Some ideas on negotiating online and print contracts

2012 was the year our Westlaw contract came up for renewal, and in the process I looked at Bloomberg and Lexis.  While Bloomberg was an impressive product, I felt that the pricing was prohibitively expensive, however, Lexis came in with a very strong proposal.

If we were to afford both Lexis and Westlaw it meant adjusting the content to avoid excessive duplication and select that content from each where we thought one did a better job than the other.

Case law, statutes/regulations and some secondary sources were part of primary plans from both Lexis and Westlaw.  However, I could play with the content mix with dockets, public records, verdicts/settlements and the bulk of secondary sources.  It is my opinion  that Westlaw offers a slightly better docket product, but felt that Lexis’ public records were more comprehensive and flexible than Westlaw’s.  We also wanted the Matthew Bender and verdicts/settlements libraries from Lexis and West’s ALR, AmJur and CJS databases.  I also preferred Factiva/News over the comparable content on Westlaw.

Of course your choices might be different.  For example, you might wish to include Lexis’ ALM content and/or Courtlink – but the bottom-line is to avoid as much duplication as you can and while maximizing each contract for a vendor’s perceived strengths.

For more savings we included our LMA in the talks even though it was not up for renewal at the time.

If you plan on keeping enough of your print collection in an LMA you might find that West will be more flexible with the cost of that contract than in lowering the cost of Westlaw outright.  But you have take a hard look at your print collection and pare it down to what you expect to retain for 2-3 years.  This year was ideal for us to do this since we are configuring our library and retiring some print was a natural part of the process.  Also, in general moving from print to electronic is something we are doing with most of our loose-leafs subscriptions.

There were a couple of other things we got that saved us some money, but I do not wish to address them publicly.  Feel free to contact me privately and I will go into more detail.

By adjusting the content and being somewhat creative I think you can find ways to save on the cost of these large contracts.

SEC and corporate disclosure filings research products

Back before EDGAR, attorneys needing precedent language for drafting corporate disclosure filings were usually working from in-house forms files and hard copy documents retrieved, manually, from the Public Reference Room at the SEC, or ordered from a vendor such as Disclosure or Washington Service Bureau.  When EDGAR went live in 1994 the opportunity for full text searching of documents filed with the SEC was made possible through the efforts of Phil Brown and others.

Phil Brown was the creator of Livedgar (Global Securities Inc./GSI) and for a long time Livedgar was the premier product for doing this kind of research.  Livedgar promised a direct link to the SEC and real-time filings, whereas all the other vendors had a load time delay.  The staff at GSI also pre-loaded thousands of commonly executed searches so that users often could find what they needed by merely loading one of these searches and maximizing Livedgar’s potential.

GSI expanded Livedgar beyond a platform for retrieving filings to include rankings and M&A focused areas.

Livedgar was eventually bought by Thomson Reuters, and renamed Westlaw Business.  Many people, myself included, felt it did not represent an improvement and went looking for alternatives.  The reasons included, increased cost, weighing down the product with so many ancillary areas that the focus of SEC research was lost in segmentation.  And finally, Thomson Reuters dismissed all of the support personnel (people with the most experience in SEC research and the product) leaving customers to fend for themselves.

By this time there were other very good products for doing this kind of research to choose from: Securities Mosaic (Knowledge Mosaic)and 10K Wizard (Morningstar) are the two most commonly chosen platforms.

However, Phil Brown is back with Intelligize, which seems to represent what Livedgar would be if it were still around.  Intelligize has some features that are unique:  Including “exhibits incorporated by reference” linked to the filing, also, flagging filings with Comments.   Being able to see at a glance which item in a filing drew a comment and which SEC Examiner made it, as well as, the filing company’s response is another important enhancement.  A user can filter by SEC Examiner, Form Type, and many other fields.

Intelligize has the usual add-ins, some primary material such as No Action Letters, Rules and Regulations, Deals and M&A analyzers and rankings; but I’d have to say that the straight-forward functionality was the single most impressive aspect of Intelligize.

Next month I plan on writing about another product for doing this kind of research, but offering a much different approach: Practical Law Company.

A few clarifications about Westlaw Next

I received some feedback from Brian Quinn from Thomson Reuters with some clarifications about Westlaw Next, which I wanted to include in order to avoid leaving the wrong impression.

Brian wanted to correct something I wrote in my Westlaw Overview about WestSearch:

Because of how it attempts to match your query to issues covered by the Key Number system, it can seem like it is using related terms, but it doesn’t really do that. It just finds related cases because they have Key Numbers in common with your issue, even if they don’t share the exact same language.

I also relied on some old information about the availability of Dockets directly from Westlaw Next – the Dockets database is available on NEXT as well as CLASSIC.

