I have been working on a post about the various ways legal publishers have been responding to the current pandemic, but this news was too good to hold back for a longer piece. It is not often that legal publishers forego the opportunity for revenue. Many legal publishers have begun publishing kits and resources for their subscribers which sit behind a paywall.  Kudos for Lexis Nexis for being the first publisher (that I know of) to make subscription resources available to the entire legal community for free. Content includes news from Law360 as well as a toolkit covering corporate, commercial,privacy/security, capital markets and life science issues.  According to the press release, they are providing these resources “to help legal professionals, lawmakers and business leaders become better informed and successfully navigate the legal issues and intricacies surrounding the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19).

Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of North American  Research Solutions is quoted in the press release: ““In this moment of fluid change and uncertainty, we couldn’t think of a better way to help our customers and the community than by offering full access to breaking news and analysis on COVID-19 from our award-winning Law360 newsroom and the Lexis Practice Advisor Coronavirus Resource Kit that helps lawyers practice and provide better counsel to their clients,”

Here is the full press release.

LexisNexis Offers Free, Comprehensive COVID-19 News Coverage and Practical Guidance Content from Law360 and Lexis Practice Advisor

 

  • Law360 covers COVID-19’s impact on the government, business and the legal profession;
  • Lexis Practice Advisor toolkit provides guidance and insights across multiple practice areas to support decision-making and counsel on COVID-19 matters

 

NEW YORK – March 16, 2020 – LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, a leading global provider of information and analytics, today announced two free resources from Law360® and Lexis Practice Advisor® to help legal professionals, lawmakers and business leaders become better informed and successfully navigate the legal issues and intricacies surrounding the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19).

“In this moment of fluid change and uncertainty, we couldn’t think of a better way to help our customers and the community than by offering full access to breaking news and analysis on COVID-19 from our award-winning Law360 newsroom and the Lexis Practice Advisor Coronavirus Resource Kit that helps lawyers practice and provide better counsel to their clients,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO, North American Research Solutions at LexisNexis.

Law360 has launched a dedicated COVID-19 page containing breaking news, in-depth features and expert analysis and commentary on all things relating to COVID-19 and the law. Its comprehensive coverage and content illuminates how the global pandemic has impacted the legal industry and the practice of law, as well as the U.S. court system, federal agencies, industries, businesses and more. The free content is available at www.law360.com/coronavirus or delivered via electronic newsletter.

“The sheer volume of COVID-19 news and information makes it difficult for legal professionals, business leaders and government officials to comprehend its broader impact. That’s why Law360 is investing significant resources to ensure our readers are well-informed and better able to make decisions pertaining to COVID-19,” said Anne Urda, Editor in Chief, Law360. “In situations such as this, LexisNexis believes it is our top responsibility to inform the legal community and ensure everyone has access to as much information as possible, which is why we’ve made this content available to the public at no cost.”

The Law360 COVID-19 pages currently feature more than 180 stories across topics such as:

  • Courts: Rulings, impacted cases, an interactive map of U.S. court closings and more
  • Legal Industry: Impact on law firms and their clients, insights from legal practitioners and experts
  • Practices: Employment, insurance, securities, M&A, contracts, and more
  • Industries: Banking/finance, travel, hospitality, entertainment, pharmaceutical and more
  • Government: New legislation, travel and trade restrictions, loans/tax relief, and more
  • Global: Impact across major European (and Asian) markets and industries

To help U.S. attorneys manage the evolving COVID-19 crisis, Lexis Practice Advisor has developed a Coronavirus Resource Kit covering a wide range of topics across multiple practice areas. The Resource Kit addresses emerging issues and offers guidance relating to COVID-19 and the law. The Resource Kit’s content includes impact analysis on commercial deals and compliance, forms and guides for transactional and labor/employment contracts, regulatory tracking, and more. Among the areas covered by the Resource Kit include:

  • Capital Markets & Corporate Governance
  • Commercial Transactions
  • Corporate and M&A
  • Data Security & Privacy
  • Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation
  • Life Sciences

LexisNexis will continuously update its COVID-19 news coverage and Coronavirus Resource Kit, making them freely available to legal practitioners for the duration of the epidemic in order to help maintain the rule of law and return to normalcy as quickly as possible.

