With Monday’s launch of WestlawNext, Thomson Reuters’s new legal research platform, and recent announcements from Fastcase and LexisNexis about new products, it’s time to step back and see what really is changing.

The New York Times and the latest ABA Journal both preview some of the changes, which we also summarize below. While competition for your business is always good, there are now a lot of things to remember and compare beyond Westlaw or LexisNexis.  Some say the big two missed their chance with the solo and small law firm demographic, so it will be interesting to see the applications for the new products.  Consider this your quick reference guide.Trends

Google set a high bar for any product that relies on searching capabilities. People have come to expect a few things: natural language searches over Boolean search terms, results prioritized by relevance, and searching content on external (public) websites

Other developments include integration of citation and analysis, especially with visualization.  Collaboration tools are also driving new product lines.

The Google issue is best illustrated by some interesting Thomson Reuters research:

Product development executives say they spent hundreds of hours watching attorneys do research and getting feedback on their existing product. . . . [T]he company’s research showed that lawyers often did not scroll beyond the first page or two of results to find the content they wanted. Instead, they would continue to rerun searches, generating costly bills.

(From the ABA Journal) Lawyers are accustomed to Google, where if good results don’t come up in the first few pages, it usually means your search terms are at fault. Although that is not true with the old Westlaw or LexisNexis, it often seems easier to try a new search than to wade through pages of results.  The new formats try to address this problem.

WestlawNext

When: February 1st
Cost: It’s an upgrade to Westlaw.
Highlights: Search result relevance and natural language. Algorithms find related documents that a lawyer might not have searched for. Integrated KeyCite. Workflow collaboration includes saving results by client, searching saved cases, and highlighting or adding notes to cases.

For more information: WestlawNext; A First Look; Top 10 List; My Trip Out [to] West

Lexis

There are two developments at Lexis.  Monday it announced a new partnership with Microsoft.  Lexis will be integrated into Microsoft products like Word, Outlook, and SharePoint.

Later this year it is expected to unveil a new platform, currently being called New Lexis, outlined here.

When: TBD.
Cost: Unknown. May be available a la carte.
Highlights: Search result relevance and natural language. Suite of collaboration tools.  The new platform can also obtain results from thousands of legal websites, not just Lexis’s proprietary database. Shepards is incorporated into searches and can be viewed graphically.  The goal is “precise results in an efficient manner” and combining legal business and technology:

[T]he new Lexis platform will . . . help lawyers evaluate the likelihood of winning a case, the cost of winning, and the potential value to both lawyer and client. . . .[I]ts new platform will also pull information from some of its other product lines, including the Martindale-Hubbell lawyer directory . . . .

(From the ABA Journal)

Bloomberg Law

When: TBD. Currently in beta testing.
Cost: Unknown, but this service is expected to be geared toward larger firms.
Highlights: Search result relevance and natural language. Ease of use and content. Citation analysis summaries, graphical strength-of-authority indicators. Menu-driven, starting with the question of what you want to do. Lags on secondary sources.

Google Scholar

When: November 2009
Cost: Free
Highlights: 80+ years of case law from federal and state courts, U.S. Supreme Court decisions back to 1971 and secondary sources. It does what Google does best by aggregating the case law made available by courts rather than hosting its own database.

Read our review, a prediction, plus some noted problems.  Quoted by the ABA Journal, Rich Klau from Google reports that “[t]here is no attempt to slay anyone here. . . . Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it useful.  This was a collection of content that was not accessible and well-organized.”  Furthermore, the target audience is ordinary citizens and there are no plans to do any more with the information than what is already available.  In a nutshell, you probably can’t replace the other services with Google Scholar, but it can put price pressure on other services.

Fastcase

When: Growing for the last 10 years.
Cost: Free to MSBA members and16 other state bar associations.  For non-members, monthly subscriptions start at $95/month.
Highlights: In addition to the cost, Fastcase already addresses the “google-ization” issue of prioritized search results.  Results can also be viewed graphically.  Limited secondary sources, but plans to add them.  There is also a new free iPhone app. (another review here)

From anecdotes on the MSBA’s solosmall listserv, it sounds like Fastcase has replaced other services for many solo and small firm practitioners in Minnesota.  For people who need just a little more than Fastcase provides, at trainings we suggest that you can cut down your costs by using Fastcase as your primary research tool, then going to Westlaw or Lexis to Keycite or Shepardize your best results from Fastcase.

The ABA article summed up all the new developments by saying that, aside from price, “the companies may be testing the limits of how much information beyond pure legal research content is too much.” Where price does matter, there are still many other lower cost options out there as well, such as Law Moose, LoisLaw, and VersusLaw.  It will be interesting to see how these services respond to the market changes.

Posted by Andrea Hable