Comparativ​e Review of Online Legal Research Platforms, Part 4: Controlled Search Experiment

The following analysis will address how Westlaw.com (CLASSIC), Westlaw Next (NEXT), Lexis.com (LEXIS) and Lexis Advance (ADVANCE) performed using a the same search (only modified to account for differences with how the platforms interpret search language).   I used both Natural Language and Terms and Connectors searches and depending on how your preferences are set, your results may differ from what I report.

I began from an ALR article, When Statute of Limitations Commences to Run Against Promise to Pay Debt “When Able,” “When Convenient,” or the like. (67 ALR5th 479).

This article suggested the following searches:

Terms and Connectors: limitations /s (commence* begin* began start!) /s (debt note money repay repayment) /s (“when able” “when convenient” “when possible” “when practicable”) 

On Lexis this would become: limitations w/s (commence* or begin* or began or start!) w/s (debt or note or money or repay or repayment) w/s (“when able” or “when convenient” or “when practicable” or “when possible”)

Natural Language: when does statute of limitations period commence, begin, or start when time for repayment of a debt or note is “when able” “when convenient” “when possible” “when practicable”

Natural Language Searching: Westlaw

I ran the ALR suggested search in the following databases on CLASSIC:

• All Federal & State Cases (ALLCASES)
• United States Code Annotated (USCA)
• State Statutes – Annotated (ST-ANN-ALL)
• American Law Reports (ALR)
• American Jurisprudence – All (AMJUR-ALL)
• Corpus Juris Secundum (CJS)

However, I found the suggested Natural Language search did not produce as good of results as a simplified version of it:

“statute of limitations” commences, begins, starts, toll debt “when able” “when convenient” “when possible” “when practicable”

CLASSIC limits results for Natural Language searching to up to 100 results, I had my preferences set to 60.

The results were relevant to the search, although most of the documents came from secondary sources, then statutes, and then cases.   Since there is no way to filter the results on CLASSIC, I had to scroll through all the screens to find the cases mixed in with the secondary source material and code sections.

Only one case appeared on the first screen of cites, but it was the ALR model case, Dewey v. Tabor, 226 Mich.App. 189, 572 N.W.2d 715, 67 A.L.R.5th 737, showing up as document #18.  However, slightly editing the search produced very different results.  If I included the words “pay” or “repayment” the results were skewed to the point that Dewey v. Tabor was pushed down to #43 in the results set.

Right-clicking on the “View All Results” from the ResultsPlus sidebar allowed me to open a new tab with these hits.  This list included 14 secondary sources, some of which were also in my main results screen.

NEXT at first returned tens of thousands of results, many of them useless, but this was before I limited my databases and edited the search.

Taking advantage of the Favorites section allows a user to add any database to their list of  most used sources and then conduct a search in those databases (one does this by hovering over the title and clicking on the “star” that appears).  I selected the same databases I had used in CLASSIC.

I also edited the search using the “+” sign, which tells NEXT that the term must be given extra weight.  The search I settled on was:

+”statute of limitations” commences, begins, starts, toll +debt “when able” “when convenient” “when possible” “when practicable”

This search did much better, returning the case used by the ALR at the top of the Overview and offering other cases on point.  The other results were generally relevant, but with over 1500 hits these results were of limited benefit beyond the first few screens:

• 34        Cases
• 38        Statutes & Court Rules
• 134      American Jurisprudence Trials
• 185      American Jurisprudence Proof of Facts
• 270      American Jurisprudence 2d
• 1,164   American Law Reports
• 251      Corpus Juris Secundum

Natural Language Searching: Lexis

Using LEXIS I chose comparable libraries used on CLASSIC: 

• Federal & State Cases, Combined
• United States Code Service – Titles 1 through 51
• State Codes, Constitutions, Court Rules & ALS, Combined
• Jurisprudences & Encyclopedias, Combined

LEXIS forces you to limit your results to up 250, which I did and using the same search as I ran on Westlaw yielded the following:

• 29 Cases
• 188 Statutes & Legislation
• 33 Treatises and Analytical Materials

I improved on these results after simplifying the search:

limitations commence repayment debt “when able” “when convenient” “when possible” “when practicable”

The example case from the ALR article most relevant to this question was within the first 5 cases.  The secondary sources had several relevant articles mainly from AmJur 2d, as well as Limitation of Actions (Matthew Bender) and state-specific jurisprudence titles.

On ADVANCE I further modified the search to:

“statute of limitations” repay debt “when able” “when convenient” “when possible” “when practicable”  

• 1,037,765 Cases
• 282,593 Statutes & Legislation
• 230,301 Treatises and Analytical Materials

The search might still be improved to lower the number of results, but in my discussions with the Lexis developers they admit that large numbers of results are often returned using ADVANCE.  With ADVANCE’s method of filtering the results the large result set is not perceived as a major problem.  Even so, 1 million cases is a grossly impractical number of hits.

That said, the first screen did have the most relevant cases including the sample case from the ALR article.

