January 25, 2010 Legal Sites Plan Revamps as Rivals Undercut Price By ASHLEE VANCE NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/technology/25westlaw.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print Westlaw and LexisNexis, the dominant services in the market for computerized legal research, will undergo sweeping changes in a bid to make it easier and faster for lawyers to find the documents they need. Lawyers and researchers paying to go online to find court cases and other legal documents should find better-looking interfaces, more relevant search results and new tools for document-sharing and other collaboration. The changes to the research services are a reaction by Westlaw and LexisNexis to lower-priced — sometimes free — rivals and arrive at a time when law firms are working to cut overhead. The two companies also want to cater to a younger generation of lawyers accustomed to slick Web services and the search interfaces presented by companies like Google and Microsoft. “I think Westlaw and Lexis have been balancing the needs of an older-generation of lawyers accustomed to using their services with bringing things up to the 21st century,” said Carolyn Elefant, a lawyer who practices in Washington and writes the MyShingle blog. “My guess is that they saw an opportunity to update their platforms with the legal industry in such a state of flux.” Westlaw will introduce its changes on Feb. 1; LexisNexis has yet to specify a date. Lawyers and other researchers turn to services like Westlaw and LexisNexis to find a wide variety of legal documents, public records and analysis. A single lawyer might pay about $100 a month for a limited version, while large law firms will pay millions of dollars for unlimited access. Westlaw and LexisNexis each bring in more than $1 billion a year for their respective parent companies, Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier. Both services were quick to embrace the digital age in the 1970s when they offered electronic versions of their systems. They were pioneers in the move to the Web during its infancy. In the subsequent years, however, Westlaw and LexisNexis have started to look dated. Westlaw, for example, last did a major overhaul to the underlying technology behind its research system in 1998. Since then, the main Westlaw Web site has filled with dozens of links, covering legal databases, statutes, court rules, forms, investigation tools, news and analysis. Mike Dahn, vice president for product development at WestlawNext, said it took the company five years to build the new system. The company interviewed lawyers and tracked the ways in which they used the service. It analyzed data on how lawyers did searches and even used eye-tracking systems to understand what parts of a Web site drew the lawyers’ attention. Because of advances in computing power and computer science, lawyers can now search all the databases in a given jurisdiction, rather than having to hand-select the pools of information they believe might be relevant to a given case. Most important, according to Mr. Dahn, the WestlawNext service has a revamped search system that allows lawyers to type in general requests, as they might on Google, rather than their typical narrow searches. The search system also relies on algorithms to find documents related to a case that the lawyers may not have thought they needed. In a few weeks, LexisNexis will announce a revamped interface as well and show off a suite of collaboration tools that let lawyers share and work on documents together, said Michael Walsh, the head of United States legal markets for LexisNexis. Mr. Walsh declined to discuss more specific details. The executives from Westlaw and LexisNexis stressed that their broad access to legal documents, experience in this market and legal analysis provide advantages over cheaper competitors. Google, for example, has a free search service called Google Scholar that digs through cases and legal journals. “You can get a pretty good percentage of the results you get out of Westlaw or Lexis by using the free tools,” said Don Cruse, a lawyer in Austin, Tex., who writes the Supreme Court of Texas blog. -- ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 Mail: antunes at uh dot edu *********************************** * POST TO [email protected] * *********************************** Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
