Saving sources

Where QuestLaw appears

QuestLaw gives you two places to save from: the extension icon in your browser toolbar, and a Save button that floats at the bottom-right of the page you are reading.

Save a source

While reading a case, statute, or secondary source on Westlaw, Lexis, or most webpages, open the QuestLaw panel and choose Save source. QuestLaw fills in the authority, citation, court, decision date, and source link automatically. Review or edit any field before saving.

• Open the QuestLaw side panel on the page you want to save.
• Choose Save source and check the details QuestLaw found.
• Choose a workspace, or leave the source in your general library to organize later.

Save quotes, highlights, and notes

Select a passage on the page to open QuestLaw’s selection tools. You can save the passage as a quote, add a highlight on supported Lexis and Westlaw pages, or attach a note. When QuestLaw recognizes the authority, it generates the pincite and keeps the passage with the source.

• Use Save quote when you want to keep only the selected language.
• Turn on Save quote while highlighting to capture each passage when highlight mode is active.
• Open the saved source later to review its quotes, notes, markup, and citation details together.

Save from an ordinary webpage

QuestLaw is not limited to Westlaw and Lexis. On a news article, agency page, blog post, or any other webpage, you can save the page itself or just the passage you care about.

• The whole page. Click the QuestLaw icon in the toolbar and choose Save Webpage. QuestLaw keeps the title, the site, the publication date when the page provides one, and a cleaned-up link.
• Just a passage. Select the text the ordinary way, right-click it, and choose Save highlight to QuestLaw. The passage is saved as a quote on the source, with the link back to the page.

Install

QuestLaw is currently available for Chrome and Brave.

Chrome

• Open the Chrome Web Store listing and choose Add to Chrome.
• Pin the QuestLaw icon so the panel is one click away while you read.
• Open any supported page and click the icon to launch the panel.

Brave

Brave installs QuestLaw from the Chrome Web Store as well. Open the listing in Brave, choose Add to Brave, then pin the icon and open a supported page.

Accounts

You can sign up with Google or an email and password.

Create an account

• Open the QuestLaw side panel and choose Sign in with Google, or enter your email address and password.
• If you create an account with email, you’ll receive a confirmation link in your inbox (check Spam!).
• Return to QuestLaw. Your account and sync status appear in the side panel.

Manage your account

Open Settings from the side panel and choose Account. You can see which account is connected, switch storage between cloud sync and local-only, and sign out there.

Premium access

You may see a (disabled) option in Settings for starting a free trial or the like. You can ignore this. Currently, all users by default have full access, for free, indefinitely.^* I may need to turn subscriptions on at some point for new users in the future; but old users are family.

^* Subject to unexpected acts of God, expected acts of God, and what I can reasonably support in the future.

Delete your account

• Open Settings from the QuestLaw side panel and choose Account.
• Choose Delete account and synced data, then confirm.
• Your account, its synced records, and its devices are removed. Anything you already exported stays on your own machine.

Workspaces

Workspaces can be used to cleanly separate your work across different projects or tasks.

Choose a workspace type

QuestLaw offers two kinds of workspaces:

General

For bookmarking and organizing sources, quotations, markup, and notes without setting up a legal test.

Analysis

For tracking how authorities treat different tests, factors, or elements you’re interested in.

Set up an analysis workspace

• Create a new workspace and choose Analysis.
• You can build out a test with as many factors and sub-parts as you need. You can have multiple tests per workspace.
• Save or move the relevant authorities into the workspace.
• In the details for each source you save you’ll be able to easily document how the different factors were addressed (e.g., Lean Plaintiff).

Use the side-by-side view to compare facts, holdings, and element-by-element treatment across authorities. You can also copy the comparison as formatted text for a memo or draft.

Workflow customization

Choose how QuestLaw behaves while you research on Lexis, Westlaw, and other webpages.

Open Settings from the QuestLaw side panel, then choose Workflow Customization. Changes take effect on supported research pages without changing the source records already in your library.

Use familiar Acrobat™ shortcuts

Turn on Also highlight on the page to use the research page’s own highlight action after QuestLaw saves a selected passage. This gives you a familiar highlight-first workflow when the page supports it.

On a supported research page you can also turn highlighting mode on and off by pressing H, the same way you would in Acrobat. Esc leaves highlighting mode, and Ctrl/Cmd + Z undoes the last highlight.

Save quote while highlighting

Turn on Save quote while highlighting to save every passage as a QuestLaw quote while highlight mode is active. Use this when you want highlighting to be your main capture action.

Keep your research session active Experimental

Turn on Keep research session active to send light, same-site activity while a Lexis or Westlaw tab is open. This may reduce session timeouts, but research-site changes can affect reliability. QuestLaw never stores your password.

Word add-in setup

QuestLaw for Word opens your research library in the document's side panel.

If you are an institutional partner who needs help loading the add-in through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, email me directly at support@questlaw.io.

Once you have access, install the add-in from within Word, then sign in with the same email or Google account you use with the browser extension. Your workspaces appear in the panel beside your draft.

The Word add-in is currently in beta and available by invitation.

Signing in and syncing

Word signs in through your browser, using the same account you already use with the extension.

Word add-ins cannot open a normal sign-in window, so QuestLaw hands the sign-in to your browser and finishes on its own. There is no code to read, copy, or type: choose Sign in, finish in the tab that opens, and come back to Word.

The sign-in handshake

Unlocking your library

Signing in is what gives Word access to your encrypted vault — there is no separate device to approve. Once you are signed in, the pane recovers the vault for your account and loads your library.

