Legal Research

Inside the New Westlaw, Lexis & Bloomberg Platforms

By jlutz99

The ABAJournal Law News Now has an article on the new Westlaw, Lexis and Bloomberg platforms.  Here's an excerpt:

LexisNexis also maintains its new platform will go beyond mere legal research to integrate the services of a variety of legal business and technology companies it has acquired in recent years, allowing it to offer Web design, billing systems, workflow analysis and more.

Lexis is taking a broader approach to its business, says Walsh. ?We are marrying our information and data with productivity tools.

?It?s no longer sufficient to just deliver searchable case law,? he says. ?We have to delight our customers. What we have learned in the marketplace is that it is unlike any other market. It is amazing how many problems your customers have; and if you can solve them and solve them well, they are going to want your product.?

For example, the new Lexis platform will include productivity tools to help lawyers evaluate the likelihood of winning a case, the cost of winning, and the potential value to both lawyer and client. The company says its new platform also will pull information from some of its other product lines, including the Martindale-Hubbell lawyer directory, to help lawyers learn as much as possible about every participant in a trial or deal. ?We have the content and the tools to do it,? Walsh says.

For challenger Bloomberg, this is the second time it has tried to expand into the legal market. In 2004, it began offering its ?B-Law? research product, but it didn?t gain a foothold in the market because it was only served up on Bloomberg?s proprietary terminals.

The new Bloomberg Law, which the company has been quietly beta testing over the past year in law schools and a handful of law firms in the New York metropolitan area, fixes that problem. It can be accessed from any PC, and its citation analysis summaries and strength-of-authority indicators ?graphically display the treatment of your case and allow you to easily see the extent to which subsequent courts have analyzed your case,? according to promotional materials. A company representative declined to comment on the product for this article.

Read the article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Full post as published by FSU College of Law Library Blog on January 25, 2010 (boomark / email).