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In the 4 decades since its launch, Westlaw created the “gold standard” of research support with a cadre of reference attorneys who were available any time a lawyer was working – that is, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Thomson Reuters executives are apparently ready to “pass the baton” to one of their competitors. Tonight for the first time in almost four decades, attorneys who call the Westlaw Reference Attorney helpline after 8 PM CST will presumably be greeted with a recording telling them to call back tomorrow.

On December 10th, Law Library Directors and Knowledge Managers around the country received this startling announcement: “Currently, Reference Attorneys provide 24/7 research support to subscribers of Westlaw Edge, Westlaw Classic, Practical Law, CLEAR, and over 30 other Thomson Reuters products.  Beginning January 3, 2022, the Reference Attorney Service will move to a core business hours model and will be available Monday through Friday, 7am -8 pm Central for both chats and calls.”

Spectacularly Out of Step with Reality. Let’s think about this – the rest of the world has shifted away from “core business hours” and Thomson Reuters has devised a 1980’s style customer support model.  How many recent trends are screaming contrary indicators: the growth of global law firms, the demand for work-life balance and flexible schedules, pervasive mobility, not to mention a little thing called COVID-19 which has up-ended the time-space continuum of work. What do time zones even mean in a connected post-pandemic world?

On December 19th I interviewed Jonathan Meyer, Director, Reference Attorneys at Thomson Reuters. I spent more than 30 minutes on the phone with Meyer trying to understand why there was no alternative to ending 24X7 support. After all, every law firm which entered into a long term Westlaw contract entered that agreement with the expectation that users of the premium priced product would continue
Continue Reading Thomson Reuters Signals to Lawyers “You’re On Your Own” – Ends Evening and Weekend Customer Support Today

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.…

Tuesday morning law librarians around the country began fielding inquiries from lawyers complaining of slow response times and access problems on Westlaw. The disrupted services included: Westlaw, Westlaw Edge, Westlaw UK, Practical Law US and UK, Practical Law Connect, Data Privacy Advisor.

After almost 7 hours of  interrupted access and colossal slow response times, Thomson Reuters representations were reaching out to customers to report that systems had been restored to normal.

I reached out to Thomson Reuters executives for an explanation, but they provided only two  brief statements addressing the  system
Continue Reading Westlaw Services Back to Normal Following Serious Disruptions Through Most of Tuesday

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

 New feature identifies cases which are contrary to an opponent’s arguments

This week Thomson Reuters released another feature to Quick Check. How much easier can cite checking get? Quick Check Contrary Authority helps lawyers zero in on vulnerabilities of an opponents brief. Quick Check Contrary Authority identifies uncited cases that oppose the arguments in an opponent’s brief.

Quick Check Thomson Reuters brief checking tool was released as part of Westlaw
Continue Reading In The Brief Checking Wars Thomson Reuters Ups the Ante with New “Contrary Authority” Feature

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

The results of the Dewey B Strategic 2020-2021  Hits and Misses Survey are in. Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate in the survey.

The demographics. The survey was conducted  from February 16th through March 1st 2021. There were 101 respondents. The respondents described their professional positions as follows: 81% librarians/knowledge managers), 11% law firm management, 5% IT professionals, 3% practicing attorneys, 1% data scientists.

As usual I have asked readers to identify the best new products in several categories including news, analytics, workflow. Readers also provided the names of products they plan to cancel or acquire. I could not ignore the defining issue of 2020 – so I asked a series of questions about the performance of legal publishers in response to COVID.

What was the most significant development in legal technology/publishing?

I love and respect my readers but I don’t always agree with them. I have to admit I was truly shocked that readers selected the  shuttering of Ross Intelligence the most significant development of 2020. Here’s why— frankly I only know a handful of firms that had purchased
Continue Reading The Results Are In: Dewey B Strategic What’s Hot and What’s Not Part 1: Westlaw Edge vs Lexis+ vs. Law Firm Budgets