Bloomberg Law
JUST ASK: The Rules of Research for New Associates
As fall associates settle into the reality of legal practice, I am taking the opportunity to share a variety of research “best practices.” These rules can be applied across all environments: law firm, corporate, public service and government. New associates are facing the messy reality of needing to harness legal and factual issues that need…
Westlaw Precision Launches With Promise to Cut Lawyer Research Time in Half
Today Thomson Reuters is announcing the release of a new platform Westlaw Precision which promises to dramatically cut research time and improve the quality of research results. Westlaw Precision will be sold as an upgrade to Westlaw Edge. Westlaw Precision is tackling the gnarly and perennial problem of language ambiguity by doubling down on taxonomy. At launch, Westlaw Precision covers 8 topics (Commercial law, Federal Civil Procedure, Federal Discovery and Evidence, Federal Remedies, Federal Class Actions, Employment, Securities, and Anti-trust.) Fifteen new topics will be released through 2023. Only the most recent 12 years of caselaw in each topic are included in search results.
Westlaw Precision includes 6 new features at launch. Precision Research is the “Star of the show.” The other 5 features offer cite checking or workflow enhancements.
“Our customers tell us difficult legal research can often take more than 10 hours per case,” said Mike Dahn, head of Product Management, Westlaw, Thomson Reuters. “It’s time consuming because they are often looking for something very precise, but traditional …
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How To Evaluate and Get Started with Data APIs
For the past few decades, the traditional law library has been transformed by the digitization of statutes, regulations, and commentary. Law Librarians and KM professionals have become the curators of an ever-expanding universe of commercial, dynamic data sources including company profiles, competitor profiles, experience data, insights into judges, experts, and arbitrators, deal data, dockets, and…
The Dewey B Strategic 2020-21 Hits and Misses Survey – The Product Most Likely to be Cancelled is — Lex Machina

The Dewey B Strategic 2020-21 Hits and Misses Survey: What Research, KM/Workflow and Analytics Products are Readers Buying?
The 2020-2021 Dewey B Strategic Hits and Misses survey asked responders to identify products purchased in 2020 or to be purchased in 2021. Despite the financial concerns triggered by the pandemic, law firm librarians continued to consider new products. Some new products such as Westlaw Edge and Lexis + are often driven by an impeding contract renewal. Other product selections are driven by practice demands as well as a desire to remain competitive by introducing innovative solutions and enhance productivity.
The Top Products Four was the magic number this year. Each of the top vote getters were identified by 4 responders as new purchases. …
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What’s Hot and What’s Not? Welcome to the Dewey B Strategic 2020-2021 Hits and Misses Survey
Respond to the 2020-21 What’s Hot and What’s Not Survey here. Although the world was shut down by the pandemic, our friends in legal tech continued their pursuit of innovation and market share. Most of us had a sense of whiplash and disbelief when the world came to a virtual halt in March 2020. Law librarians who had built digital libraries over the years offered their attorneys a fairly seamless transition to their work from home desktop. Within weeks most legal publishers had developed a special COVID offering. These ranged from free alerts, to primary sources and workflow toolkits. Despite all of these efforts law librarians and knowledge managers faced a gap in COVID coverage. Almost overnight a “gray literature” emerged which major legal publishers were not …
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Lexis Adds Lex Machina and CourtLink Analytics to the Lexis+ Ecosystem

Lexis+ Litigation Analytics offers the following types of insights:
- Judge and court analytics: Contextualize understanding of federal district and state courts and judges.
- Courts & Judges Comparator Quick Tool: Compare judge behavior and courtroom trends over time in federal district court.
- Attorney and law firm analytics: Assess the experience of attorneys and law firms in federal district and state courts.
- Counsel Comparator Quick Tool: Compare law firm and attorney performance based on actual results in federal district court.
Bifurcated Data: Enhanced Analytics and “everything else”
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Breaking News: ALM Ends Exclusive Relationship with LexisNexis While Extending LexisNexis Alliance
Today American Lawyer Media and LexisNexis announced the extension of their strategic alliance with a new content agreement. According to the press release, the agreement “lays the groundwork for expanding the integration of ALM content within LexisNexis legal research solutions.”
LexisNexis and ALM, have an an exclusive agreement since 2011, which made ALM’s iconic content including The American Lawyer, Corporate Counsel, The National Law Journal, Legaltech News, New York Law Journal and other specialty publications available through the Lexis+ and Lexis® legal research solutions and Nexis® Newsdesk. This extension ensures that current news from ALM will continue to be available to LexisNexis customers.
Breaking News: I also received an exclusive statement from Richard Caruso, General Manager, Global Legal News, ALM, stating that “Lexis no longer has an exclusive to our content archive, allowing us to open up licensing opportunities with other Legal research providers; we are planning on announcing a new agreement very soon.”
What this means for Lexis and ALM subscribers:
- Subscribers can now have a license with ALM that is not tied to their LexisNexis contract.
- ALM will be handling their own sales and not relying on LexisNexis sale reps to manage their customer relationships.
- ALM will soon be announcing that ALM content will be available though a second Legal research platform.
Market Impact This will offer some relief ALM 100 law firms who are are rebelling against LexisNexis’ increasingly aggressive tying …
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ALM Announces the Launch of Law.com Radar and Launches Breaking Deal Feeds
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…