Terms and Connectors Searching (T&C): Westlaw

Search used: limitations /s (commence* begin* began start!) /s (debt note money repay repayment) /s (“when able” “when convenient” “when possible” “when practicable”)

I limited this search to the following databases:

• All Federal & State Cases (ALLCASES)
• United States Code Annotated (USCA)
• State Statutes – Annotated (ST-ANN-ALL)
• American Law Reports (ALR)
• American Jurisprudence – All (AMJUR-ALL)
• Corpus Juris Secundum (CJS)

This search on CLASSIC yielded 95 results, sorted according to these content types: Codes (alpha); Cases (reverse-chronological); Secondary Sources (alpha).  The sample case used in the ALR article was on the first screen and the same ResultsPlus sources showed up along the right edge (right clicking on any of these will open these documents in a separate tab without losing your original results or search).

Generally the results were on-point and easily navigable, although CLASSIC complained about the phrase “when able” and suggested “when ABIL” instead, which I ignored.

NEXT returned fewer results but everything was on-point:

• 3          Corpus Juris Secundum
• 1          American Jurisprudence Trials
• 9          American Jurisprudence Proof of Facts
• 6          American Jurisprudence 2d
• 29        American Law Reports
• 0          Statutes & Court Rules
• 11        Cases

The one questionable result was returning zero state statutes.

Terms and Connectors Searching (T&C): Lexis

Search used: limitations w/s (commence* or begin* or began or start!) w/s (debt or note or money or repay or repayment) w/s (“when able” or “when convenient” or “when practicable” or “when possible”)

ADVANCE’s result set included:

• 14 Cases
• 18 Statutes & Regulations
• 7 Treatises and Analytical Materials

Most of the secondary sources hits came from AmJur 2d but they also included one on-point law review article.  While several of the AmJur 2d articles cited the ALR that dealt extensively with this issue, the ALR article itself was not included in the results.   In my talks with the Head of Platform Development at Lexis I was told that the process of migrating content over to ADVANCE is ongoing and the ALR content should be there in the coming months.

The ALR model case appeared early in the list of cases and the other cases were well focused on the issue.

LEXIS returned many more hits than ADVANCE but overall the results contained a much higher percentage of off-topic hits:

• 29 Cases
• 511 Statutes & Regulations
• 29 Treatises and Analytical Materials

The model case from the ALR did turn up but much lower in the results list although still appearing on the first screen.  The problem was in the code and regulation sections – many, if not most, of these were not on point.  This was also the case with the secondary sources.  While there were some good articles, most of the hits were chaff.

The reason why the results were far less precise and returned a higher number of irrelevant hits was rooted in the fact that the term “when” was ignored as a stop-word by Lexis.com and “repay” was treated as “re pay” – this skewed the results significantly.

I changed the search to limitations w/15 (commence* or begin* or began or start!) w/30 (debt or note or money or repayment) w/15 (“when able” or “when convenient” or “when practicable” or “when possible”) which yielded much more targeted results, although with  fewer hits overall:

• 8 Cases
• 28 Statutes & Regulations (Legislative)
• 8 Treatises & Analytical Materials

LEXIS still complained about the search term “when”, but the phrase “when able” was returned as part of the title of the ALR article that was the basis of my search.

Using the adjusted T&C search, ADVANCE returned one more case but fewer in the other categories:

• 9 Cases
• 19 Statutes & Regulations (Legislative)
• 7 Treatises & Analytical Materials

Conclusion 

I found both NEXT and ADVANCE very impressive and generally represent an improvement over CLASSIC and LEXIS.  But I would qualify that assessment by stating that both platforms appeared to produced more focused result sets using Terms and Connectors as opposed to Natural Language searching.   However maximizing these platforms is a training issue and not an inherent weakness.

Comparativ​e Review of Online Legal Research Platforms, Part 3: Westlaw

In order to get a better idea of what the differences are between Westlaw.com (CLASSIC) and Westlaw Next (NEXT) my local Westlaw representatives arranged for me to receive a webinar from the following Thomson Reuters personnel (indicated is the specific area they each addressed):

• Mike Dahn, Senior Vice President, Product Development (overview of development)
• Brian Quinn, Senior Director, New Product Development (specifics of searching)
• Joel Hurwitz, Director, New Product Development (Westlaw+Microsoft)
• Heather Meix, Marketing Manager, Large Law Firm Business (pricing)

Westlaw Next: what is new?

When I was first shown NEXT by our local Westlaw representative I was told that the priorities driving the development of NEXT were 1) to make using Westlaw easier and 2) to present the most relevant documents in a easy to navigate results screen.

Thomson chose not to completely reinvent CLASSIC or turn to an outside search engine developer as did Lexis but chose to leverage the best aspects of CLASSIC such as the Key Number System with some important enhancements.  The new search engine is called WestSearch.

