Today Thomson Reuters is announcing two new solutions Thomson Reuters Marketplace and Thomson Reuters Legal Home which are designed to enable lawyers to locate and utilize Thomson Reuters products.

Thomson Reuters Marketplace, (beta version), is an online marketplace where lawyers, technologists and knowledge professional can research, trial and purchase a wide range of Thomson Reuters solutions.

Thomson Reuters Legal Home  Is a more sophisticated offering which is customized to the individual users. The goal is to serve as an “integrated digital launchpad” where subscribers can access their Thomson Reuters products as well as information about external products which can be interated with or linked to Thomson Reuters products. Thomson Reuters will continue to expand Marketplace offering for legal, tax and accounting professionals as well as adding solutions for government and regulatory customers.

There is no question that legal technologists, librarians and knowledge managers invest lots of energy in promoting the Continue Reading Thomson Reuters Introduces Marketplace, Launches Legal Home – Panoramic Migrating to HighQ

Did anyone imagine that eight months into the pandemic we would still be needing new ways to capture, monitor analyze the ever morphing legal issues around COVID? Today Fastcase is launching COVID-19 Case Alerts, an editorially curated email alert service to keep subscribers aware of new civil opinions, selected pleadings, breaking news, and analyses of legal issues related to the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is a dangerous and fast-changing pandemic, and it’s more important than ever for firms to be ahead of the curve when advising clients. There is no excuse for missing key developments, especially now,” said Ed Walters, Fastcase CEO. “Our team will be curating these COVID-19 Case Alerts and providing them for free to attorneys using Fastcase through their bar association.”

Each business day, excluding holidays, Fastcase will deliver a snapshot of the day’s legal developments on COVID-19. This includes decided cases from Fastcase, new complaints and pleadings from Docket Alarm, new blog posts from the LexBlog network, and legal news from Law Street Media, consolidated into a single, daily alert.

Here are some examples of the COVID-19 Alert Coverage: Continue Reading Fastcase Launches COVID-19 Case Alerts

This week American Lawyer Media (ALM)  the publisher of the American Lawyer and Law.com announced the rebranding and expansion of their innovative legal news service Legal Radar. Legal Radar is now Law.com Radar.

Law.com Radar was originally  launched  in February as Legal Radar with a breaking litigation news monitoring service. This week  the service was expanded to include corporate deal feeds and news which meets the needs of transactional lawyers.  The press release  describes  this breaking news product as allowing lawyers to be the “first to know” and therefore “the first to act” on business development opportunities.

Law.com Radar leverages ALM’s technology-driven legal news platform and offers a unique mobile experience. Adding Radar to the Law.com brand “deepens its connection to ALM’s award winning newsroom.” ALM editors refer to the  breaking stories as “blips” which look like “news cards” they often include a link to related documents.

Law.com Radar is shaping up to be a highly targeted tool designed to meet the business development needs of partners. Lawyers need to understand business trends. This involves  tracking not only their  clients but also industries and sectors. Law.com Radar news blips can be shared with clients and colleagues.

Law.com Radar News Blip

With the launch of Law.com Radar, subscribers can now access exclusive updates on corporate transactions as part of a personalized Radar news feed covering  33 industries, 20 practice areas, US and international regions and thousands of companies and law firms. Special topics for competitive intelligence include “Who’s getting the work,” and tracking competitor firms by ALM ranking or name.

 

Law.com Radar Newsfeed

From the Press Release “Radar builds on ALM and Law.com’s long tradition as the premier resource for legal professionals seeking deep insights and the necessary intelligence to compete in today’s legal market,” said Richard Caruso, Vice President and General Manager, Global Legal News. “With Radar’s customizable news feed and alerts, subscribers are first to know what is driving litigation and deals in the sectors where their clients operate and compete.” Law.com Radar’s corporate deal content includes the latest mergers and acquisitions, venture financings, private equity deals, securities offerings, real estate transactions and more. Designed to help lawyers follow the deals that are most relevant to their practices and clients, each Radar blip delivers key facts, highlights the legal advisers, and links to related resources. “Our mission with Law.com Radar is to get actionable information to legal practitioners as fast as possible, so they can take the next step—whether it’s making a call to a client or flagging an emerging risk area,” notes Vanessa Blum, Executive Editor of Law.com Radar.

No Additional Charge Law.com subscribers  get access to Law.com Radar’s premium content and features at no additional charge. A free version of Law.com Radar, with limited features, is also available.

The Legal News Market Heats Up  Last week I covered the launch of Thomson Reuters  legal news service Westlaw Today.  Fastcase is building out their Law Street Media platform with a unique combination of legal news and analytics. Bloomberg Law has redesigned and relaunched their news offerings. These developments and the launch of Law.com Radar signal a a potential seismic shift in the legal news market which has been dominated by LexisNexis Law 360 for the past decade. I documented the spectacular rise of Law360 in a 2013 post. What a difference a year and a pandemic can make!  2021 will be a year of constrained budgets due to the ongoing uncertainties arising from COVID-19. Law firms looking to escape Law360’s double digit price increases (as well as LexisNexis practice of tying of Law360 to Lexis Advance contracts) may realize that they have a new savings opportunity thanks to the new wave of innovation in legal news delivery.

