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The results of the Dewey B Strategic 2020-2021  Hits and Misses Survey are in. Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate in the survey.

The demographics. The survey was conducted  from February 16th through March 1st 2021. There were 101 respondents. The respondents described their professional positions as follows: 81% librarians/knowledge managers), 11% law firm management, 5% IT professionals, 3% practicing attorneys, 1% data scientists.

As usual I have asked readers to identify the best new products in several categories including news, analytics, workflow. Readers also provided the names of products they plan to cancel or acquire. I could not ignore the defining issue of 2020 – so I asked a series of questions about the performance of legal publishers in response to COVID.

What was the most significant development in legal technology/publishing?

I love and respect my readers but I don’t always agree with them. I have to admit I was truly shocked that readers selected the  shuttering of Ross Intelligence the most significant development of 2020. Here’s why— frankly I only know a handful of firms that had purchased
Continue Reading The Results Are In: Dewey B Strategic What’s Hot and What’s Not Part 1: Westlaw Edge vs Lexis+ vs. Law Firm Budgets

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
Continue Reading What’s Hot and What’s Not? Welcome to the Dewey B Strategic 2020-2021 Hits and Misses Survey

Today LexisNexis is announcing the launch of Lexis+ Litigation Analytics. Litigation Analytics does two things. It integrates analytics into the research and practical guidance  workflow.  Lexis+  now offers “enhanced analytics” from Lex Machina as well as state level analytics derived from CourtLink for the states that Lex Machina does not currently cover.
Karl Harris, C.E.O. of Lex Machina a offered me a demonstration of Lexis + Litigation Analytics.. Harris placed analytics within the context of the new workflow which was introduced with Lexis+.  Lexis+ includes a persistent navigation bar which today adds litigation analytics to the 3 original  pillars of,  Lexis + : workflow: research, practical guidance and brief analysis. The Lexis + home page  is designed around an inviting query “What would you like to research today”  hovering over a large search box.  Analytics are still fairly new to the average  lawyer’s toolkit and I think it is wise to remind lawyers about analytics throughout Lexis+ workflow experience..
Harris explained that the core goals of the Lexis+ enhancement was based on customer feedback which highlighted the importance of   accuracy confidence and efficiency in analytics products. In addition they wanted to  deliver an integrated product experience in what Lexis refers to as 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”

Continue Reading Lexis Adds Lex Machina and CourtLink Analytics to the Lexis+ Ecosystem

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
Continue Reading Breaking News: ALM Ends Exclusive Relationship with LexisNexis While Extending LexisNexis Alliance

We all knew that law libraries were shrinking. No one suspected that they would be totally “done in” by a virus. Law libraries have been “going digital” for at least 20 years, but few firms tossed out their last “pocket part” update. But as firms plan their post-pandemic re-openings, retaining a collection of shared books is frankly a biohazard. Should librarians develop systems for sanitizing and quarantining books? In today’s digital world -– is it even worth the trouble? 

Does anyone really want to take on the backlog of updating books that are nine months out of date next January when lawyers begin returning to offices?

For the past two decades, many law librarians have been assessing products and developing in-house solutions to support virtual library resources.  

There is no universal solution. The law firms which have the foresight to invest in strategic information professionals are most likely  to have had substantial digital libraries in place last March when COVID-19 brought the world to a screeching halt. Many firms are running parallel digital and print libraries because they are supporting both the last of the “baby boomer partners” and the “born digital” generation of lawyers. COVID-19 has been an unprecedented tipping point which exposes the importance of completing or starting a digital library transition plan.  

  12 Building Blocks Of A Digital Library  

Continue Reading 12 Tips For Building Your Digital Law Library In The Age Of COVID-19

It will come as no surprise that the roster of legal publishing and tech innovator offerings of Covid-19 resources continues to grow. Fastcase, PacerPro, PubK Law and Tax Notes have new Covid-19 resources.Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Law mentioned in an earlier post now have added free resources which out from behind the paywall.Well Fastcase has gone “Amazon” – they have basically built a Covid-19 Shopping Mall which includes a gallery of their own resources, affiliates resources, government resources and competitors resources – all for a good cause!

Federal Legislative Response to Coronavirus
Thomson Reuters Skopos Labs

Bloomberg Law has brought their very popular In Focus Covid-19 page out from behind the paywall. There are  3 “trackers ” which provide a survey of  court operations during Covid-19, state quarantine and public health laws and Covid-19 related labor laws.The page also provides, news, analysis, regulatory guidance e.g .reporting Covid issues to the SEC. According to Bloomberg Law President Joe Breda “We are committed to continuing to add to this collection, and possibly other features of BLAW in the future.” There also a Bloomberg Law Corona Virus news page  That offers great deal of public content as well as a free newsletter.

Fastcase Covid-19 “Mall of American Resources”
Covid Resources “Gallery”   Fastcase COO, Steve Errick sent me an email about Fastcase’s Covid-19 efforts. ”We are supporting our bar members by providing them a list of resources including noting where our publishing peers provide
Continue Reading New Covid-19 Resources From Fastcase, PacerPro, Tax Notes and PubK Law. Free Covid Resources From Westlaw and Bloomberg Law

Today Fastcase and Ross Intelligence are announcing a content, research and development partnership which the founders expect to drive innovation for both companies. Fastcase which is celebrating its 20th anniversary has excently expanded beyond its primary law focus into analytics, legal news and secondary source publishing and alliances. Ross which made headlines with its A.I. search engine for legal research has recently launched its law school program and begun building alliances with bar associations and with Clio practice management software.

I interviewed Ed Walters CEO and Co- Founder of Fastcase about this new alliance. Walters describes this alliance in terms of a major market shift in the legal research and technology space. “In the 1990s the main way market dominance was building gigantic silos of data” epitomized by the Lexis and Westlaw platforms. According to Walters “The future will be owned by small, nimble companies that have inter-operable parts. The Fastcase-Ross alliance is about creating a new paradigm for the next 10 years.”

Ross will gain access to the Fastcase pipeline of case law, statutes and regulations across all 50 states. Walters described t he benefits of the alliance in the press release. Fastcase will benefit from Ross’s “trailblazing work in the field of natural language processing in machine learning. The partnership will enable Fastcase to collaborate on exciting new products and jointly create new solutions for unmet needs of the legal profession.”

Lexis and Westlaw (Thomson Reuters) invented the online legal research market and have dominated it for years.
Continue Reading In Paradigm Shift Legal Research Innovators Fastcast and Ross Intelligence Form Development Alliance

During the Great Analytics ‘Shoot-Out’ at AALL, law librarians tested and compared the results of seven federal litigation analytics platforms.

Analytics tools enable lawyers to ask completely new questions and gain insights which were virtually unavailable in a text based research world.  It takes a special skill set to ask the right  “data quality” questions when firms are assessing  the dozens of analytics products competing for a share of lawyers desktop or an organization’s information resource budget.

Use cases for analytics include: pitch strategy, AFA responses, litigation strategy, deal negotiation strategy, managing client expectations, diving process efficiency, internal bench marking and developing peer metrics.

Law librarians have been quietly driving the adoption of analytics in the business and practice of law.  Hundreds of librarians, knowledge managers and legal publishing executives jammed into a meeting room at the 2019 American Association of Law Libraries Conference and Meeting in Washington DC on July 15th to attend a two and one half hour “super-session” “ The Federal and State Analytics market: Should the Buyer Beware?” exploring the state of litigation
Continue Reading What Do Law Firms Need to Know About Buying Litigation Analytics Products?