visible copy Thomson Reuters can reword is too weak to sit beside the probe and must never override it.

The signed-out response shape is UNVERIFIED (never observed, since testing it means signing the user out) — hence the fail-closed condition above; observing it once would allow a more specific message.

Step 1 — find the case

Citation search navigates directly to the document; there is no results page to parse. Type the citation into the main search box and submit, or navigate:

https://1.next.westlaw.com/Document/<docGuid>/View/FullText.html?userEnteredCitation=87+F.3d+536

Westlaw resolves the cite to its own docGuid server-side. Confirm by reading document.title, which carries the case name. Measured: 87 F.3d 536 landed on I18e36046930e11d9bc61beebb95be672 / "S.E.C. v. Life Partners, Inc.".

The jurisdiction filter does not affect a citation lookup but DOES silently narrow a term search. A term search returning nothing when the case plainly exists is usually the filter, not the corpus.

Step 2 — delivery dialog and the client-ID gate

element	is
#deliveryLinkButton1	opens "Download This Document"
#deliveryWidgetButton1	"Delivery Options"
a.co_blobLink.Athens-Document-Caption-pdfbutton	"Download original image (PDF)" — direct blob URL to the reporter page scan, no dialog, no client ID

Clicking Download raises a "Select a client ID" modal whose own container renders EMPTY (only a close button). Its real control lives elsewhere in the DOM as #co_clientID_recent_0, labelled with the user's client ID. Searching only inside the dialog node finds nothing and looks like a broken page. Click #co_clientID_recent_0; the download dialog appears behind it.

The client ID is billing/matter attribution — for a law faculty account, typically the user's own name. Never select one the user has not named. Attribution is theirs, not yours.

Step 3 — format and layout

element	set to
#co_delivery_format_fulltext	<select> → option "Microsoft Word (.docx)", value XMLMIND_DOCX
#coid_chkDdcLayoutUseDualColumnsForCases	UNCHECK
#coid_chkDdcLayoutIncludeHeadnotes	UNCHECK — West headnotes are editorial, not the court's words
#coid_chkDdcLayoutInlineKeyCiteFlags	UNCHECK — KeyCite markup pollutes verbatim matching
#coid_chkDdcLayoutOriginalImageLink	CHECK — embeds a pointer to the page scan
#co_delivery_FullText	radio, already checked = full text
#co_delivery_StarPageRanges	star pagination

DOCX, not PDF, and the reason is not preference. A DOCX carries text in document order, so there is no layout to misread. A PDF is positioned glyphs: extracting it means re-deriving reading order — the exact failure that corrupted a two-column reporter page into The investors here relied on MBC to / are instructed to apply by Howey, fused text no court wrote, which read plausibly and reached print. Choosing PDF re-selects that bug.

RTF is the fallback if DOCX parsing misbehaves: plain text, diffable, lossier on structure. Legacy .doc (OLE) and WordPerfect have no upside; Excel (CSV) is list export only.

Step 4 — submit

#co_deliveryDownloadButton    input[type=button].co_primaryBtn.co_delivery_submitButton

This button is NOT inside the dialog node. Enumerating the dialog's children yields only tabs, checkboxes and Cancel, and the only element labelled "Download" there is #deliveryLinkButton1 — the toolbar button that OPENED the dialog. Clicking that re-opens instead of submitting. Search the document, not the dialog.

Step 5 — the delivery is a QUEUED JOB

Measured request sequence after submit:

POST /V2/Delivery/InitiateDelivery
POST /V2/Delivery/CompleteDeliveryInitialization
GET  /V1/Delivery/Status/{transactionId}        (polled)
GET  /V1/Delivery/Details?timeZoneId=...        -> the queue record

/V1/Delivery/Details returns JSON: FileName, FileSize, DeliveryFormat, ProgressStatus, TransactionId, DeliveryId, ExpireDate, DownloadCount. Wait for ProgressStatus "Completed" and ErrorDescription "Success".

No request in that sequence returns the .docx body. The file sits in Westlaw's delivery queue until retrieved, expires at midnight the same day, and DownloadCount stays 0 until then.

DO NOT GUESS THE RETRIEVAL ENDPOINT. Six plausible URLs built from DeliveryId and TransactionId — /V1/Delivery/Download/{id}, /GetDocument/, /Retrieve/, /V2/..., query-string forms — ALL returned 404. The retrieval trigger is JS-bound with no href in the DOM: the queue item is li#0_qitem > a.co_deliveryQueue_item, href="javascript:void(0);". Open the queue with #dq_msgbar_button and click that anchor. Guessing endpoints wastes calls and teaches nothing; reading the UI found it immediately.

The click triggers a normal browser download into the user's Downloads directory. Move it from there; nothing in the page hands you bytes.

Step 6 — project the text (in memory; do NOT write a .txt)

Westlaw's XMLMIND_DOCX uses a FLAT OPC layout, and it breaks standard tooling. The parts sit at the package root — document.xml, footnotes.xml, header1.xml — not under word/. It is a valid zip and Word opens it, but python-docx and most libraries hardcode word/document.xml and raise on open. Measured: 13 parts, no word/ prefix anywhere.