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

Today Intelligize,  a LexisNexis company, is announcing the launch of Company Insights – a new feature which provides seamless access to detailed financial data provided by premium financial data provider Factset. Until now, Intelligize focused on text based searching and with Company Insights they are pivoting to include quantitative financial research analytics.

According to the press release: ”Company Insights indexes and synthesizes a wide range of corporate information, including regulatory disclosures, earnings-call transcripts, stock-price and ownership data, corporate governance documents, analyst/investor presentations, and releases, in addition to thousands of LexisNexis® news sources.”

The  Company Insights data is presented as a navigable dashboard of analytics which can be used for competitive intelligence or M&A deal due diligence in law firms.

Phil Brown, Managing Director summed up the benefit to law firms: “Intelligize’s Company Insights revolutionizes the Continue Reading Intelligize Launches “Company Insights” Analytics from Factset

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory is releasing a new Practical Content Dashboard within their flagship Cheetah and Cheetah for Corporate Counsel platforms. The Cheetah platform includes over 20,000 practical content tools and documents  spread across twenty seven practice areas. The practice content will now be easier to locate with addition of the dashboard. Ken Crutchfield the vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer Law & Business US is quoted in the press release: “The new features will give our customers fast access to all of the applicable tools needed for their day-to-day work saving valuable Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer  Releases Practical Content Dashboard

Today Lex Machina is launching an analytics module for one of one of the most important commercial litigation jurisdictions in the United States, the New York County Supreme Court. The new module will include 119,000 civil court cases filed after January 1, 2016. Subscribers will have access to over 600,00 full text pleadings and orders which have been downloaded into the module. Coverage includes both class action cases and “pre-RJI cases”  (cases that have not yet filed a request for judicial intervention). The  analytics data was extracted from both dockets and court filings.  New York County Supreme Court  data includes civil litigation involving torts, tax and commercial matters. New York is the 10th state court added to the Lex Machina suite of state coverage. Lex Machina  will release modules for the other four counties within the boundaries of New York City in the coming months.

Continue Reading Lex Machina Launches New York State Analytics Module –Webinar Today

Today Casetext is announcing the availability of a Microsoft Word plug-in for the Compose brief drafting technology. It makes sense to put a valuable drafting tool right in place where lawyers spend their time drafting. Compose enables  attorneys to locate and add arguments, legal standards, and precedent without ever leaving Word.

According to the press release, the Word version of Compose includes all the motions and features available in the original Compose application: a menu of click-to-add arguments, legal standards customized to the attorney’s side and jurisdiction, and Parallel Search, a powerful form of concept-based legal search which uses a sentence to find matching case law, even if it includes none of the same language.

The Promise of Dramatic Efficiencies .“Compose already increases efficiency in brief-drafting by 4x,[1] in part because it cuts out the need for attorneys to bounce between templates, treatises, case law databases, and a DMS in order to Continue Reading Casetext Offers Dramatic Drafting Efficiencies With New Compose Word Plug-in

Last  week  Gavelytics announced the the expansion (I would call it a makeover) of their state litigation analytics platform. Not only is the look and feel completely refreshed, but they have added new content and enhanced search and filtering features. Gavelytics 2.0 expands state court litigation analytics and data on judges, law firms, lawyers, and litigants as well as a massive searchable database of litigation documents and briefs.  Currently covering 10 U.S. states, Gavelytics coverage will expand to 20 states by December 2020.

The graphics have been enhanced for lawyers, judges, law firms and litigants. One of the best new features is the expandable list of law firm names to enable researchers to include variant law firm  names in order to capture all the relevant analytics.

Gavelytics has played an important role in the competitive market to build out state court analytics coverage.Law firms have embraced analytics to demonstrate the firms litigation experience for pitches and for developing litigation strategies.

The press release describes how  Gavelytics “analyzes tens of millions of litigation documents and applies machine learning to provide actionable insights on the behaviors and tendencies of judges, lawyers, law firms and litigants.  It Continue Reading Gavelytics 2.0: New States, New Look, Deeper Analytics and Full Text Documents

Preview the 2020 Benchmarking + Legal Information Services (BLISS) Survey results, learn how leading law firm libraries are using data to plan for 2021 and receive a special pandemic report.

The program will be facilitated  by HBR Director Colleen Cable. I will be joined by two large law colleagues for a lively discussion of how our teams are adapting to the changes of 2020 and how we will leverage the survey results to plan for 2021.

Panelists:
  • Jean O’Grady, Director of Research & Knowledge Services, DLA Piper US, LLP
  • Margaret Bartlett, Library Manager, Locke Lord LLP
  • John DiGilio, Firmwide Director of Library Services, Sidley Austin LLP

Oct 20, 2020 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

The Report Webinar participants will receive a special report on the impact of the pandemic on law firm libraries.

Register here.