This is how Thomson Reuters describes it:

WestSearch is a sophisticated search engine, especially developed for searching legal content. It integrates West’s market-leading research tools such as KeyCite®, the West Key Number System, and ResultsPlus®, with West’s proprietary analytical tools (authoritative treatises, legal encyclopedias, and practice guides) and editorial enhancements to case law, statutes, and regulations, as well as links to related documents. WestSearch also learns from usage patterns established by thousands of online researchers. It employs these editorial assets to retrieve comprehensive results, with the most relevant documents listed at the top of the result page.

When performing a keyword search on CLASSIC, what is searched are only those terms input by the user (a search can be expanded using truncation characters but related terms are still missed with this tactic).  What Thomson built into WestSearch for NEXT is a taxonomy which maps any term to related legal terms.

How this taxonomy mapping works was demonstrated using the phrase “castle doctrine” (defining under what circumstances and how much force a property owner can use when responding to a home invasion).  This phrase is sometimes found in a state’s statutory language but more often is described in other language, such as “stand your ground”, “eminent danger” or in some similar fashion.   Searching on CLASSIC one would have to include as many of these phrases as possible whereas on NEXT using any one of the phrases will map to all the others and your search will return a more comprehensive result set.

These enhancements in NEXT were summed up as emulating the best practices of traditional legal research.  NEXT is effectively simulating the process of an attorney looking through a digest or index and finding related concepts or terms in order to expand on the original query.

The other major upgrade with NEXT is how the results are displayed.  As with Lexis Advance, a search is executed across as much of Westlaw as a user desires and the results are grouped in a left-screen pane according to general categories.  When the documents of any “bucket” are displayed they are ranked according to relevance based on a number of elements.

One of the more controversial elements is what has been described in the popular press as crowd-sourcing.  West does not use this term, but not in an attempt to hide what is operating in the background as much as a semantic disagreement.  NEXT exploits user behavior associated with a search and those documents identified as desirable, i.e. when users have identified the same two cases as being relevant to a certain legal concept, this case will rise in relevance and be weighted as more important.

WestSearch technology analyzes the usage history of each document on WestlawNext:

• How often have judges, attorneys, and legal scholars cited a document while discussing an issue?
• How have users interacted with a document, i.e., How often have they printed a document? When did they view a KeyCite result for a document? Did they save a document to a folder or add a note to the document?

WestSearch aggregates these usage patterns and analyzes the relationships to establish connections between documents and between particular documents and issues. Then, when you search a similar issue on WestlawNext, WestSearch uses this history to expand your search by connecting documents that relate to each other. WestSearch also evaluates the documents retrieved by your search to help determine relevancy (ranking the more relevant documents higher in your search result). This helps bring the most relevant documents—those with content most highly related to your issue—to the forefront of your search results.

Searching is done from a single bar, Google style, and Natural Language searching is encouraged – but for more experienced users, a Terms and Connectors search is recognized.  When using Terms and Connectors a user will still benefit from NEXT’s enhanced mapping and produce more relevant results than when using the same search on CLASSIC.

A feature I have found especially helpful is called “Favorites”.   This is a page module in which a user can store their most used sources.  There is a search bar within this designated area and any combination of these sources can be searched.

Content

As with ADVANCE, not all of the content from CLASSIC has migrated to NEXT (most has, but there is still some content expected to be added).  Most prominent in this group is the Dockets database.

Westlaw Dockets has had a few advantages over Courtlink (Lexis), but neither one is a good as Bloomberg’s docket searching.  At one time West Dockets had more state jurisdictions than Courtlink, but Courtlink may have since added more jurisdictions.  West Docket database is available directly through CLASSIC or Court Express in what I consider a superior interface and there are no usage limits per month as there are with Courtlink.  However, you still need to search the separate library of trial court memoranda, orders, briefs and motions.  Bloomberg’s method of searching the attached PDFs is better than either Westlaw or Lexis.

Westlaw has always had extensive secondary source material including major legal content such as the American Jurisprudence series, ALRs, CJS, important treatises and many state specific analytical sources.

Westlaw + Microsoft

Westlaw also has developed a functionality within Microsoft Word.  When installed, a Drafting Assistant ribbon is added to Word (but not to Outlook) and this will allow users to create a Table of Authorities, insert links to case cites, cite-check the document, and construct Keycite history for the cases.

Another feature is what is “Locate Authority”.   Highlight a sentence or two from your  document and Locate Authority will analyze the text, identify the legal argument and respond with cases, statutory cites and other appropriate material.

Pricing

There has been much written and anecdotal evidence presented by librarians and others to the effect that NEXT is more expensive than CLASSIC.  And I think Thomson Reuters has admitted as much since they are now offering “simplified pricing.”  Without going into the specifics, this new pricing model is an attempt by West to address these concerns.

However, the jury is still out on whether NEXT will cost more or the roughly same than CLASSIC.  That calculation is frought with variables such as the argument that using NEXT saves time doing research.  On the other hand, since Thomson Reuters spent a very large sum to develop NEXT, it would seem logical they would wish to recoup that investment, and if NEXT does represent value added, then there is no reason to think they would simply give that enhanced value away.  Bottomline: Buyer beware.