What syncs, and which direction

• Your saved sources, workspaces, quotations, notes, and analysis are pulled into Word.
• Word never writes research back to your library. Editing happens in the browser extension.
• Draft text, footnotes, selections, scan results, and fixes stay in Word and are never uploaded.

Inserting citations

For supported authorities, one click inserts a validated, formatted citation.

• Open the workspace in the Word panel and find the authority.
• Place your cursor, then choose Insert to drop the quotation, pincite, and full citation.
• Short-forms are used automatically on later references to the same authority.

Scope

22nd-edition Bluepages full citations for supported reported cases, statutes, complete database cases, and federal U.S.C., U.S.C.A., and U.S.C.S. citations.

Citation review

Run a Bluepages audit across the document to catch citation issues before you file.

Start a scan and QuestLaw reads the document body and footnotes, flags citation problems, recommends corrections, and shows the rule behind each one. Nothing is uploaded — the scan runs against the document you have open, and results stay in the document.

Quotation review

Check the quotations in your draft against the source text you saved.

The same scan that reviews citations also compares every marked quotation in the document with the source text held in your library. Open Review Draft in the QuestLaw pane, run the scan, then filter the findings to Quotations.

• Open Review Draft and start a scan. Your vault must be unlocked, because the comparison needs the saved source text.
• Filter the results to Quotations. Each row shows the quoted passage and why it was flagged.
• Open a finding to see the quotation as it stands in your draft beside the saved source text.

What you can do with a finding

• Select the quotation in Word to jump straight to it in the document.
• Add the review as a Word comment next to the passage.
• Correct the quotation boundaries when QuestLaw picked up too much or too little.
• Pick the right saved source when a passage could match more than one, or exclude the passage from the scan.

Supported rules and actions

Coverage is deliberately narrow and stated plainly. Anything not listed here is not checked or formatted.

Citation insertion

QuestLaw inserts 22d-edition Bluepages citations for reported cases, complete database cases, and federal U.S.C., U.S.C.A., and U.S.C.S. citations.

It applies B1.1–B2 and Rules 10.1, 10.4, 10.8.1, 10.9, 12.3.1(d), and 12.5(a). The formatter also draws on Tables T1, T6–T8, T10–T13, and T16.

Formatting review

Word's targeted formatting review currently checks Rules 1.1, 2.3, 3.2(a), 6.1(a), 6.2(b)–(c), 10.4, and Table 11.

Where the explanations come from

Rule explanations shown in Word draw on The Indigo Book, an open, Bluebook-compatible citation manual that is not affiliated with or authorized by The Bluebook.

How your data is protected

QuestLaw is probably more secure than it needs to be. But that is a good thing.

Encryption

Everything is encrypted on your device before it goes anywhere. In transit? Encrypted. On our servers? Encrypted.

That includes the sources you have saved, the notes you have written, your markup, and your analysis. Your confidential work product is treated as confidential. Your non‑confidential work product is treated as if it were confidential too. Each record is encrypted separately with AES-256-GCM, using a fresh key and nonce for every version, before it is written to local storage or sent to the cloud.

• The vault key is wrapped by a non-extractable device key that never leaves your machine.
• Records are stored under blinded identifiers and isolated to their owner. The server only holds authenticated ciphertext, not readable content.
• Decrypted records exist only in memory while the vault is unlocked. Nothing decrypted is written to durable storage.
• Removing a device rotates the vault to a new key generation and re-encrypts every live record, so the removed device cannot read anything published afterwards.
• Deleting your account removes the vault, device, entitlement, and account rows, and revokes your sessions.

What QuestLaw can see

• Your account email and the ordinary technical details needed to run a sync service.
• Anonymous feature counts, if you leave them on. They are never sold or handed to an analytics company, and you can switch them off in Settings.

QuestLaw cannot read your saved research, source links, workspace names, notes, quotations, or analysis, and cannot read anything you write in a Word document.

Word

Word uses the same encrypted vault. Draft text, footnotes, selections, scan results, and findings — your document in its entirety — stay in the Word add-in’s memory and are excluded from anything QuestLaw transports or stores. Your document is never sent, stored, or processed off your own machine. Citation and quotation review run locally, so a scan works with the network turned off.

Signed out

Signing in is optional. Local-only use is fully supported: the library still encrypts every record, works offline, and keeps backup, restore, and export available in Settings.

Inspecting it yourself

Because QuestLaw is a browser extension, the shipped client code and encryption design can be extracted and read directly from your own installation.

Troubleshooting

The panel will not open

• Reload the page. The extension injects on load, so a tab open from before you installed it will not have it.
• Check the extension is enabled at chrome://extensions.
• On a work machine, confirm your administrator has not blocked side panels.

A source will not parse

QuestLaw reads the page you are on. If the citation, court, or date comes back blank, the page is usually a search result, a preview, or a print view rather than the full document.

• Open the full document view, then save again.
• Every field can be edited by hand before you save — a partial parse is still worth keeping.
• If a specific reporter or database is consistently wrong, report it with the URL.

Sync looks stuck

• Check you are signed in on this Chrome profile. Signing in on the website does not sign in the extension.
• Check storage is set to Cloud rather than local-only in Settings.
• A new browser stays empty until the vault is unlocked there.

Word will not sign in

• Codes are single-use and expire. Start again from Sign in in the pane.
• Finish in the same browser you started in.
• If the pane stays on "waiting", close and reopen it, then retry.
• See signing in and syncing for the full handshake.

My library is empty in Word

Word pulls the library only after you are signed in and the vault is unlocked. If the pane shows sources but no detail, the vault is still locked — unlock it from the pane.

Still stuck?

Get in touch.