If you go to Westlaw's homepage at www.westlaw.com, the third item over in the black menu bar is "Reference Materials." Clicking on this link brings you to the Westlaw User Guide page, which contains free user guides in pdf format. There are "Topical research guides" covering areas such as labor and employment law, immigration law, insurance, international law and taxes. Most of the topical areas have at least two guides. One of the guides provides a list of frequently used databases in the subject area and the types of materials that the databases contain. The other guide provides research tips on how to find specific types of documents.

Two other useful guides are the database guide and the research tip guide for Federal Statutes and Legislative History under "Westlaw database lists" on the main Westlaw User Guide page. Page eight and nine of the research guide provides a nice layout of the Congressional Lawmaking Process with references to the databases that are useful for finding documents at each step in the process. For example, step 6 is the bill is reported out of committee. The databases recommended for finding these documents are LH (Legislative History) and USCCAN-REP (U.S. Code Congressional and Administrative News-Legislative History Reports).

In addition to the topical guides and the legislative history guides, there are also "Jurisdictional research guides" for New York, Europe and the United Kingdom. There are other guides for general users covering topics such as cases, statutes and KeyCite or guides for specialty users such as paralegals or the visually impaired.