Lawyers want one click solutions. The market demands workflow efficiency. Lexis Advance Practice Pages promise to deliver both.

LexisNexis recently released a series of 
new jurisdictional and practice area pages. Each of the major legal publishers is responding to the legal market demand for new products and platforms
which drive efficiency and streamline lawyer workflow. Unlike the Lexis Practice
Advisor which is a full blown practice guidance system, the practice pages
reside within the Lexis Advance platform and function as a discovery tool which
exposes relevant practice content to  a lawyer as soon as they login to the platform. The practice pages are designed to surface the best and most relevant content relevant to research in a particular practice area on a single screen.

Features of the Practice
Pages (See Illustration Below)
  • Integration of content from Lexis brands Law360, Mealy’s,  Shushenoff, Knowledge Mosaic
  • Partner content gets equal billing (e.g. CCH, Wall Street Journal, American Banker are given equal billing with Lexis content)
  • Treatises offer an online topical index
  • Treatises can be searched or browsed using a table of contents
  • Statenet alerts provide relevant  legislative and regulatory updates
  • Human curation enhances automated tagging
  • Taxonomy and content is enhanced through a collaboration of legal editors and journalists.
  • Lawyers can create their own favorites.

    Banking Practice Pages

Steve Errick, Vice President, Managing Director of LexisNexis describes it as the “cookbook approach” to research. The practice pages reflect a customer preference for more concise units of guidance rather than deep immersion in a treatise. For better or for worse, Lexis is acknowledging a trend which I have referred to in earlier posts as “google brain.” Some scientific studies have indicated that Google has changed our brains which have become more adept at scanning rather than deep reading.

Practice Pages
 As of this week there are  7 practice area pages – Tax,
 Banking & Financial Services, Energy, Healthcare,
Labor & Employment, Mergers & Acquisitions, Military
Justice. In  late June/early July Real Estate and Native
American Law practice pages, will launch.The selection of topics has been based on input from Large
Law and Federal customers. 

Jurisdictional Pages. There are currently 4 jurisdictional  pages– New York, California, Florida, Texas. On a single screen the Practice Page provide access to:

  • Cases
  • Statutes and Regulations
  • Administrative Materials
  • Treatises and Forms (including many Matthew Bender classics)
  • News and Analysis

New York Jurisdictional Page

Future Developments.

Jurisdictional Pages According to Steven Errick,…… “Our aspiration is to cover each of the
50 state jurisdictions, scheduled based on the needs and interest levels of our
state customers and the firms and corporations with interests in those states.
We’re fast-tracking releases with roughly one  page released every other week  Hand-in-hand with
this, we will be building out content that supports and justifies a page in each
of the jurisdictions over the long term.
Practice Pages Errick also indicated that Lexis is  currently
targeting a total of 25 to 30 practice areas that  they think will merit coverage. ”
Some derivative practice areas might sit within a single page, but  would have
their own sections, similar to how labor and benefits sit within employment, and
Credit Union financial regulatory coverage will sit alongside the Banking &
Financial Services page.” In the  next six months, the editorial team will be working on the
Insurance, Bankruptcy, and Intellectual Property pages. Securities is expected to launch in the
earlier part of 2016,. Given the strength of the Lexis securities resources in the Practice advisor and Securities Mosaic this will be a complex undertaking.
 
Can Sector pages Be Far Behind. Given the focus law firms have been putting on understanding Industry Sectors of clients, I asked Errick  if these would be represented in the Practice Page approach to resource discovery. Errick indicated that this is under serious consideration. He indicated that these will require special care in development to avoid confusion with practice pages in situations. Errick provided this very detailed response below: 
When it comes to Industry pages, we do
not want to confuse our customers with multiple pages for a specific industry or
practice area (e.g. creating an Energy Practice page and an Energy Industry
page). Where there is a singular regulatory practice such as Energy that serves
an industry, we will build a “Business and Industry News and Analysis” pod
within that practice page to allow customers to quickly find industry
coverage. 
But, with an interdisciplinary field
of several practice areas within an industry, such as Pharmaceuticals/Life
Sciences, we’ll lead with the industry view, both in the U.S. and globally, and
then build it out with the corresponding diverse regulations and
practice-oriented content (e.g., patents, FDA regulations, etc.).  We’re already
building out those industry content additions in our Banking & Financial
Services and Energy pages, and expect to complete more of these type of Industry
and Segment pages by the end of the year.
The other emerging area are those
pages which are custom-designed for specific customer segments: Our Military
Justice Page, for example, was designed based on the targeted needs of our
Federal Customers and with their direct suggestions and input. Whether Corporate
Counsel, a State & Local view, or a Federal Government view, we want to “sit
at the desk” of each of our customers and respond to the unique ways they
research and practice.

Also, for our Law Librarian customers, we’re creating an Information Professionals page, which puts our archives, serial sets, etc. directly at the fingertips of those individuals managing extensive and complex information needs for a firm or institution

By moving from Lexis.com to Lexis Advance,
we now have an incredible flexibility to build a variety of specialized pages,
allowing us to leave behind the notion of “one size fits all customers.” 

 Access


 

All practice pages (with the exception
of Lexis Advance Tax) are available to everyone with access to Lexis
Advance.

Errick outlined the unique approach to the Tax product:

“We have a different model with Lexis
Advance Tax: We surface through this page unique content sets that power the
page as well as primary and secondary sources in a subscription model. With the
subscription, a firm will receive these content sets as part of the Lexis
Advance Tax package. This originates from our commitment to build a tax solution
that maximizes our deep tax resources, built within a search module that
respects how tax attorneys conduct their practice, including tax-oriented
research. The tax content can still be accessed outside of the Tax Page, without
the Tax Page specific functionality.”