I began by identifying the main goals Thomson Reuters had in developing NEXT as: 1) to make using Westlaw easier and 2) to present the most relevant documents in a easy to navigate results screen.  Overall, I think NEXT performed well based on this criteria.

With this overview I have completed my comparative reviews of the three major online legal research platforms.

Part 1: Bloomberg Law

Part 2: Lexis.com and Lexis Advance

In the next installment I will report the findings of a controlled search experiment in which I ran the same (or very similar) search across LEXIS, ADVANCE, CLASSIC & NEXT.

Comparativ​e Review of Online Legal Research Platforms, Part 2: Lexis.com/Lexis Advance

Overview of Lexis.com (LEXIS):Lexis Advance (ADVANCE)

I recently had a conversation with Marty Kilmer, Head of Product Platforms (LexisNexis) and Jeff Arvin, Managing Director of Lexis for Microsoft.   They offered some background on the development and functionality of ADVANCE and the major differences between LEXIS and ADVANCE.  One of the first things Marty told me was that while LEXIS utilizes a search engine built from the ground-up by Lexis, ADVANCE uses a customized “out of the box” search engine developed by MarkLogic as the backbone of its software, although with considerable adaptation incorporating Lexis algorithms and metadata.

One might assume that a different search engine operating in the background would produce different result sets from LEXIS and ADVANCE.  In actuality I found that both platforms returned mostly relevant results.   The difference was more noticeable in the raw number of results and how they were presented to the researcher.

One of the factors influencing the development of ADVANCE was a recognition that today’s information seekers are accustomed to retrieving extremely large result sets from  Internet search engines like Google.  For many users this provides a level of confidence in the comprehensiveness of a search engine’s capabilities.  The first thing a user will notice about ADVANCE (when not using a Terms and Connectors search) is that ADVANCE, like Google, will return a large number of results.

When using Natural Language ADVANCE returns literally millions of results.  I sent my ADVANCE results to my local Lexis representative to double-check since they were so large I wanted to make sure they were correct before publishing them.  LEXIS limits the results to 250 documents for Natural Language searching, and it is likely that it would also return large results but for these limits.  However, since LEXIS is not as flexible in how the results can be displayed, a large result set less workable than on ADVANCE.

As Marty Kilmer explained these large result sets were a part of the development of ADVANCE.  The expectation is that the results are manageable with ADVANCE’s sophisticated filtering capability and intelligent ranking.

Lexis concentrated much of its effort into developing ADVANCE’s filtering capabilities and they were successful in creating a series of results screens that effectively organize the results.   Users can easily drill down with a single mouse-click: by jurisdiction (court, federal, state), by content type (cases, codes, legislative) and by source (dockets, secondary, news).   It is also possible to stack filters and further narrow down the results.

This is similar to the “Focus” command or “Search within results” experienced researchers often use, but much more flexible and productive.  The strategy of searching broadly and then searching within those results has been maximized with ADVANCE.  The difference, and a feature commonly found on academic periodical databases and even many shopping websites,  is that a graphical interface replaces text based searching.  Each time a user focuses the results by choosing a left-pane filter a new tab is opened with a new result set;  navigating back to the original or any previous result set is simply a matter of opening one of the previous tabs.  You never lose your result sets no matter how often you slice them up.

ADVANCE was designed to maximize keyword searching by using the search bar at the top of the screen, similar to what you would use on Google.  Usually with these kinds of searches the more keywords you include does not always produce better results.  Google suggests using no more than three or four terms, and these guidelines also apply to ADVANCE.  However, a Terms and Connectors search can be done in ADVANCE and will produce very similar results to the same search done on LEXIS, but with improved filtering functionality and searching across all sources.

ADVANCE will produce results from any relevant source, relieving a user of the stress associated with choosing the best database(s) or having to duplicate the search in various databases.  However, if you do want to limit you searching to a specific source or a combination of sources, ADVANCE also offers this capability.

To sum up, ADVANCE offers to two important improvements to LEXIS:

• Returning results from all the most appropriate sources
• Filtering and displaying a comprehensive result set

ADVANCE is still adding content and as of today there are secondary sources missing.  However, Lexis plans on having upwards of 95% of all content added within the coming months and the only content not targeted for migration is that for which there is a question why it was on LEXIS to begin with.  For example, I did not know that LEXIS has cookbooks in its content.  This kind of content will be the only kind of content that will not make the move.

