Legal publishing alliances

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


Starting in 2016 LexisNexis will manage all  ALM  print and digital news contracts and  provide customer support for the 200  largest law firms in the US. This means that the firm’s LexisNexis Account Manager will now be responsible for negotiating ALM contracts. The accounts that are being transitioned on January 1 will be the accounts that

Today LexisNexis and American Lawyer Media  announced  a new agreement which deepens their strategic relationship while
ensuring the continued availability of archived ALM legal news  on the LexisNexis platform. ALM owns the “grand-daddy” of modern legal news reporting  The American
Lawyer as well as other well known national titles such as
 Corporate Counsel, The National


This is the first alignment of independent legal publishers that I can recall.. As a consumer of  legal information, I appreciate the importance of small publishers in the legal information ecosphere. Past  publishing partnerships involved companies of wildly disproportionate size and market power. This partnership has delightful symmetry and counterpoint (Hein offers  deep archive