About LexisNexis Legal & Professional

LexisNexis Legal & Professional is a leading global provider of legal, regulatory and business information and analytics that help customers increase productivity, improve decision-making and outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis® and Nexis® services. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 10,600 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.

 

About Law360
Law360, a LexisNexis company, is a one-stop source for legal news and in-depth analysis, with up-to-the-minute coverage of litigation, regulation and enforcement, legislation, executive orders, administrative hearings, corporate deal-making, and more across dozens of practice areas, industries, and jurisdictions. With a unique blend of cutting-edge technology and journalistic expertise, Law360 delivers the intelligence legal and business professionals need to remain experts and get ahead of the curve. Visit www.law360.com to find out what more than 1 million readers at top law firms, Fortune 1000 companies, and key government agencies already know.  

I have been working on a post about the various ways legal publishers have been responding to the current pandemic, but this news was too good to hold back for a longer piece. It is not often that legal publishers forego the opportunity for revenue. Many legal publishers have begun publishing kits and resources for their subscribers which sit behind a paywall.  Kudos for Lexis Nexis for being the first publisher (that I know of) to make subscription resources available to the entire legal community for free. Content includes news from Law360 as well as a toolkit covering corporate, commercial,privacy/security, capital markets and life science issues.  According to the press release, they are providing these resources “to help legal professionals, lawmakers and business leaders become better informed and successfully navigate the legal issues and intricacies surrounding the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Continue Reading LexisNexis Offers Free COVID-19 News and Practical Guidance From Law360 and Practice Advisor

This morning the American Association of Law Libraries issued a press release stating that they are monitoring the Coronavirus (COVID-19) situation closely. The press release stated that the safety of members and program attendees is the “top priority.” At this point they have no plans to cancel or postpone upcoming events in Chicago  (Leadership Academy, Competitive Intelligence Strategies, etc.)

Registration for the 2020 Annual Meeting and Conference, July 11-14  in New Orleans is open. There are no reported cases of the virus in the Continue Reading American Association of Law Libraries Monitoring Coronavirus– Still Planning to Hold Upcoming Events and AALL Conference

Please take the 2019-2020 Dewey B Strategic Survey here. Review the 2019 highlights below and tell your colleagues about the best and the worst of 2019 in legal publishing and legal tech.The survey will close on Sunday March 1st.

The Highlights 2019 was a relatively quiet launch year in legal technology and publishing.  The year opened with speculation about the impact of layoffs at Thomson Reuters. Mid-year Wolters Kluwer suffered a significant malware  attack  on May 7 but was fully back online within a week.

LexisNexis announced the full integration of one of it’s oldest acquisitions. Courtlink which was acquired in 2001 was finally integrated into their flagship product  Lexis Advance.  The market responded with mixed reviews.

Bloomberg re-branded itself as Bloomberg Information Group (BIG.) Sadly this signified the retirement of BNA ( Bureau of National Affairs) as a brand. Bloomberg had acquired BNA in 2011 add a significant library of secondary sources including newsletters and books. The full integration of BNA into the Bloomberg platform allowed the company to revert to the simplified pricing model they had pioneered during their launch into the online legal information market.

Fastcase continued an aggressive spree of acquisitions and alliances covering public records (TransUnion), bankruptcy forms, Expert witness information (Juris and Courtroom Insight)  and  legal news (Law Street Media) clearly positioning product to move into the large firm market.

The Year of the Brief Analyser. Casetext CARA which launched the first brief analysis tool in 2016  now has a competitor in the Westlaw Edge “Quick Cite tool.”  At the 2019 American Association of Law Libraries AALL Annual Conference both Bloomberg and LexisNexis previewed their brief citiator tools which are expected to launch in 2020.

Please respond to the survey here.

Casetext is launching an AI driven drafting tool called Compose. 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. Casetext is currently working with a group of law firm “partners” who will help them develop an expanded library of motions. According to Pablo Arredondo, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Continue Reading Casetext’s Compose AI Powered Drafting of Briefs and Motions – Lawyers Still Required

Reposting Press Release: Selected ABA content to be available on vLex platform will provides AI enabled legal research platform with content with material from over 100 countries. Wonder if this could lead to  vLex content being available to ABA members in the future?