Of course both LEXIS and ADVANCE cover the primary legal information comprehensively.  Many annotated state codes and legal jurisprudence encyclopedias are published by The Michie Company (owned by Lexis) and ALM content is only available through Lexis.  Some other highlights of LEXIS and ADVANCE content include:

• Well over 4,000 Matthew Bender titles including major treatises like Collier’s and Moore’s
• Arguably the premier public records database in Accurint
• One of the largest and best business and news databases with Factiva

It will be interesting to see how the Law360 content is presented on Lexis.  As of now it is still operating as a stand-alone company, but I was told by Lexis that the plan is to have it in Lexis at some point.  The only real complaint I have about Lexis content concerns Courtlink: it still requires a separate username and cannot be accessed from within LEXIS or ADVANCE.  However, I was also told that the plan is for that to change in the near future.

In recognition of the reality that most people use the Internet for their information needs, Lexis has added an area of their platform for open Web searching.  However, this is more sophisticated that searching the open Web itself; a lot of work has gone into vetting the websites.   Only the best legal websites are included.  One need not leave Lexis in order to pull results from government websites or other reliable sites.  And lest someone think Lexis is selling what is free on the Internet, there is no charge for these results.  What this feature does is allow a user to collect all the relevant results from their research into one folder no matter if it came from a Lexis source or a website.

Another of the more interesting features of ADVANCE is the partnership between Lexis and Microsoft, Lexis for Microsoft Office (LMO).  This was described to me as “content in context”.  For users this means that from within Microsoft Outlook or Word there will appear a button in the ribbon that will invoke ADVANCE when viewing an email or editing a Word document.  This feature will recognize entity terms (companies, courts, cites) and automatically display ADVANCE results in a right pane on the screen.

LMO offers enhanced functionality for document drafting and review, cite-checking, creating and auto-updating a Table of Authorities and in general allowing users who may not be accustomed to using ADVANCE or LEXIS to benefit from those research tools while never leaving Outlook or Word.

Both West and Lexis are responding to the realities of the Internet age and how information seeking behavior, including legal research, is evolving.  This overview has focused on ADVANCE and how Lexis has responded to the new normal and in the third overview I will cover Westlaw Next.  While these two major legal research information providers are reacting to the same market forces and share many of the same goals the products they are developing are very different.

Comparative Review of Online Legal Research Platforms, Part 1: Bloomberg Law

This is the first of four articles comparing online legal research platforms.  The first three installments will consist of overviews of Bloomberg Law, Lexis (“Dotcom” and Advance), and Westlaw (Classic and Next).  The final installment will be a presentation of my findings from a controlled research experiment in which I use the same or similar search across Westlaw Classic, Westlaw Next, Lexis.com and Lexis Advance.

Part 1 describes the context for these articles and begins with the overview of Bloomberg Law.

For several years my firm had contracts with both Lexis and Westlaw, but in late 2008 and in the wake of the economic downturn, cutting expenses became a priority.   I was asked to lower library costs across the board for the 2009 budget.   It was obvious that where the most duplication existed and where the most logical savings could occur was in choosing one of the two platforms to go forward with instead of continuing with both.  Because of user preference and the fact that at that time Westlaw was more flexible than Lexis with their content and pricing, we chose Westlaw.

We have been happy with that choice, but with the contract for Westlaw now coming up for renewal at the end of this year and a little more wiggle room in the budget, I decided to take a fresh look at the online research products from Lexis and Bloomberg as well as review the content and terms of the contract with Westlaw.  Towards this end I set up consecutive two-month trials with Lexis and Bloomberg to see how their products performed compared to Westlaw.

Overview of Bloomberg Law (BLaw) 

There is much that is very good about BLaw, not least of which is the incorporation of BNA Commentary and Analysis.  BNA has long been a top tier legal information provider, and the addition of BNA content to BLaw is a huge positive.  However, aside from BNA and PLI content there is not much else in the way of secondary sources, at least, not if one compares BLaw’s secondary source content with Lexis’s Matthew Bender library of over 4,000 titles or the number of comprehensive West treatises and encyclopedias.  Also missing from BLaw’s content are public records and while BLaw has Legislative & Regulatory content, there is not much in the way of legislative history.

BLaw does have some aspects which I think are superior to either Lexis or Westlaw.  One of those areas is BLaw’s Litigation & Dockets pages.  BLaw offers dockets and filings for most federal and some state courts.  In this regard BLaw has comparable dockets coverage to Lexis and Westlaw.  Federal docket content is pulled directly from PACER, with BLaw acting as a gateway,  however, without the delay there is with both Lexis and Westlaw from the time a lawsuit hits PACER to when it appears on their systems.  (Lexis says their system is updated hourly and Westlaw uploads new docket data daily.)

When searching dockets on BLaw a search is also done to any PDF document attached to the docket.  This is not the case with either Lexis or Westlaw, both of which require you to search the trial documents libraries separately, in fact, Courtlink (Lexis) requires a separate sign-on entirely.

I also like that when you purchase BLaw you buy everything they have, no included/excluded content.  Users need not concern themselves with transactional or hourly pricing – searching, viewing, printing, downloading are all included in the per user pricing model (more on that later).  That said, most firms continue to pass along a good portion of their research costs to clients, and firms need some kind of metric for computing the cost of specific research.  Bloomberg has a method of quantifying per client use for any user needing this data; it is fairly complicated, but from the explanation I received, it should suffice.

