Start here
The database is a literal-minded clerk
A search engine doesn't understand your issue. It matches the exact words you give it, in the exact relationships you specify — nothing more.
Hand a natural-language question to the clerk and it guesses what you meant and ranks its best guesses. Hand it a Boolean query — terms and connectors — and it does exactly what you said. Boolean trades the convenience of being understood for the power of precise, reproducible control. Every pitfall later in this guide is the clerk doing exactly what you typed, not what you wanted.
Neither is "better." Natural language is great for a quick look in an unfamiliar area; Boolean wins when you need precision, completeness, and a search you can document and re-run.
Try it — sort each situation
The building blocks
The operators (terms & connectors)
A handful of connectors do almost all the work. These are Westlaw's — Lexis and other platforms use similar ideas with slightly different syntax, so check your platform's "terms and connectors" help.
| Operator | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
& / AND | Both terms must appear, anywhere in the document | drone & curtilage |
space = OR | Either term. In Westlaw a blank space means OR — not AND. | drone quadcopter UAV |
" " | Exact phrase, adjacent words in order (use straight quotes) | "unnatural accumulation" |
/s · /p | Same sentence · same paragraph (keeps terms related) | bind! /s "bankruptcy court" |
/n | Within n words, either order | assum! /3 risk |
! | Root expander — matches all endings | neglig! → negligent, negligence |
* | Wildcard — one variable character | wom*n → woman, women |
% / but not | Excludes a term (use sparingly) | tax % income |
( ) | Groups terms to control order of operations | (ice OR snow) /p business |
Quick check
The method
Build a search in four moves
Good Boolean isn't guessed — it's built. Take a real problem: your client slipped on an icy sidewalk outside a business that let runoff refreeze; you want cases finding for the pedestrian.
Warm up — think in synonyms
A court might never use the word sidewalk. Without typing "sidewalk," what other words could describe where the fall happened? Jot a few, then reveal.
walkway · pavement · walk · premises · entrance · parking lot · "common area". Finding these is the whole game: push past the obvious word and brainstorm the terms a court might actually have used. A useful trick is to ban the obvious word and force yourself to name alternatives. Each synonym becomes an OR alternative.
Walk the four moves
1 · Break the issue into concepts
Name the 2–4 ideas that must all be present. Here: (a) the icy condition, (b) the business's duty, (c) a pedestrian win on a dispositive motion.
More concepts = narrower search. Start with the fewest that capture the issue.
2 · Brainstorm alternates; handle phrases & roots
For each concept, list synonyms. Quote phrases and use the root expander:
("unnatural accumulation" OR ice OR icy OR snow OR slush) (negligen! OR "dangerous condition" OR "duty of care") ("summary judgment" OR "motion to dismiss")3 · Join synonyms with OR, concepts with AND / proximity
Within a concept,
OR. Between concepts,AND— or a proximity connector when the terms should be related:("unnatural accumulation" OR ice OR snow) /p (business OR "property owner") AND ("summary judgment" OR "motion to dismiss")4 · Run, review, refine
Too many results? Tighten a connector (
AND→/p→/s) or add a concept. Too few? Add synonyms, loosen a connector, or check for a broken phrase or stray quote.Then log the exact query so you can reproduce and refine it.
Where searches quietly break
Common mistakes & pitfalls
Most bad searches aren't wrong syntax — they're the literal clerk doing exactly what you typed. Here are the ones that bite most often.
1 · A blank space is OR, not AND
You want the phrase, you type it bare:
Westlaw reads tour bus driver as tour OR bus OR driver — tens of thousands of stray hits.
Quote the phrase: "tour bus driver" AND 49 /3 31105. (The 49 /3 31105 neatly finds "49 U.S.C. § 31105" without fighting the § symbol.)
2 · Smart quotes silently kill a phrase
Draft in Word, paste into the search box, and "fly ball" arrives as “fly ball” — curly quotes the database won't read as a phrase, so it matches nothing (or everything).
Type straight quotes " directly in the search box; don't paste quoted phrases from a word processor.
3 · Too many ANDs strangle the search
Every AND concept must appear, so stacking them drives results toward zero:
Miss any one term — a court says "patron" not "spectator" — and the case vanishes.
Keep the core concepts, add synonyms with OR (spectator OR patron OR fan), and drop non-essential terms.
4 · AND when you needed proximity
AND only means "somewhere in the same opinion" — the two terms can be pages apart and unrelated. In a long case, that's a lot of false hits.
Use /s or /p to keep terms related: "district court" /s (bind! OR bound!) /s "bankruptcy court" returns fewer, tighter, easier-to-review results.
Match the symptom to the cause
Quick check
Running score: Score: 0 / 0
Precision pays off
Precision, and where to practice
Boolean's real payoff isn't just fewer results — it's reviewable results and a search you can defend and re-run. A tight proximity search often surfaces the same key cases as a natural-language query, but with far less to wade through.
Diagnose and fix
/p (same paragraph) is loose, and there are no other concepts — so any case mentioning a dog and a bite in one paragraph qualifies, including criminal and animal-control matters. Tighten it: add the missing concepts (a duty/landowner concept and the liability theory) joined with AND, use synonyms with OR (dog OR animal), and consider /s instead of /p. e.g., (dog OR animal) /s (bit! OR attack!) AND (landlord OR "property owner") AND negligen!
Build one yourself
Ready to construct a real query step by step? BooleanBuilder walks you through concepts → synonyms (auto-joined with OR) → truncation & phrases → connectors → a final review — the exact four-move method above.
The whole thing on one card
The model
The database is a literal clerk — it matches your words and relationships, not your meaning.
Four moves
Concepts → synonyms & phrases (!, " ") → OR within, AND / proximity between → run, review, refine.
Connectors
space=OR · &=AND · /s /p /n proximity · ! root · " " phrase.
Top traps
Space read as OR · smart quotes · too many ANDs · AND where you needed proximity · forgotten synonyms.