Today LexisNexis announced  its agreement to acquire MLex, a provider of international legal analysis and commentary on regulatory risk. MLex which started in Europe has become a an important resource for antitrust lawyers in the US.
The press release describes MLex as “an innovative media organization that has a track record of uncovering regulatory risk before it breaks in other news outlets. MLex focuses on providing insight, analysis, and commentary into key developments in regulatory risk. They employ an investigative approach combined with in-depth, forensic coverage of cases via an unrivaled team of experienced and expert reporters, qualified lawyers and industry experts in more than a dozen bureaus around the world, including Brussels, Washington DC, Sao Paolo, Hong Kong and San Francisco.”

Lexis The Aggregator.  Lexis has a “thing” for news. With the launch of Nexis in 1980 they offered the first “full text” database of national newspapers.  In the past few years Lexis has shown a special interest in acquiring high quality legal news products which had developed a loyal readership. They acquired Knowledge Mosaic, a US regulatory news source and the suite of  Law360 newsletters. Law360 now publishes almost 50 topical and jurisdictional newsletters which cover a wide range of legal topics and the legal market. In addition, Lexis has an exclusive license for the American Lawyer Media archive of legal newspapers, as well as the current and archival news from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Last October Lexis acquired the Moreover news aggregation platform which Lexis relaunched as the Newsdesk platform in April of this year.  Lexis keeps strengthening it’s hold on the  legal markets’ insatiable hunger for  competitive intelligence resources to feed both business development and client advisory.

MLex will remain a stand alone product which will be strengthened by it’s new access to the core LexisNexis legal and editorial content.

The legal market just needs to wonder what other legal news sources Lexis might have in it’s acquisition pipeline. Will the next  specialty legal newsletter you read soon be a Lexis product?

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Here is a link to  the Press Release.