Today American Lawyer Media and LexisNexis announced the extension of their strategic alliance with a new content agreement. According to the press release, the agreement “lays the groundwork for expanding the integration of ALM content within LexisNexis legal research solutions.”

LexisNexis and ALM,  have an an exclusive agreement since 2011,  which made ALM’s iconic content including The American Lawyer, Corporate Counsel, The National Law Journal, Legaltech News, New York Law Journal and other specialty publications available through the Lexis+ and Lexis® legal research solutions and Nexis® Newsdesk. This extension ensures that current news from ALM will continue to be available to LexisNexis customers.

Breaking News: I also received an exclusive statement from Richard Caruso, General Manager, Global Legal News, ALM, stating that “Lexis no longer has an exclusive to our content archive, allowing us to open up licensing opportunities with other Legal research providers;  we are planning on announcing a new agreement very soon.”

What this means for Lexis and ALM subscribers:

  • Subscribers can now have a license with ALM that is not tied to their LexisNexis contract.
  • ALM will be handling their own sales and not relying on LexisNexis sale reps to manage their customer relationships.
  • ALM will soon be announcing that ALM content will be available though a second Legal research platform.

Market Impact This will offer some relief ALM 100 law firms who are  are rebelling against LexisNexis’ increasingly aggressive tying tactics. The LexisNexis tying tactics require law firms to purchase Lexis Advance or Lexis +  research platforms in order to get  Law 360, Intelligize, a corporate license for the Wall Street Journal  or even Lexis print treatises such as Colliers on Bankruptcy.

2020 signaled a change in the legal news market with the Launch of Legal Radar  by ALM, the Fastcase Launch of LawStreet Media, the Thomson Reuters Launch of Westlaw Today and Bloomberg’s renewed focus on legal news . Read more about these developments in my recent post on 2020 trends.

Nonetheless, Lexis will continue to offer significantly more legal news content than their competitors  by combining ALM content with New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Factiva, Law360 and 40,000+ other premier sources. The competitive forces noted above combined with the post pandemic uncertainties of the legal market – could result in a significantly altered legal news market by 2022.