LexisNexis and Recommind Tie Up
August 26, 2009
LexisNexis continues to look for ways to boost its revenues. The efforts are interesting because the company continues to retrace its steps in an effort to crack the code. LexisNexis, like Westlaw, faces a mini revolt. Some law firm clients are asking the firms to do legal work for fixed prices, reduced rates with ceilings on costs, and be more creative in reducing the costs of certain legal work. This is bad news for the commercial legal information companies. The reason? The companies delivering US legal information depend to some degree on taxi meter pricing. The idea is that the legal researcher pays for time and other variables for system access. Not surprisingly, for a patent matter, a legal researcher can run up a four or five figure bill. In the good old days, the law firms’ clients would pay up. Today, some clients are balking. Once again the traditional business model runs headlong into the new realities of business.
What’s the fix? LexisNexis has tried a tie up with Microsoft to put research in Microsoft Word. Did you activate the feature? I didn’t. LexisNexis has tried to diversify into fraud, content analysis, and risk. Do you think of LexisNexis when I say these words? I didn’t think so. LexisNexis has tried different angles of attack on search, law firm software services, and Web access.
The financial pressure continues to mount.
I just learned that knowledge management is the next revenue Petri dish. “LexisNexis and Recommind to Deliver New Knowledge Management Capabilities for Law Firms” reported this new venture. The story reported:
The new offering integrates Lexis Search Advantage content and services accessed through lexis.com with MindServer Search, Recommind’s enterprise search platform. It provides a one-stop destination combining access to documents and information from both a firm’s internal sources as well as trusted LexisNexis® content, delivering search results that are more complete, efficient and actionable.
The run down of benefits is pretty much what one would expect: information integration, better research, etc.
The proof of the pudding will be revenue. LexisNexis is straying from its core competency of delivering commercial grade legal information. Will knowledge management generate enough cash to put LexisNexis back on the fast growth track? In my opinion, the company is in a race. Some government entities are making more legal related information available online. Attorneys looking for ways to cut costs are likely to flock to these free services. Another challenge is the interest in lower cost professional information services like FastCase.
Recommind shifted from a legal niche strategy to an enterprise search strategy. Does this tie up mean that Recommind is returning to its legal niche or diversifying courtesy of LexisNexis.
Interesting moves by both companies. Each firm has search technology. Now search and content have morphed into knowledge management. Does anyone know what knowledge means? Does anyone know what management means? The phrase strikes me as “old school”.
Stephen Arnold, August 26, 2009
Comments
One Response to “LexisNexis and Recommind Tie Up”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
Stephen, my impression is that doing “legal search” is a tough task, too complex to be delivered by one single company. What you describe shows that this type of business requires the efforts of two specialized companies, one in search and one in legal.
As you suggest, this type of move may continue to happen in the search industry.
I cannot but agrre, we are applying a similar strategy to natural language and search, providing natural language technoligies to third-party search engines.
Antonio Valderrábanos
http://www.bitext.com/EN