Imagine my surprise when I came across a press release from
Thomson Reuters describing  a new “app” they were making available to
their financial services customers. The app uses 
legal data from Court Wire to not only alert traders to lawsuits against
companaties they follow, but the app provides historical data on market and
business events following similar litigation in the past.

 The Legal market has been using  Thomson Reuters Court Wire and competitor products to track litigation for more than a decade. Recently Thomson Reuters offered customers of their Eikon financial services product a new Court Wire app. The Court Wire application offers traders special features which are unavailable in the legal market. Court Wire app provides users with  customizable,
timely alerts and search criteria, visual movement of real-time and historical
price changes, summaries of complex legal cases, and, utilizing Eikon charting
and reporting tools, the ability to create interactive visualizations and
competitive analysis. These features are all designed to provide traders with a
streamlined and efficient workflow.

Here is the most interesting feature. According to the press release,
“The app provides automatic alerts in a trader’s stock portfolio when a
lawsuit has been filed against a corporation and charts historical data to show
how the stock prices of other companies and industries have reacted in similar
circumstances. This analysis empowers financial professionals to make quick,
informed investments.”

What is baffling to me is that this is not simultaneously
being offered in the legal market where there is an insatiable appetite  for insights which can provide a business advantage. Is it not obvious that lawyers are also interested in predicting business as well as legal risks?

This is the total 
no-brainer. When will the similar insights be offered to the legal
market. Could not TR’s alignment with IBM Watson be used to drive deep
correlations and insights between litigation in a while I do to you but events.

I asked if Thomson Legal could comment on the CourtWire
app and find out if they planned to release a similar app to their legal
customers.

  Leann
Blanchfield, vice President, product development provided this response: “I
can’t speak to what we have in the pipeline, but I can speak to the integration
of content that has been happening across Thomson Reuters to bring relevant
data to customers from products serving professionals in other markets. A
recent example is the integration of certain business data from Eikon — part of
our Financial & Risk business — into our business development solutions,
including Monitor Suite and Business Development Premier.

This work is made possible by Open PermID, which Thomson
Reuters has been using company-wide to improve internal data federation. The
Thomson Reuters Permanent Identifier is a machine readable, 64 bit number used
to create a unique reference — which will never change over time — to a piece
of information. The PermID helps us, as well as our customers and partners,
handle data management challenges, eliminate mapping inconsistencies, reduce
operational risk, and streamline end-to-end workflow processes across various
platforms. As we discussed with you in January at our Innovation Summit, we are
also making a subset or of our PermIDs available to anyone through an open
license. 

The integration of Court Wire on the Eikon platform and
Eikon data in our biz dev products is driven by the same spirit that drove the
creation of Practice Point, a product launched this year that puts Westlaw and
forms content into a Practical Law-inspired, task-oriented solution.”

This answer does not suggest that there will be a
CourtWire/Eikon app offered to the legal market any time soon,
or at least they are not ready to say.. but let me be the first to say I think
the legal market would also welcome an app which provided insights into the correlations
and consequences of ligitation on business entities and industries following similar
litigation.