Today Thomson Reuters is announcing two new solutions Thomson Reuters Marketplace and Thomson Reuters Legal Home which are designed to enable lawyers to locate and utilize Thomson Reuters products.
Thomson Reuters Marketplace, (beta version), is an online marketplace where lawyers, technologists and knowledge professional can research, trial and purchase a wide range of Thomson Reuters solutions.
Thomson Reuters Legal Home Is a more sophisticated offering which is customized to the individual users. The goal is to serve as an “integrated digital launchpad” where subscribers can access their Thomson Reuters products as well as information about external products which can be interated with or linked to Thomson Reuters products. Thomson Reuters will continue to expand Marketplace offering for legal, tax and accounting professionals as well as adding solutions for government and regulatory customers.
There is no question that legal technologists, librarians and knowledge managers invest lots of energy in promoting the availability of new resources via mail, training sessions, presentations at practice group lunches… and yet there is the “why haven’t we purchased X months or years after the rollout. Irish McIntyre, head of Legal Software and Workflow for Thomson Reuters echoed this frustration in the press release: “Our customers have shared the need for solutions such as Thomson Reuters Marketplace and Legal Home, and we are in a unique position to meet these needs…These solutions will help our customers derive more value from the investment they have made in products, technology and services. We are delivering product interoperability around our customers’ workflows; it is about performing work, not onboarding tools.”
Thomson Reuters Legal Home. Legal Home is currently limited to products which are accessed using Onepass. There are currently 20 products available from Legal Home including Westlaw, Practical Law, RIA Checkpoint, Drafting Assistant, West Legal Ed Center and HighQ. Rawia Ashraf, Director of Prodcut Management, Legal Tech Innovation provided me with a demo. In fact, during a demo I noted that Thomson Reuters HighQ, content was featured most prominently. HighQ users will get access to the HighQ projects and documents as well as research and drafting products. Neither West KM nor Contract Express are currently included in the Legal Home.
Legal Home, is described in the press release as an integrated digital workspace as a central launch pad for legal professionals to tap into essential resources and navigate their work. It provides seamess access to Thomson Reuters applications through a single sign-on, Legal Home brings together filtered information from multiple applications and sources, making it a convenient place to start and manage each day.
The platform also provides a detailed view into a user’s HighQ sites and activity feeds, across multiple instances. Firms that allow integration with Office 365 will display a lawyers recent Office documents. Lawyers can also add personalized links to external sources such as news sites Practical Law Legal Updates will deliver news and industry developments.
Legal Home, free to Thomson Reuters customers, is now available in the U.S. and UK, and will soon be available in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. According to Ashraf, new features will be added every six weeks. Upcoming features include Integration with Office360 Calendar in December 2020 and DMS integration is scheduled for Q1 of 2021.
Thomson Reuters Marketplace Marketplace is currently in beta and will be available globally beginning in February 2021. It is an open platform where users can test nearly 50 Thomson Reuters solutions. Perhaps more importantly it provides users will a shortcut to interoperable solutions that can be integrated with Thomson Reuters products. I am not aware of any other vendor offering what Thomson Reuters describes as a “proven path” of vetted applications and solutions that seamlessly integrate with Thomson Reuters products and technology.” Marketplace also exposes HighQ users to many of the powerful HighQ features and ready-to-use solutions.
KPMG Law, which provides clients with legal business solutions based on its strong legal capabilities coupled with its insight and expertise, will be listed on Marketplace. “Being a part of Thomson Reuters Marketplace enables KPMG Law to make its services and expertise readily available and accessible to a broad network,” said James Thomas, head of Legal Technology & Innovation at KPMG Law in the UK. “We’re looking forward to working with businesses to ensure their journey towards a more digitized legal department is successful, from both a people-process and technology perspective.”
External vendors listed in Marketplace include KPMG Law’s suite of productized legal solutions that have been built on the HighQ platform; services to help clients properly configure HighQ when accessing Marketplace’s solution templates; and access to services provided by KPMG’s Legal Operations and Transformation Services team, including change management, process optimization and operating model assessment.
Continued Integration– Contract Express Legal Tracker and Panoramic
There are obvious similarities between the HighQ and the Panoramic workflow product that Thomson Reuters launched in February 2019. Today’s press release outlines plans to merge the two products.
“Building on the recent integrations of Contract Express and Legal Tracker, Thomson Reuters will begin migrating key functionality of Thomson Reuters Panoramic into HighQ. HighQ already offers robust capabilities, including task management and social collaboration, that many customers use for legal project management. Moving forward, the business will integrate many of the central capabilities of Panoramic into HighQ, including Matter Maps, the financials of 3E, and situation-relevant Practical Law guidance. “
In My Humble Opinion – How TR Can Improve Legal Home
Both Marketplace and Legal Home are designed to achieve an important win-win goal for law firms and Thomson Reuters. Marketplace is designed to make it easy for law firms to locate not only appropriate products but also understand how those products can be integrated into third party platforms.
Legal Home has the stated goal of exposing lawyers to the Thomson Reuters products available at their law firm. However during today’s demo I identified two ways in which Legal Home needs to be improved. Currently Legal Home only shows users products they have used recently. It doesn’t show them the products they don’t know about! Secondly and more importantly – you can’t get into Legal Home to customize it unless you know your Onepass password! Am I the first person to tell Thomson Reuters that lawyers do not know their Onepass passwords? Everyone saves their Onepass passwords in the products they use all the time and they never look back. It would make a lot more sense for lawyers to be able to launch Legal Home from within the products they are using all the time (Westlaw, Practical Law, HighQ etc.) I fear that Legal Home will never get the traction it deserves unless Thomson Reuters eliminates the Onepass obstacle.