The docx is the only artifact this skill stores. scripts/westlaw-docx-text.py is a projection, not an export step: consumers import project(path) and read the text in memory. A .txt written beside the docx is a second copy of the same opinion that nothing diffs — and the one this skill used to write discarded the docx's italic runs, so a case name the court set in italics reached a 27-page compiled casebook excerpt in roman, because the cut read only the projection. Persisting the projection is what made that undetectable.

# For eyeballing only. -o writes a file, which is not how a consumer reads this.
scripts/westlaw-docx-text.py <in.docx>

Reads document.xml from the zip root (falling back to word/document.xml so a normal docx also works, and saying which layout it found), walks <w:r> runs inside each <w:p>, wraps every run carrying <w:i/> in Typst emphasis (_..._), unescapes entities, drops empties, and reports paragraph count, character count, emphasis spans and star-page markers to stderr. Emphasis is on by default; --no-emphasis reproduces the old flat read for diffing and is not a source to cut from. Measured:

export	docx	paragraphs	chars	markers
SEC v. Life Partners, 87 F.3d 536	50,078 B	138	90,972	42
SEC v. Ripple, 682 F. Supp. 3d 308	49,381 B	202	76,239	22
SEC v. Mutual Benefits, 408 F.3d 737	22,314 B	78	27,130	8

All three are flat OPC, 13 parts. Those counts are the --no-emphasis read — the default emphasis read is longer by two characters per span, so a character count that does not match this table is the emphasis marks, not damage. Measured 2026-09-10 on Tornetta v. Musk (253,642 B, 2,467 paragraphs, 234 markers): 369,296 chars flat, 371,130 with emphasis, 917 spans — including 19 _Weinberger_ and one _MFW_, every one of which the persisted .txt had discarded.

Naming and layout of a retrieved case

Per case, in the consumer's docs/:

<Case-slug>.westlaw.docx   the export, byte-for-byte as Westlaw delivered it — the ONLY artifact

Slug is party-v-party, volume, reporter, court, year: SEC-v-Ripple-682-FSupp3d-308-SDNY-2023.

One file per case. Write no .txt twin. The projection is regenerable at any time from the docx, which is what makes storing it pointless and losing its italics to it possible. A Westlaw source needs no corrections ledger either: the reproduction check is re-running the projection.

Star pagination

Markers appear inline, mid-sentence, immediately before the first word of the new reporter page. A case reported in two reporters carries two interleaved series, and the parallel one takes a DOUBLE asterisk — measured in Life Partners, 21 *537-style markers for 87 F.3d alternating with 21 **304-style markers for 318 U.S.App.D.C.:

the direction of its former president and current chairman *538 **304 Brian Pardo, arranges these

Strip with \*\*?\d+; a \*\d+ pattern matches inside **304 and leaves a stray asterisk, and counts the two series as one (which is why the extractor reports 42, not 21 + 21).

Both uses are real. A consumer matching quoted text against the extraction must strip markers first. A consumer that wants to PRINT star pages has them available and should not strip.

Coverage

Westlaw is the best available source, not ground truth — it is one publisher's keying of the reporter page, not the page itself. This does not eliminate the need to eyeball retained passages against a page image where one exists (Step 2's original-image PDF is that image).

Why publisher text, stated once

The free corpora are not independent. CourtListener's opinion text and the Caselaw Access Project's JSON for 87 F.3d 536 carry byte-identical OCR damage (is 'rue, Junctions, {per curiam)), because both descend from the same Harvard scan. Two OCR engines — CAP's and a blinded tesseract at 400dpi — both failed on the damaged t in true. The Westlaw DOCX resolved all three passages correctly, including Entrepreneurial functions (lowercase, which a context-based guess got wrong as Functions). Publisher-keyed text is not a marginal improvement over OCR here; it is the difference between a reading and a reconstruction.

Record provenance as westlaw-docx. Westlaw with star pagination is what legal academics actually cite — a legitimate source of record, not a stand-in for the bound volume.

Red flags — STOP

About to	Do instead
Debug a missing selector or a stalled delivery queue	Run Step 0 first — an expired session presents as a broken page
Export as PDF because it "looks like the reporter"	DOCX — PDF re-introduces layout extraction, the bug that fused two columns into text no court wrote. Use the original-image PDF only as the SCAN record
Guess a delivery retrieval URL from DeliveryId	Read the UI — six guessed endpoints all 404'd; the trigger is a JS-bound queue item
Open the export with python-docx	Flat OPC — read document.xml from the zip ROOT
Write a .westlaw.txt beside the docx	The projection is in memory. A stored twin drops the court's italics and nothing diffs it back
Reach for the CourtListener/RECAP route while Westlaw covers the case	That route yields a court PDF with no formatting layer, so italics cannot be recovered from it at all. It stays, for cases Westlaw lacks and for an expired session, and a consumer on it must say italics went unchecked
Pick a client ID to get past the modal	That is billing attribution; ask the user
Look for the submit button inside the dialog	It is outside; the in-dialog "Download" re-opens the dialog
Leave headnotes or KeyCite flags in the export	West editorial matter is not the court's words and breaks verbatim matching

Related

• workflows:elide-case — excerpting the retrieved opinion into a course reading
• courtlistener — free case law when no subscription text is required
• browser-automation — owns the CDP port and tool prefix
• lexis — deliberate stub; Lexis retrieval is not implemented, and it routes back here