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 Lexis Nexis is releasing a new M&A analytics tool called Market Standards which helps lawyers identify, compare and analyze publicly files transactions – to optimize the terms of M&A deals.

Market Standards enables a lawyer to analyze, 150+ deal points, in 33,000 deals spanning 10 years. New deals are analyzed and added within 48 hours. Using detailed deal points lawyers can easily find precedent language, and see deal point and transactional trends with data visualizations.

Market Standards was developed with feedback from “hundreds of interactions with M&A lawyers.” Market Standards enables attorneys to:

  • Compare deals side-by-side and access full-document views of all filings related to a deal and key acquisition agreements
  • Gain data-driven insights into market trends on the most negotiated contract provisions and drill down with detailed filters for even more specific information
  • Analyze market trends with interactive, “big picture” data visualizations that immediately update as deal point filters are added or deleted
  • Easily find precedent for your transaction, filtering down to granular levels such as earn-out metrics, escrow types, indemnification caps and baskets, and reverse termination fee triggers
  • Discover terms that counsel has agreed to across the table, or the fee amounts a financial advisor was paid in past transactions

Market Standards will be incorporated into Practical Guidance, and future expansions into other practice areas are planned. Customers subscribe to Practical Guidance for M&A  will receive access to M&A Market Standards at no additional cost. Additional Market Standard modules are planned for  Employment and Finance in 2021.

Lexis provided insights into the product development in the press release:

“Understanding current standards and trends for M&A deal points and easily accessing highly relevant language gives attorneys an edge when drafting and negotiating. Market Standards is a uniquely powerful tool for M&A attorneys,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO, LexisNexis North America. “Market Standards provides the detail and analytics that M&A attorneys and research professionals need to make the most informed decisions.”

“We believe the future of practical guidance is data-driven. We’ve started with M&A and will be expanding Market Standards to other practice areas in the coming months,” said Daniel Lewis, Vice President of Practical Guidance. “We’ll also be launching a number of new, exclusive features that advance data-driven practical guidance.”

The Market for Market Standards

Legal analytics has been a very hot market. Transactional lawyers have felt neglected as litigation analytics exploded into the market and have become a  routine part of  of litigation  strategy and pitches. Other products which preceded Market Standards to the market include Bloomberg Law’s Transactional Intelligence Center and Wolters Kluwer M&A Clause Analytics.

Market Standards is an impressive product but I am somewhat baffled. LexisNexis already owns the dominant SEC research product Intelligize, which also provide analytics of M&A deals.  Lexis has developed a  KM product Lexis Search Advantage which is built on Intelligize search algorithms and tagging. It may be concerning for Intelligize customers that the launch of Market Standards may shift investment away from Intelligize.

Earlier this week Lex Mundi, a network of independent law firms  announced that they have selected the Vable aggregation platform as a their technology partner for developing  a current awareness & news monitoring service for clients, prospective clients, and 22000+ lawyers within the Lex Mundi network.

Aggregating Law Firm Client Updates Lex Mundi will use the Vable’s aggregation, curation and delivery platform to transform member updates into a single searchable database. Vable’s natural language processing technology automatically sorts articles into relevant legal sectors to aid searching.  Available resources include legal current awareness and legal commentaries and analysis in respect of each of the jurisdictions represented. Content will be tagged with one of the twelve topics covered by Lex Mundi including Coronavirus (COVID-19), Restructuring, Diversity and Social Justice and Cross-border transactions.

Continue Reading Law Firm Network Lex Mundi Selects Vable for Content Aggregation

Anita Carr Shapiro

The Practicing Law Institute website has announced the passing of PLI President, Anita Shapiro. In 2015, Shapiro appointed as their first female President. She joined PLI   in 1999 as a program attorney, then rising from Vice President to Executive Vice President until her appointment as President in 2005. According to her Linked In profile, Shapiro spent two years as a Litigation Marketing Manager at Mayer Brown.

Many in the law librarian community may also remember Shapiro as a Westlaw Account rep in New York City from 1990 to 1999. Shapiro remained a great supporter of the law librarian community and she sought the perspective of law librarians who participated with other legal professionals on the PLI Advisory Board.

More about Shapiro from the PLI In Memoriam page:

Continue Reading PLI Mourns the Passing of  Its First Female President Anita Shapiro

I am being interviewed by one of my favorite bloggers, Bob Ambrogi of LawSites about what else? — Blogging, If you have ever wondered how bloggers get started and keep going – join us for what is sure to be a lively discussion.

Live Interview, This Week in Legal Blogging, September 24, 2020, 12 Noon (pacific), 3 PM Ieastern).The show will run on Facebook Live, Twitter and LinkedIn Live on Thursday at Noon PDT but, if you can’t catch it live, we’ll have the full video and selected answer on LexBlog.

Today Lex Machina is announcing enhancements to their  COVID-19  tracking tool. Earlier this year Lex Machina launch the COVID-19 Impact Analyzer and has continued publishing a series of blog posts which explain trends in COVID-19  litigation In federal courts.

The COVID-19 case tag
Lex Machina has created a new case tag for COVID-19 which allows researchers to analyze a subset of cases in which claims which were caused directly or indirectly by the corona virus. Since January 1 almost 4000 cases have been filed in federal district courts due to COVID-19. Case filings peaked in May at 800 and have tapered down to the 600 in August. The majority of COVID-19 cases have been filed for claims involving insurance (698 cases), contract (696 cases) and unemployment (198 cases).

