Make Money in Law School with Lexis and Westlaw
It’s a new semester of law school, which means you have another chance to earn money from Lexis and Westlaw. I just made $34.88 in about an hour. Here’s how you can do it too!
Points = Money
First of all, you have to understand that Lexis and Westlaw reward points allow you to buy things and gift certificates. Thus, they have value.
Admittedly, the marketplace where the points are accepted is limited (even more so with Westlaw). But you can still get valuable and useful things for your hard work. Thus, in my mind, they are close enough to green backs.
Lexis point value
The value that I blurted out in the intro to this post comes from some quick calculations I made. I wanted to quantify my Lexis points in terms of dollars. I figured the easiest way to do this is to check out what the points can actually buy.
On Lexis, $25 gift certificate costs you 1637 points. A little math reveals that a point is roughly equal to $0.015 ($25 / 1637). Yep, it’s worth about a penny and a half. Not bad. You can earn 25 points a day for answering a “fact or fiction” question That’s $0.375. Next week, you actually get double points for every day’s question, so that’s $0.75. Heck, that’s a free soda every day!
Earn your $34
Now that you see how I affixed a dollar value to my Lexis points, here is how I earned them (and how you can too!).
25 points – Play “fact or fiction.” Many of the questions can be guessed or answered reasonably, but some require an actual search. Don’t forget to do this every day.
100 points – Do the summer employment survey. You get 100 points and a completed square on your “Passport to Success.”
100 points – Do the Wildcard Passport square. Your school may be different, but our wildcard was a quick exercise using BriefCheck. This completes a square.
200 points – Shepardize 30 citations. Find a list of 30 citations (or quickly type out one), stick it in the Get & Print version of Shepard’s, and click submit. Your points won’t be deposited until Friday (I think), but you’ll get them. This completes a Passport square.
900 points – Take six tutorials. Find the “Learning LexisNexis” page and pick six tutorials to do. Two of them are picked for you, in order to complete the tutorials square on your Passport. You get 150 points each for the first six tutorials you complete each semester.
1000 points – You just completed four Passport squares. This gets you a 1000 point bonus. Cool!
See, you just earned 2325 points ($34.88) in no time. You can do this in one sitting or spread it out over a few spare minutes here and there.
Now go out and earn points money! You have no excuse not to. And you just might become more at ease with Lexis while you’re at it.
If you have any point-earning tips, please share them with us. Now, what are you going to buy with your new-found wealth? Please post a comment or drop me a line.
[tags]legal andrew, lexis, lexisnexis, westlaw, law school[/tags]
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Comments
6 Responses to “Make Money in Law School with Lexis and Westlaw”
January 25th, 2007
Awesome post! I’ve been thinking about lately how much my Lexis and Westlaw points are worth in money. Now I know. Realizing that using their services is free money should be an incentive to any law school student to take advantage of the points. Again, great write up.
January 25th, 2007
I’m glad you liked it. I’ll bet there are some people out there who think we’re nuts by looking at free “points” this way. But it makes perfect sense to me (and to you, I presume). How do we decide if things are worth our time? We have to break them down to common denominators and compare them. Money is usually a good denominator for things like this.
Thanks for commenting,
Andrew
February 4th, 2007