Comments on: LexisNexis And Westlaw Re-Launch – Too Little, Too Late?

By: Does free legal research mean the end of fee-based legal research models? « The Irreverent Lawyer

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 16:26:31 +0000

[...] Jay Fleischman in his article, “LexisNexis And Westlaw Re-Launch – Too Little, Too Late?,” at Legal Practice Pro, thinks any late-adapting innovations being offered are akin to rearranging [...]

By: Too Little…Too Late? « Law Firm Bottom_Line

Too Little…Too Late? « Law Firm Bottom_Line — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:37:00 +0000

[...] Jump to Comments Great post about the timing of the new versions of Westlaw and Lexis at Legal Practice Pro. This is what caught my [...]

By: carolynelefant

carolynelefant — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:32:16 +0000

Jay, Having seen the demo of West at their office (disclosure – West paid) and testing the new product, I disagree that West hasn't done anything new. They have leveraged their existing resources to provide a far more powerful and comprehensive search engine that puts useful information right up in front of users. In fact, until I visited the Westlaw offices, I had no idea how closely the company tracked user habits and applied them to their product. If Westlaw were free, I'd use it hands down over anything else out there. But just as I might like to drive a Mercedes or Lexus, the marginal value of those cars over my Prius is minor. The same is true with the marginal value of WestlawNext over some of the "second city" tools as I refer to them.But, Westlaw is not free. And thus the question becomes, what's the value add. For solo/small firm lawyers who practice in a discrete area of law, the answer is not much for the reasons you described.The other question is whether the courts will use the new upgraded Westlaw. My impression is that judges generally resolve cases based on the parties' briefs and cases cited, but with Westlaw, judges can get background to all kinds of other information that may tip their decisions one way or another. In other words, they'll have access to a wealth of material that a solo or small firm practitioner filing a brief won't. I don't know if that will help or hurt, but I do know that I'd certainly prefer being able to access the same universe of cases as the judge in my matter – and that's just not feasible with Westlaw's existing pricing.

By: Andrew Grossman

Andrew Grossman — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:29:02 +0000

A decade ago I wrote a wishful-thinking paper for University College London SLAIS entitled "Towards Cooperation in Access to Foreign Primary Law", published by LLRX and at 30 Int'l J. Legal Info. 1 (2002). There's been much progress since: with help from the Open Society Institute, even Europe's poorest nation, Moldova, has its laws online. Whereas in the early days of the Internet France was still wedded to its proprietary Minitel, now it has a Government Portal with access to virtually everything legal and administrative. So does the EU, and so do nearly all European countries -- Britain perversely almost last, wanting until the last minute to keep its laws behind a paywall.In the US, Jurisline (discussed at length in old articles on LLRX.com) tried to break the mold of Lexis and Westlaw with free access. They lost in the courts (and not just because Mead Data Central's home courts tended to be overly friendly to Lexis); and Westlaw with Findlaw.com and Lexis with Lexisone.com sought to undermine the economics of startups. Once arrangement of data and pagination were seen not to be copyrightable, public.resource.org was bound to happen. Even PACER's 8¢ a page has been too much for some, and last year's shutting down free library access to prevent further dumps of data hasn't stopped "free access" activists from their efforts. Much of what is free or cheap, described in the article and/or known to users of county law libraries. Loislaw.com is readily available to users at the L.A. County Law Library and perhaps at others, maybe many others. Users of university libraries (not just law school libraries) have access to Lexis Academic Universe. JSTOR (containing most top law reviews with a rolling date limit of most recent content) is available at every university library and to users of some major public libraries even from home. HEIN Online has nearly all law reviews and is available at every law school and many other academic libraries.But wait, there's more: There was a time when the historical English Reports cost more than $10,000 on CD-ROM. Then it was on Justis, the (expensive) English official reporter. And after that it was on HEIN Online. Today it's on commonlii.org free and gratis. And why not? It's all in the public domain.As memory and computing power approach costlessness, Lexis and Westlaw have less and less to sell. What they offer now is precision in search criteria, but that's mainly a timesaver. How much is a legal assistant's time worth?

By: practicehacker

practicehacker — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:06:27 +0000

I can haz over-priced research? I wrote a piece for this month's TechnoLawyer about this and it got bumped for technical reasons. Either that, or they shied away from the piece because it kicks Lexis and Westlaw square in the nards. I will post it on my own blog instead – most likely in parts (I try to keep my posts snack-sized). Please to enjoy and comment.

By: nilsmontan

nilsmontan — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:43:44 +0000

Too late. I have been on their Martindale betta social networking site for about 3 months and it is really not taking off. LinkedIn has crushed these guys in this space.