At the dawn of the digital information age, I learned an exotic research tradecraft “Selective Dissemination of Information” (SDI). Platforms such as Dialog and Orbit contained dozens of databases which included abstracts and descriptors for scientific and business
articles and reports. Curated topical updates could be harvested by using a set of complex commands and
Power Tools for Summer Associates: Seven Research / Workflow Tools You Didn’t See in Law School
Law Schools in the United States have been historically focused on teaching students using caselaw research tools and techniques. In
real practice, lawyers need to add a few more tools to their toolkit. During the past decade, there has been an explosion of new tools, powered by algorithms and analytics which streamline a variety of
Bloomberg Law Offers Free Access to Legal Aid Organizations
Bloomberg Adds American Lawyer Media Legal News, Experts, and Verdicts Content
OK I am going to say it yet again. Legal news is Hot!. It is only the first week of January and I am announcing the third important change in the Legal News market in three days. On Sunday ALM announced that they were continuing their licensing agreement with Lexis on a non-exclusive basis. Today
My Most Popular Posts of 2020: Innovative Products, COVID, Legal News Products
I have ranked the most popular 15 Dewey S Strategic posts of 2020.It is no surprise to me that posts about the release of specialty 
COVID resources by major legal publishers dominate – 4 of the 15 stories. My annual “Hits and Misses” survey results were covered in 3 of the 15 top posts. The
Read It and Weep: Feit Report – Which Major Legal Research Vendor is Plummeting in the Market?
Today Feit Consulting is releasing a new report on the state of market for major legal vendors: Thomson Reuters. LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law and Wolters Kluwer. I hesitate to even refer to the market as the legal research market 
because that completely ignores the dramatic integration of workflow, drafting, brief analysis and analytics into the 21st century progeny of the foundational case law research systems.The 2020 Legal Information Vendor Market Survey was conducted between June and August 2020 and is targeted at law firms with 50+ attorneys. There were 104 responses: 26%(<100 attorneys), 56% (100-499 attorneys) and 20% >500 attorneys.The The report provides context by comparing results to the 2018 survey results. These results will be include in an upcoming book Optimizing Legal Information Pricing which will be published this fall.
The one criticism I have of the report is that the report collects data on the importance of various products by vendor. Westlaw Edge is listed but not the prior Westlaw platform – which many respondents appear to still have. Since the time when the study was conducted Lexis has announced it’s new platform Lexis+ which will surely be a platform analysed in the next version of the study.Although Westlaw enjoys the greatest market share they are declining in customer satisfaction. Bloomberg Law and Wolters Kluwer are stand outs in improving customer satisfaction with 35% and 15% improvements respectively.
This is a must read for librarians, knowledge managers and C-Suite executives in law firms. Under the chart there is a link where you can click through and see customer comments.The report examines the following issues:
Bloomberg Law Wins Multi – Year Federal Judiciary Contract
The entire federal judiciary including the U.S. Supreme Court, circuit, district and bankruptcy courts are getting access 
to Bloomberg Law. Today Bloomberg Law announced that they have entered into a multi-year contract with the Administrative Office of the US Courts (AO) which will provide the 20,000 legal processionals unlimited access to Bloomberg Law. According to
Bloomberg Law Expands Docket Key to All Federal Courts
Bloomberg Law’s Docket Key offers one of the most advanced docket search features on the market. Docket Key enables researches to not only retrieve a list of docket activities, but to search within that docket or across the Docket Key repository to identify specific document types (e.g. complaints, briefs and motions.) Bloomberg Law has announced that the feature has been expanded to cover all Federal dockets.
Docket Key leverages machine learning to classify 20 different categories of filing including motions, complaints, notices, briefs, and orders. Anyone who has done docket research knows the pain of diving into a long list of entries trying to fish for a specific document type. According to the press release ” Docket Key has classified over 210 million docket entries, with additional dockets being classified daily. ”
Thinking Outside the DMS. Lawyers rarely take time to tag their document types or even mark their documents as final. As a result law firm DMS’s are wild, untamed repositories. There are AI and machine learning products on the market which some firms are leveraging to analyse and code their DMSs to make it easier to locate final versions of
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Bloomberg BNA Announces BIG Name Change Now: Bloomberg Industry Group
Today Bloomberg BNA dropped the venerable BNA as in Bureau of National Affairs from the company name. The new 
name is Bloomberg Industry Group which gives us a wonderful new acronym in Legal Publishing: BIG.
According to the press release reprinted below — the new name better reflects the diverse range of businesses, professionals and
Bloomberg Law Joins the Brief Analyser Party – With A Touch Of Intrigue
On Monday night Bloomberg Law hosted a “semi-secret” preview of their still to be named “brief analyzer.” I will cut to the chase and recommend “B Brief” as a name for the analysis tool. After all, the point of a brief analyzer is to make lawyers more efficient. The product is expected to be released as a beta test in September and to launch by the end of the year – depending on feedback from the beta testers. Bloomberg Law President Joe 
Breda and his executive team held an event in a “speak easy” style restaurant on Blagden Ally in the hipster heart of DC. A select group of librarian and tech journalist invitees received a mysterious key in a rather MI-5 invitation several weeks before the AALL Annual Meeting and Conference. In a darkened back room, the invitees received a preview of the “brief analyzer” product and were invited to give feedback.
Like other brief analyzers the process is launched by dropping and dragging a document into the analyzer tool. The tool extracts and analyses the citations, text and concepts in the document.
Bloomberg’s product demo focused on the workflow for analyzing an opponent’s brief rather than the process for finalizing a brief that is being drafted. Most of Bloomberg’s competitor’s in this space have launched their products focusing on the brief drafting process, the analysis of an adversary’s brief was included as an additional use case.
The bottom line is that for either process, the analyzer tool is designed to speed up the review process and help lawyers focus on the most important
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