Another area where BLaw arguably has an edge is with company, market and financial news and information.  Bloomberg made its name as a financial news and information media company and the Bloomberg Terminal is legendary in the industry.  While the BLaw databases containing this information are impressive, the Terminal content did not entirely migrate to BLaw.  Still, I’d have to give the advantage to BLaw, and it is very likely a firm could cancel a stand-alone product for SEC research if they purchased BLaw.

Overall, BLaw is easy to navigate and the functionality is straight-forward featuring flexible searching.  Any kind of search is recognized whether using Natural Language or Boolean searching no matter if you used Lexis or Westlaw connectors.  Users can choose to search across all of BLaw using the single search bar at the top of the main screen, or by placing your cursor in this bar a list of entity types will drop down.  You can also display a full list of sources and by hovering your cursor over any title a “Search” icon will appear allowing users to easily locate and search individual sources.

The Practice Centers are very helpful to collect on one page a variety of content focused in one area, but BLaw is still populating these centers, and  not all practice areas are represented (e.g. the Tax Center will not be up until the end of the year).  Transactional Law pages could offer competition for a product such as Practical Law Company (PLC), but BLaw’s transactional content is not nearly as impressive as what PLC brings to the table.

BCite, BLaw’s legal citation tool was built from the ground-up by BLaw.  It will take some time before it is regarded as equal to Shepards or Keycite.

The 800 pound gorilla in the room concerning BLaw is pricing.  Despite BLaw’s  offering less content than either Westlaw or Lexis, the pricing is actually much higher than what Lexis or Westlaw cost; significantly higher.  Factoring in the reality that it would not be a wise choice for a law firm to rely solely on BLaw (although a firm could choose either Westlaw or Lexis and be fully covered) BLaw’s pricing is even farther removed from the legal information marketplace.

I fully expect BLaw to either build or buy more content in order to become a full-fledged competitor to Lexis and Westlaw.  But I am also hoping that the upper management of BLaw come to a better understanding of the economics of the legal marketplace and adjust their pricing model.

Currently, BLaw would make a good second platform to supplement either Lexis or Westlaw, but this option is effectively off  the table at the initial price point.  However, in my most recent conversations with BLaw representatives, the company is beginning to offer an third pricing model, based on groups of users from practice groups (20+ users) which might make BLaw more of a realistic option.

Coming soon: A comparative review of Westlaw Next, Lexis Advance and Bloomberg Law

This summer I set up trial subscriptions to Bloomberg Law and Lexis as my firm prepares to renegotiate our Westlaw contract.  These trials have offered me a chance to do head-to-head comparisons of these three legal search products and come away with some idea as to  how they stack up against each other.

I am still gathering and analyzing the data but will be posting my thoughts, as well as some of the feedback I received from our attorneys, in the coming days.  But here’s a sneak peek with some initial thoughts about Lexis Advance.

Lexis is no stranger to us, since up until a few years ago, Lexis was a large part of our research arsenal.  However, with the introduction of Lexis Advance, as is the case with features West introduced with “Next” – some of the changes are exciting and offer improvements while other changes still need refinement.

One  intriguing Lexis Advance feature is the product of a collaboration between Lexis and Microsoft.   This has produced a feature that allows users to access Lexis while reading an email in Outlook or working from a document in Word.  Attorneys love this feature since it allows them to respond to an email or attached document without having to actually sign-on to Lexis in order to conduct basic research when responding to an email or checking a brief.

As I said, more to come soon.

Collection development for law libraries in the 21st century

In a climate of stationary or decreasing budgets, finding a way to provide the students, faculty, and staff of the law school, the legal community, and at times the public at large with access to “a core collection of essential materials”, is a challenge. Even libraries that are not facing budget restrictions struggle to find the correct balance between the need to maintain and expand a print collection and the requirements of the ever-changing environment of electronic legal research. (Runyon, 2009)

My firm is involved in a large municipal bankruptcy case and I was asked to find a couple of old cases published formerly by LRP in the Bankruptcy Court Decisions, but now a title acquired by Thomson West within the last year.  Both cases needed were pre-1978 when the bankruptcy code underwent a major revision, and West’s online coverage began in 1978,vol. 5.  Our print collection began with vol. 19, 1989, when we began to subscribe to the publication.  The earlier volumes were available on Lexis, but inexplicably Lexis only had one of the cases.

I ended up getting the other case from West by contacting the editor, and the reason I am relating this story is not to brag about how resourceful I am.  Librarians are resourceful, no news there.  No, the reason I am talking about this experience is to introduce my thoughts on the issues facing libraries experiencing pressure, both economic and cultural, to rely more and more on electronic resources and a growing perception that print collections are no longer necessary or even desirable in some cases.