A new partnership between vLex and the American Bar Association (ABA) brings hundreds of valuable and authoritative legal books and journals to millions of legal practitioners, law firms and educational institutions around the world.

As one of the largest legal publishers in the world, the American Bar Association publishes a wide selection of books and journals across multiple subject areas. Now, a broad selection of these titles will be available on vLex’s unique legal research and intelligence platform alongside global legal content from over 100 countries.

This partnership brings a wealth of benefits to international practitioners, comparative researchers and law librarians alike. With advanced legal technology features such as AI-driven search as a gateway to essential primary and secondary legal materials all in one location, vLex, enhanced by ABA content, delivers unparalleled value for vLex users worldwide. The new books and journals available on vLex will cover areas of the law such as business, litigation, intellectual property, international, tax, cybersecurity and arbitration.

Beyond the benefits to vLex customers, this partnership provides ABA authors with an expanded global audience and new platform on which to feature their legal content. vLex’s CEO Lluis Faus shares his enthusiasm for the new partnership:

“This is a key partnership for vLex globally. The ABA is the largest American legal publisher in terms of secondary source content, and through this collaboration we will be able to integrate world-leading thought leadership content on subject areas including intellectual property, international law and many others for our users.” Continue Reading ABA and International Research Platform VLex Announce Global Partnership

On February  25th they are launching an exciting new legal news service  Legal  Radar which I believe  his targeted to deflate the aggressive growth and pricing of its main competitor Law360.

American Lawyer Media’s flagship publication, American Lawyer has been credited with inventing the legal news market in the 1980s.  ALM  has been exploring ways to reinvent  how lawyers consume legal news for several  years.  The relaunch of Law.com brought content from all 19 ALM legal publications together in a unified platform. The old legal intelligence platform was relaunched as Legal Compass. On Tuesday they will launch an AI enabled streaming news service for lawyers.

Legal Radar delivers a clean customizable stream of breaking legal news and competitive insights. Lawyers can track companies, industries, law firms as well as litigation. Legal Radar offers breaking litigation news within minutes of a filing.  When cases are reported documents such as complaints and opinions are attached to the story. I found  Legal Radar to be  visually “addicting” like an endless Facebook stream. It was hard to stop scrolling!  Like its competitor Continue Reading ALM Launching Legal Radar — Law360 Prepare For Incoming!

Lexis and Westlaw laid the foundations for today’s online research market in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Their dominance in the legal research arena was challenged on two fronts in the 2010’s. First they were challenged by the emergence of two full service competitors: Bloomberg Law and Fastcase. More surprising was the disruptive impact of the disgruntled, entrepreneur lawyers with a good idea and some venture capital who invented some completely new ways of approaching research and delivering insights..

Spinning Analytics Gold From Dockets. Lexis and WESTLAW were in the docket business for decades but it Lex Machina (now owned by Lexis Nexis) which invented a way for lawyers to use analytics for pitches and litigation strategy.

Lex Machina took the most mundane of legal data sets– docket entries and spun it into a goldmine of legal insights. Lex Machina started as a public interest project at Stamford Law school in 2006. The product leverages machine learning and natural language processing, to normalize, structure, and analyze raw data from millions of case dockets Continue Reading Analytics, AI and Insights: 5 Innovations that Redefined Legal Research

I have been predicting that predictive tools would gain an increasing presence  in the practice of law. The press release from Thomson Reuters about Legislative Insights on Westlaw Edge  carefully skirts the prediction issue by substituting the word “probabilities.” Thomson Reuters deep legislative coverage is about to be turbo charged with technology from Skopos Labs. Thomson Reuters was an early investor in Skopos through their venture capital arm Thomson Reuters Ventures.

Legislative Insight is driven by a proprietary machine learning and natural language processing methodology from Continue Reading Thomson Reuters Launches Westlaw Edge Legislative Insights With Probabilities of Enactment

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