I was recently provided with an internal Bloomberg communication from Cesca Antonelli, Editor-in-Chief at Bloomberg Industry Group*. Antonelli  scoped out Bloomberg’s plans: “ … as we move into 2023, we will substantially grow the size of our newsroom. You read that right. At a time when it seems like our entire industry is shrinking and doing more with less, Bloomberg Industry Group is making a big bet on robust journalism.” Leadership is committed to marrying the best content to the best AI.

Legal News Focus Bloomberg Law is going to focus on “the part of our market that is growing the most: news for Big Law litigators. Our goal is to become No. 1 in litigation news, and that’s where most of these new jobs will be.”  Although no specific hiring target is mentioned, the new positions will include team leaders, deputies, content editors and reporters. The positions will be filled with both internal candidates and external recruits.

The strategy will be to “stand up a team of writers inside courthouses in key locations. There will be “a new SWAT team of general assignment reporters to write stories about the decisions our legal intelligence teams don’t currently have time to get done. New
Continue Reading Bloomberg Law is Doubling Down on Legal News– Starts Hiring Spree to Bulk Up Legal Coverage

Today Fastcase and Matterhorn Transactions are announcing an alliance that will make M&A deal data and analytics available in Fastcase’s legal news platform. Law Street Media.  The deal terms and data will be added to its existing litigation-focused coverage of technology, agriculture, and health law.

According to the press release: “Matterhorn proprietary data analysis provides legal professionals with unparalleled capabilities to search for and compare the market terms of mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, and other transactions. The company provides transactional attorneys both

consolidated information on market terms as well as detailed legal language used for specific deal provisions, based on underlying legal agreements and financial disclosures. Matterhorn enables its clients to know precisely the frequency, form, and language of transaction terms and provisions by tying each deal term to the actual documentation.”

It is axiomatic that lawyers  and law firms are hungry for data and analysis- so this is a smart alliance. I am not personally familiar with the Matterhorn product. But the description above sounds similar to the content available in Lexis Intelligize, Thomson Reuters “Westlaw Business” (formerly GSI) and Bloomberg Law. I have no doubt some brilliant research librarian will undertake an analysis of each platform to tease apart the unique and common content and features across these platforms.

The integration of analytics with news has been a growing trend for  the past two years. In addition to Fastcase— American Lawyer Media, Lexis Law360 and Bloomberg have all been pushing data into their news offerings.

Growth without Greed I am an agnostic on how these products compare at this point. Everyone is welcome to the join the analytics party – legal consumers win as the quality and scope of products expand.  But  I  do have to cheer  for the addition of sophisticated M&A data to products available through Fastcase – which has taken a unique “growth without greed” approach to transforming the legal
Continue Reading Matterhorn Deal Data Available In Fastcase Law Street Media News Platform

The 2007 recession was sort of a “cattle prod” which shocked law firms into acknowledging that  clients won’t pay for inefficiency. Legal publishers responded with a variety of “know how” or KM tools  which have created  a highly competitive niche in legal publishing. Every major legal publisher LexisNexis ,Thompson Reuters, Bloomberg Law, and Wolters Kluwer have been focused on gaining market share by growing their practice guidance and drafting tools.
This week FEIT Consulting is releasing a study :”Findings from the LexisNexis Practical Guidance/Thomson Reuters Practical Law Focus Group Inquiry” which summarizes the results of four focus groups which pitted Thompson Reuters Practical Law against Lexis Practical Guidance (previously branded as Practice Advisor.)
The basic question : “Is Lexis practice guidance ready for prime time?”  appears to have been answered in the affirmative.
Well the librarians are a hardened and skeptical lot and will want to test, poke, probe and conduct their own internal focus groups before

Continue Reading Feit Consulting: Is Lexis Practical Guidance Ready for Prime Time?

The 2020-21 Dewey B Strategic What’s Hot and What’s Not Survey  included a series of questions related to the COVID-19 Crisis.

COVID Resources Every legal  publisher launched some kind of COVID related legal resource. Many of these resources were made publicly available outside the paywall. These products included toolkits, trackers,  practical guidance, advisories, checklists, legislative

Workflow Tools. 2020 was marked by significant activity in the  legal workflow/drafting space.  There were eight products that came to my attention during 2020. Three of the eight workflow products fall into the Brief analysis category.   Casetext invented the brief analysis space with the launch of the first brief analysis product CARA in 2016.  So

Legal News One of the most surprising developments of 2020 was the new focus on Legal News. ALM launched an innovative new alerting services called Law.com Radar which originally launched as (Legal Radar). Here are links to the posts I wrote about  Law.com radar in February and November 2020. Westlaw although owned by the Thomson Reuters news organization had ignored the legal news market they launched Westlaw Today in 2020.  (The predecessor company West Publishing had made short lived attempt  with a product called Westlaw News sometime in the 1980s.) Fastcase which bought Law Street Media began publishing legal news which leveraged data harvested from their Docket Alarm analytics product. ( A new Lexis News offering Law360 Pulse which launched  in January 2021 was not included in this survey but will be included in the 2021 survey.)

Best Legal News Product: ALM’s Law.com Radar

Legal Marketplaces It has become nearly impossible to test and track all the new legal technology tools that flood the market each year. In addition, existing tools are transformed with powerful new functionality. Enter the legal marketplace – a new category of legal resource
Continue Reading What’s Hot and What’s Not 2020-21 Survey: ALM Law.com Radar Voted Best Legal News Product and Thomson Reuters Legal Home Best Marketplace

Today Bloomberg Law is launching enhancements to their Draft Analyzer tool which streamlines the  M&A drafting process. The Draft Analyzer was launched in 2015  as a “what’s market” tool which I reviewed in an earlier post.  The Draft Analyzer streamlines transactional workflow by leveraging a proprietary algorithm to benchmark a clause  to similar provisions

We were all blindsided as 2020 unfolded, yet the momentum of technological change and innovation assured a steady stream of new products. I have identified five trends, which I have divided into three categories: unforeseeable, continuing and surprising.

The trends I believe are worth noting — Unforeseeable: COVID-19 impacts; Predicable: state court analytics and innovative workflow tools; Surprising: legal news re-emerges as a competitive focus among major legal publishers and tech marketplaces emerge.

Unforeseeable: COVID-Related Trends

COVID alone triggered four subtrends:

  • The emergence of local law and ephemeral publications. Major legal vendors were no more prepared to track county level health department issuances and Governors’ executive orders than the average law firm. To make things worse these “documents” were issued in a myriad of social media formats, texts, tweets, Facebook pages … . What’s a law firm to do?
  • Librarians and KM professionals stepped into the vacuum and established protocols for locating and harnessing the untidy universe of COVID-19 ephemera.
  • Law firms became publishers of original COVID-19 resources (leveraging the local documents harnessed by librarians).
  • Legal publishers turned out an unprecedented number of free legal resources covering COVID-19 issues. I covered this trend in an earlier ATL post.

Continuing Trends: State Court Analytics And Workflow Tools

Workflow ToolsContinue Reading 5 (Unforeseeable, Predicable, And Surprising) Legal Tech Trends In 2020