While I of course agree that online research is the primary method used by lawyers for legal research, and I am certainly not advocating a return to using print instead of online, the fact remains that we are not yet at that point when online resources, alone, are sufficient for conducting complex and comprehensive legal research.  I still think that the most accurate and complete research is done integrating print with electronic sources.

As a consequence, despite budgetary forces, we must be very careful about how we weed our collections, and whenever possible strive to create objective methods and processes to value a title within the collection and measure usage.  Sometimes the decision is an easy one, I doubt anyone prefers Shepard’s in print over the online version or Keycite; and for good reason.  Other decisions may seem straight-forward, i.e. duplicated titles in print and online may be cancelled.  But in some cases the print source is used more than the same title online.  The CCH Standard Federal Tax Reporter is a case in point.  Many people consider the binders much better than the Intelliconnect platform and this is true for other CCH titles as well.

Caleb Derven and Valerie Kendlin in their case study of a print resource cancellation project suggest incorporating concepts from management science to form the basis of a decision making process for collection development.  Access to “Management Information System” (MIS) data allow librarians to enable accurate profiling of print resource usage in a time of severe financial cutbacks.  “Evidence-Based Librarianship” (EBL) provided the framework within which the library could make these hard decisions as well as providing an iterative process within which decisions could be critiqued, stress tested and ultimately accepted.  (Derven & Kendlin, 2011)

Management Information System data and Evidence-Based Librarianship are somewhat fancy terms for a fairly basic idea: first you gauge how much resources are used, and by whom, followed up with formulating a plan to implement and communicate the rationale underpinning the long-term strategy and the specific short-term decisions.

A related issue is the entry of e-books to the legal marketplace.

I was told by a West representative, that West has begun to replace loose-leaf sets with annual or semi-annual softcover sets in order to format them for e-book availability.  Law Journal Press has been converting subscriptions from supplement-by-supplement payment to annual online+print subscriptions.  Their online service is a platform to present e-books of the titles.  Wolters Kluwer, the parent company of both CCH and Aspen Publishing, has taken the Bowne Red Box set and recast it as RB Source for use on iPads and other e-readers.

So far, while attorneys have embraced this new technology in their personal lives, they are reluctant to drop print legal research resources and replace them with e-versions.  But, that appears to be where we are headed.

So, what’s the rub?  Primarily, the problem for libraries is loss of control and ownership of their collections.

What a library purchases with a subscription to an online resource is access, not the content itself.  If you cancel the subscription, you no longer have access to any of the content.  Also,  content changes.  A print collection is stable; it will remain on the shelf no matter if your subscription is active or not, and in many cases it will take years before the set is no longer useful.   Mind you, I am not advocating relying on sets no longer being updated, and for some practice areas, tax for instance, it would be tantamount to legal malpractice – the point I am making is that a library owns the content, and it will not disappear (as do online resources) when you drop the subscription.

We are still in a period of transition, but it is clear that libraries across the spectrum from public, academic to private law libraries are feeling pressure to put most of their budget into electronic services – but I still think print resources are not obsolete yet.

References

Caleb Derven & Valerie Kendlin (2011): Evidence-Based Librarianship: A Case Study of a Print Resource Cancellation Project, Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37:2, 166–170.

Amanda M. Runyon (2009): The Effect of Economics and Electronic Resources on the Traditional Law Library Print Collection, Law Library Journal, 101:2 (Spring 2009), 177-205.

Business research and resources for the private law librarian

More and more I am being asked to perform business research for a variety of functions within my firm: business development; industry research; competitive intelligence; and company background.  Over time I have found several non-legal sources worthwhile and also sought to find other business sources that I could access without directly subscribing.

For a law librarian at an academic institution, access to a variety business databases is not an issue since most universities that have a law school also have an MBA program and those departments will need access to most of the important business databases.  But for a private law librarian, business research is usually not the primary focus and the budget for all but the largest firms will not allow for subscribing to more than a few business resources beyond those related to SEC disclosure and company financials.

At my firm, we subscribe to Hoover’s, Securities Mosaic (we have also used Livedgar/Westlaw Business and 10-K Wizard) as well as other business-related databases available through Westlaw or Lexis.  But I have found I can supplement these with very good and reliable business resources that are available through my area public library.

I can search ReferenceUSA, Value Line, Morningstar Investment Research Center, General BusinessFile ASAP, and SRDS Media Solutions simply by having an active public library card.  These are some of the best resources for business research and would be quite expensive to subscribe to for my private library.

Other free sources that are very good include, Yahoo! Finance, U.S. Census Bureau; FDIC Bank Data & Statistics; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; and U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

These sources offer a wealth of market, industry, demographic and statistical information that will allow you to create a more in-depth report on an industry, region or company which is well beyond what you may have through your library’s paid subscriptions.

Take-away: there is a plethora of quality business information available for free just by checking your local public library and becoming acquainted with relevant government websites.