COVID-19 impact analyzer updates. Users can track  Covid-19 case trends using biweekly, monthly or year to date increments. The app is available to the public and analyzes case filings, court activity in case it’s caused by COVID-19 in the federal district courts.

Compared to 2019 case filings are up in contracts insurance, patent, product liability and securities.

The business interruption case tag

Lex Machina developed a business interruption case tag to enable users to review the progress of cases Involving lost income or extra expenses due to COVID-19 related business interruption.

YTD COVID-19 Case Filings in Federal Court

Prior to the pandemic, only 300-500 business interruption cases have been filed in federal courts were filed each year. In the first half of 2020 there were almost 700 cases were filed. “These tools artists are a big step in working to quantify, track and analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the federal court system, said Rachel Bailey, Data Relations Manager of Lex Machina. “With practitioners facing unprecedented challenges, It is especially important to be able to quickly and easily research and understand activity in specific courts, what cases are working their way through the system, and how current activity compares to previous trends.“

Tracking updates in COVID-19 cases in court activity webcast

On October 1st Lex Machina will host a Webcast discussing COVID-19 litigation trends and the new tracking features. Register the Webcast here.

 

 

Today Casetext is releasing The first  Compose employment law collection:
Wage and Hour. In my original Compose product review I noted that “Compose does not promise to replace lawyers – it offers to make lawyers more efficient by automating the first draft of a motion or brief. It can also function as a tutorial for a new lawyer who is assigned with drafting a motion for the first time.” Compose launched
Casetext released their groundbreaking drafting tool in conjunction with Legal Tech in January with three  collections: Federal Discovery, Federal Motion to Dismiss, and Federal Core Civil Procedure.  Since that time they have continued to expand their library of motions. Compose enables a lawyer to select a motion type in specific jurisdictions, add arguments from a menu for the jurisdiction, select legal standards customized to the arguments and jurisdiction, add facts and authorities using the powerful Parallel Search technology and then customize the draft.  In July,  Casetext released  a report “Increasing Law Firm Profitability using Compose Brief-Drafting technology”  which documents the dramatic efficiencies delivered by the Compose drafting tool.
16 New Wage and Hour Motions  Casetext interviewed labor lawyers and examined court dockets in order to determine the  16 most commonly filed motions in labor law litigation. The motions included in the Compose Wage  and Hour collection are tailored to the substantive legal issues arising in this type of litigation. The motions are  available for the three jurisdictions where 75% of all the wage and hour litigation in the US is filed: the federal courts California and New York. Motions include:

Continue Reading Casetext Compose Expands Automated Motion Drafting With Employment Law Collection

Docket Navigator  the patent litigation intelligence platform has just added some powerful new law firm case outcome analytics. Docket Navigator which has been around since 2008, offers editorially curated data on courts and  intellectual property cases. The recently launched an interactive law firm ranking feature  allows law firms and in house counsel to take a deep dive into law firm experience and outcomes across the spectrum of patent litigation activities. According to Co-Founders Amy and  Darryl Towell, law firm rankings was the feature most demanded by Docket Navigator customers.

This  feature is not  offering simply  a static list  of law firms but an interactive dashboard which allows researchers to compare law firm experience across multiple dimensions. A researcher can  retrieve comparative views of up to 3 law Continue Reading Docket Navigator Offers Powerful Patent Analytics and Interactive Law Firm Win Rates Tool

Today LexisNexis  is officially launching Lexis+ and  announcing  the retirement of the Lexis Advance  and Lexis Practice Advisor brands. Lexis+ is the new premium platform and the legacy platform Lexis Advance will now be known as Lexis.  Lexis Practice Advisor will be known as  Practical Guidance in the United States and Canada.

“We are proud to introduce Lexis+, which delivers a more intuitive and powerful user experience for legal professionals,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO, LexisNexis North America. “In today’s challenging business climate, attorneys need to rely on technologies that make them more effective, efficient and informed practitioners. Lexis+ is a bold step in our long-term strategy to develop legal solutions that improve attorney productivity, workflows and their ability to deliver timely and strategic counsel.”

Continue Reading Today Lexis+ Launches Lexis Announces Rebrands

Fastcase  acquisition of Judicata  will bring a new era of innovation and advanced legal reasoning technologies such as, citation analysis, legal analytics and brief analysis to Fastcase 8 and Docket Alarm.

Several years ago I wrote a post  about Judicata, a small California start up which described its mission as “as mapping the legal genome.”   They used their analytics and  citation analysis tool to grade law firm briefs. How that for chutzpah?. Judicata knows how to stretch the legal research and analysis envelope.

Fastcase today announced the acquisition of Judicata technology assets “with the mission of extending Judicata’s California research and analytics tools nationwide in the Fastcase platform.”

Judicata founder, Itai Guriari  worked at Jones Day then at Google working on Google Scholar before founding Judicata in 2012 with Adam Han and Blake Masters. The team spent the last decade building out “industry-leading research analytics and workflow tools for California law.” Chief technology officer Ben Pedrick  and the Judicata team will join Fastcase to scale those solutions nationwide. Gurari  will be VP of Research and Development and lead  Fastcase labs.

I asked Fastcase CEO Ed Walters to provide some insights into the strategy behind this acquisition.  “Judicata has Continue Reading Fastcase Acquires the Judicata “Legal Genome” – Watch Out For Fastcase 8!