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This week Thomson Reuters Institute and Georgetown Law Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession released their 2021 Report on the State of the Legal Market. It is always an interesting read but this year offered  a petri dish for the transformation of law firms in real time.  2020 was a perfect storm of pandemic, financial uncertainty, social change and political stress.
The Report adopts the theme of Malcolm Gladwell‘s meme-able book The Tipping Point. Contrary to the popular assumption that social change happens slowly and steadily over a period of time Gladwell argues with a metaphor that is equally appropriate for our present circumstances that in many cases change happens more like an epidemic. As he puts it ideas and products and messages and behavior spread like viruses do. Although forces of change may build slowly often a a singular set of circumstances triggers a profound change. The 2020 Report examines whether law firms have reached such a tipping point.
Growth in Profits Per Equity Partner
Some of the data  points highlighted  in the report :

Continue Reading 2021 State of the Legal Market Report – A Tipping Point For Law Firm Transformation?

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…

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

Last July Thomson Reuters quietly began the  transformation of  their Practitioners Insights publication into a full fledged legal news service called Westlaw Today.  I  met with  Zena Applebaum, director, Proposition Strategy Rebecca Ditsch – manager, Product Development and received a demo of Westlaw Today .Westlaw is owned by Thomson Reuters which also owns Reuters, the multi-media news agency. It is a total “no brainer” that Reuters should collaborate with Westlaw in bringing a legal news product to the market. (In fact, Westlaw did briefly launch a  short lived legal news service “Westlaw News” back in the 1980’s before it was purchased by Thomson Reuters). I think I share the sentiments of my  information professional colleagues when I say “what took so long?” Our next question will be can Westlaw Today challenge the LexisNexis dominance of the legal news market?

The Westlaw Today  platform will allow lawyers to subscribe to  custom newsfeeds tracking law firms, companies and issues. In addition to traditional practice area coverage Westlaw Today has a newsfeed for “Legal industry” and “Legal innovation” two of my favorite topics. They also offer coverage  special topics such as COVID and Voter Rights. Westlaw Today offers news in a variety of slices.

The Westlaw Today main page has the  look and feel of a newspaper website highlighting  a few major stories rather than imitating  the list of recent headlines and blurbs that Law360 made famous. The main page includes a sidebar with most viewed articles, trending law firms and companies, lawyer contributed content and a link where lawyers can submit proposals for articles they would like to write.

Westlaw Today Main Page

 Westlaw Today Practice Area pages offer a curated list of news stories by traditional practice areas. It also offers 
Continue Reading Westlaw Today – Thomson Reuters Launches a Legal News Platform –Offers AALL Program

Last month, Feit Consulting released a new report on the state of the market for major legal vendors Thomson Reuters. LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law, and Wolters Kluwer. Over the past 30 years, what was once known as the Computer Assisted Legal Research (CALR) market has been dramatically transformed by the integration of workflow, drafting, brief analysis, and analytics tools into knowledge-enabled insight platforms.

My interview with Michael Feit, founder of Feit Consulting, reveals how major legal information vendors have failed to adjust their pricing models to reflect the collapse of cost recovery following the Great Recession of 2008, when law firms faced a buyers’ market and CALR costs became almost 100% overhead.

According to Feit, the response of the two dominant players, Lexis and Westlaw, was to protect their revenue by eliminating “all usage-based pricing and published retail rates. From that point on, pricing from Lexis and Westlaw went rogue.”

As law librarians and knowledge managers prepare their firms’ post-pandemic budgets, Feit has shared insights and
Continue Reading Managing The Post-COVID Knowledge Resources Budget In An Era Of ‘Rogue’ Pricing: Insights From Michael Feit of Feit Consulting

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:

Continue Reading Read It and Weep: Feit Report – Which Major Legal Research Vendor is Plummeting in the Market?

Thomson Reuters has released new version of HighQ, its cloud-based productivity solution, with significant new features and integrations.  The new version, HighQ 5.4, offers powerful document automation with a new native Contract Express integration, AI-driven contract analysis, new mobile applications, Legal Tracker integration, and much more. When I saw a demo of HighQ last year – my first question was “when are you integrating it with Contract Express.”  The two products were meant to be merged and today they are. 

The HighQ 5.4 Dashboard

Thomson Reuters acquired HighQ, in July 2019.  Irish McIntyre, head of Legal Software and Workflow for Thomson Reuters is quoted in the press release: “Now, just a little over a year later, two market-leading Thomson Reuters software products are integrated with HighQ and we are introducing the most significant HighQ release to date. There are more than 100 new features or enhancements in the latest version to solve our customers’ biggest challenges and to help them work better virtually.”  The seamless Integration of Contract Express HighQ 5.4 brings the best of Contract Express and HighQ into a single solution. Contract Express now powers HighQ’s Document Automation. Contract Express templates can now be associated with HighQ sites and accessed to generate documents. These documents and associated data are stored natively in HighQ, enabling the user to integrate and establish workflows, collaborate, co-author, and utilize new data-visualization capabilities.  
Continue Reading Thomson Reuters Launches HighQ 5.4: AI Contract Analysis, Visualization and Integration with Contract Express and Legal Tracker 

Thomson Reuters has added a collection of municipal ordinances  and order for the 100 largest U.S. cities. Early in the COVID-19 crisis Thomson Reuters published  a Global Coronavirus Toolkit on the Practical Law platform. A bigger legal publishing challenge  was about to emerge.  Ever since California Governor Gavin Newsom issued the nation’s first state “stay at home” order on March 19, 2020 there has been a steady cascade of orders, ordinances and policies issued from every kind of governmental unit (cities, counties, villages) and administrative units ( health, transportation, public utilities, fair housing…)

Across the US. law librarians and knowledge managers were developing a “skunk-works” approach to gathering what was normally viewed as the “ephemera” of legal documents: governors proclamations and agency polices. Most states lacked a systematic publication plan and most failed to publish all the  COVID materials on one central website. Sometimes these  life altering  issues emerging  as tweets, texts,  on  Facebook or other social media sites. Finding
Continue Reading A Major Legal Publisher Adds Local COVID-19 Ordinances and Orders