Potential Trouble for LexisNexis and Westlaw
March 2, 2009
Most online surfers don’t click to Reed Elsevier’s LexisNexis or Thomson Reuters Westlaw. The reason? These commercial services charge money–quite a lot of money–to access legal documents. Executives at both firms can deliver compelling elevator pitches about the added value each company brings to legal documents. In the pre-crash era, legal indexing was a manual process. Then the cost crunch arrived so both outfits are trying to slap software against the thorny problem of making sense of court documents, rulings, and assorted effluvia of America’s legal factories. I may write about how these two quasi US outfits have monopolized for fee legal information about American law for lawyers, government agencies. Both Reed and Thomson then turn around and sell access to these documents to the agencies that created them in the first place. I wonder if the good senator is aware of this aspect of commercial online services’ busness practices?
What’s the trouble? I bet you thought I was going to mention Google. Wrong. Google is on the edge of indexing legal information in a more comprehensive way. But the right now trouble is Senator Joe Lieberman. Wired reported that the good senator wondered by public documents are not available without a charge. You can read the story “Lieberman Asks, Why Are Court Docs Still Behind Paid Firewall?” here. Senator Lieberman’s question may lead to a hearing. The process could, in my opinion, start a chain reaction that further erodes the revenue Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters derive from public documents. Somewhere in the chain, the Google will beef up the legal content in its Uncle Sam service here.
At their core, Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters are traditional publishing and information companies. As such, their business model is fragile. Within the present financial pressure cooker, the Lieberman question could blow the lid off these two organization’s for fee legal business. If government agencies shift to a service provided by Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, I think these two dead tree outfits will crash to the forest floor.
What the likelihood of this downside scenario. I would put it at better than 60 percent. Have another view? Share it, please. Set the addled goose straight.
Stephen Arnold, March 2, 2009
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6 Responses to “Potential Trouble for LexisNexis and Westlaw”
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Big Legal Publishers are at the brink of a big business turmoil. Public content, such as Case Law will very soon be open and free (Senator Lieberman is only one of the global actors liasing for the application of Open Government principles). More info here:
http://www.acm.org/public-policy/open-government
Public content will be provided and be accesible not only through Government Agencies websites but also by a new generation of young Legal vertical “social-search” star-ups such as Legalsolo.com, who will merge case law & law with social content such as blogs, micro-blogs, user generated comments, etc..And of course everything will be for free!
LexisNexis and Westlaw see the uphill road coming up and are spitting up free services such as LexisWeb in a rage for preventing the death of their biz model (any similarities with the death of the newspaper?). Hey, I´m not questioning the valuable content they generate around Case Law, which in turn is the only contente they will charge for in the future, I´m just saying that they will have to stop selling at stupid rates public content such as Case Law.
This is their last chance to change or die. No more fees for free public information!
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People have been seeing this coming for a long time (my first job at LexisNexis in 1997 was to manage the first web interface to their research service) but the companies have a far better position than it appears from outside.
Legal research publishing is a multi-billion dollar business, but, since it amounts to a tiny percentage of the dollars at stake in major corporate litigation, it is an easy decision for big companies to pay big law firms to use the best possible research tools.
Can anybody suggest me good online freely available for US Caselaw and Statute search.