Last week Thomson Reuters announced a significant new integration of HighQ with  workflow  features of  Practical Law and 3E features, and  Microsoft Teams®. According to the press release the HighQ workflow platform offers more than “50 customer-driven enhancements.”  The marketplace is demanding tools which drive collaboration and optimize workflows and productivity.

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?

Thomson Reuters is releasing a powerful suite of new tools to enhance workflow within Practical Law.  .   The new features include Dynamic Search, Knowledge Maps, Quick Compare,  Interactive Matter Maps and What’s Market Analytics. Several of the features such as Dynamic Search and Quick Compare parallel developments and tools already available in Westlaw Edge. Erica Kitaev, senior director, Product Management, Thomson Reuters provided me with an overview of the product features.

Paul Fischer, president of the Legal Professionals segment of Thomson Reuters is quoted in the press release:  “By putting AI, analytical tools and proprietary visual navigation technologies in service to our attorney authored content, we’ve created entirely new capabilities to help our customers thrive during this time of rapid change.”

Dynamic Search offers a natural language search powered by machine learning and algorithms that were trained on Practical Law content. Users can be presented with three different kinds of answers. Machine learning answers provide a direct answer and links to the applicable passage of text. Keyword results also  appear under the answer card.  If a user encounters a typeahead question the result
Continue Reading Thomson Reuters Launches Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set

Is any law firm or company immune from Brexit,  trade law or global privacy  (GDPR) issues? Thomson Reuters is responding to the growth of cross-border legal issues with the launch of the Practical Law Global which allows researchers to browse for foreign law answers by country  or topic.  Jurisdiction-specific resources are written by a prestigious roster of  local experts. Practical Law Global will be available on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2020.

Practical Law Global

Practical Law Global offers:Continue Reading Exclusive: Thomson Reuters Launches Practical Law Global Experience

Today Thomson Reuters announced the availability of new API’s   ( application program interfaces) that will allow customers to integrate content from Practical Law into their  practice and workflow portals. Litigation analytics from Westlaw Edge will also be available for integration with internal data sets

Law firms are in a race to extract and analyze their own data and turbo charge it with litigation and deal data, Thomson Reuters move is addressing a growing demand from clients to leverage commercial data for custom insights.

“Our customers are continually seeking insights that will help them raise their service for their clients and operate more effectively and efficiently,” said Tony Kinnear, president of Thomson Reuters Legal Professionals. “Co-developing side by side with innovative customers to provide our editorially curated content through APIs allows us to deliver entirely new capabilities through a more open and collaborative approach.”

Katherine Lowry, Director of Practice Services at Baker Hostetler is quoted in the press release highlighting how the analytics will be used for projects initiated by the firm’s newly launched Digital Assets and Data Management Group.

Data Wants to be Free (Of Platforms) Historically legal information vendors have sold platforms not data.  Newer competitors such as Fastcase have led the market in allowing customer to manipulate data with their Workbench and Sandbox offerings. Still it is a major market shift for a dominant player like Thomson Reuters to allow customer direct
Continue Reading Data Wants to be Free (of Platforms) Thomson Reuters Releases APIs for Litigation Analytics and Practical Law