Thanks to  the two professionals   who provided comments  for today’s post .

West KM and Drafting Assistant “I can attest that few have WestKM anymore and most have cancelled the product. Practical Law has taken the place of WestKM for many firms. with a vast collection of model documents and precedents. However, with the continued high pricing of PL, there has been an incremental wave of buyers canceling the product for the less favorable Practice Advisor. Several clients have also cancelled Drafting Assistant and are re-visiting the Lexis MS Word product. Westlaw Edge?  This has been pushed by every TR sales rep out there with early Westlaw renewal offers, but the hype hasn’t made much of a dent in commitments, as you have already mentioned earlier.”

– anonymous outside consultant

 TWEN – “The West Education Network.  TWEN is their course management system.  It has not seen any upgrades in many years, so it doesn’t have many of the bells and whistles that the newer generic systems that most universities use contain.  However, most faculty can manage their pages without much outside help (we offer help setting up and adding content) and it is easy to upload content directly from Westlaw.  For that reason, I don’t see most of our faculty giving it up until we pry it out of their cold dead hands.”

– anonymous academic librarian

 

My Take Since TWEN is an academic market I have no familiarity with the product. However – I recently saw a demo of an education product from Wolters Kluwer which is position to provide interactive educational materials for law schools if TWEN craters. I thought  Wolters Kluwer’s CasebookConnect offered a pretty impressive suite of resources for “born digital” law students  and law professors.

Good News for West KM?  I have heard one piece of intelligence which bodes well for West KM. Andrew Wishart, Global Head Drafting and Automation at is now responsible for West KM. I interviewed Wishart for a post when Thomson Reuters launched  Contract Express. Wishart was the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Business Integrity — the company that created Contract Express and was acquired by Thomson Reuters. Contract Express is a pretty impressive product and I recall  pointing out to Wishart that Contract Express could have some very interesting synergies with West KM.