Today Bloomberg Law is announcing the release of its 15th practice center which is focused on E-Discovery. Bloomberg is  moving rapidly to consolidate existing BNA news, practice  and analytical resources as well as creating new content to enhance attorneys workflow efficiency. The Bloomberg Law Practice Centers are designed to compete directly with competitors in this space: Thomson Reuters Practical Law and Lexis Practice Advisor.

Bloomberg Law E Discovery Practice Center

The E Discovery Practice Center offers a comprehensive solution that integrates news, primary sources including both published and unpublished state and federal court opinions, tools, sample forms, and expert guidance.  The press release indicates that this is the only resource of its kind available on an integrated legal research and business intelligence platform. The E-Discovery Practice Center will be available to all Bloomberg Law subscribers at no additional cost.

The practice center’s home page features high value content including a curated collection of fully searchable state and federal court opinions, state-specific discovery guidance and rules, and BNA’s E-Discovery Portfolio series.  I don’t recall seeing a collection of state ediscovery rules in any other product. Since ediscovery touches on a wide range of complex issues, the E-Discovery Center links to other BloombergBNA materials in related disciplines. Including: cross-border data transfers, government and internal investigations, and data and privacy security. 
Continue Reading Bloomberg Law Launches 15th Practice Center: E-Discovery

As market power shifts from law firms to in-house counsel, Bloomberg Law has responded by bulking up the Corporate Practice Center with resources designed to address the special needs of Chief Legal Officers, Chief Compliance Officers and Chief Operating Officers.  Earlier this year Bloomberg Law relaunched the Corporate Practice Center with materials developed with extensive input from corporate counsel at major U.S. Companies. The Corporate Practice at Center  includes  practice pages covering: compliance, legal operations, corporate governance,  alternative business structures, litigation and corporate news. In addition an “In Focus, “hot topics” section offers deep coverage of special topics such as proxy regulation and FCPA.

Bloomberg and the Association for Corporate Counsel (ACC) also announced that they had entered a  strategic collaboration for Bloomberg Law to offer sponsored content, practice tools and editorial expertise to ACC members through professional enrichment, educational and development programs.Continue Reading Bloomberg Law Relaunches Corporate Practice Center with In-House Counsel Focus: Compliance, Toolkits and Analytics

fastcaseFastcase is announcing today that a former LexisNexis executive Steve Errick will join the company’s executive team as Chief Operating Officer.  According to the press release, Errick will be “responsible for executing the company’s strategic vision, developing new editorial products, and developing the company’s organizational structure as the company expands.”

Errick’s non-compete agreement with LexisNexis expires on June 30th and Errick will join Fastcase on July 1st. Errick most recently served as Vice President and Managing Director for Research Information for LexisNexis.  In that role, Errick oversaw the Legal Research Information Product Division, with a $1 billion P&L portfolio.  He led LexisNexis’s development of workflow tools such as Lexis for Microsoft Office, E-book Digital Lending, Total Patent, and Litigation Suite which included MedMal Navigator. Errick also shepherded LexisNexis’s acquisition of Law360, Securities Mosaic, and Sheshunoff/AS Pratt Financial Services.Continue Reading Breaking News Exclusive: Fastcase Hires Seasoned Legal Publishing Exec — Launching New Strategy– Ready to Take on the Titans: Lexis, Westlaw and BloombergBNA

Ravel Logo New_NarrowBack in March I reported on a rumor that Ravel Law would be acquired by LexisNexis.Today LexisNexis and Ravel announced that Ravel Law is in fact being acquired by LexisNexis. Ravel Law was developed by Stamford Law grads Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed and offered a research platform which radically altered the way research results werelogo-lexisnexis delivered and displayed. They later offered a series of innovative analytics tools which provide insights into judicial precedential behavior, courts, motions and law firm litigation trends. Since Lexis acquired another legal analytics company, Lex Machina in November 2015, I was curious to learn why LexisNexis decided to acquire another product offering legal analytics. Today I posed some questions to Ravel Law co-founder Daniel Lewis and LexisNexis VP of product management, Jeff Pfeifer.

I tried to pin down Pfeifer and Lewis on the future of the Ravel Law product in the low cost legal research market. Pfeifer responded by confirming that Lexis Nexis would keep Ravel’s commitment to provide public access to the Harvard Caselaw archive on the Ravel Law platform. The press release however refers to Lexis integrating Ravel technology and designating content as “powered by Ravel Law.”Continue Reading LexisNexis Acquires Ravel Law: A Tipping Point for Legal Analytics and the Second Wave of Legal KM

Wolters Kluwer must be offering free double espresso shots every morning to their product developers and editors. Do they even sleep these days?  Less than a month ago I wrote a post on the release of their Cybersecurity & Privacy platform … the relaunch of their  International Arbitration platform and their alliance with  IP analytics provider ktMine. Today they are announcing the release of  “Corporate SmartTasks” which follows on their May 18th  launch of a free Federal Regulatory Knowledge Center beta site.

 WKfederalcomparison
The Wolters Kluwer SmartTask Corporate Suite

Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Leaps to the Head of the Class with “SmartTasks” Customizable Corporate Know-How and Offers a Free Federal Legislative Knowledge Center

Today LexisNexis is releasing a practice guide on federal civil practice TheWagstaffe Group Practice Guide: Federal Civil Procedure Before Trial  that will be available in three formats: print, online in Lexis Advance and eBook. (LexisNexis Digital Library.)  This multimedia guide includes over 150 video clips of two to five minutes in length. This is the first video offering from a legal publishing market that I can recall since the release of Professor Robert Berring’s Commando Legal Research series in 1989.

The LexisAdvance and Digital Library versions will be enhanced with video “mini lectures” by the author James M. Wagstaffe.  Wagstaffeformer co-author of The Rutter Group’s Federal Civil Procedure Before Trial. The press release describes the author as one of the country’s preeminent First Amendment and defamation lawyers. Wagstaffe is also, an adjunct professor in constitutional law and civil procedure at Hastings College of the Law and in Media Law at San Francisco State University and co-founder of Kerr & Wagstaffe LLP.  The press release describes the  videos  as providing “ rich, explanatory tips and practical insights … that enhance and complement the surrounding text in each chapter. “Continue Reading Treatises Are Not Dead They Are Just Being Transformed: Lexis Launches First Video Practice Guide: Can the Gamified Treatise Be Far Behaind?

Today LexisNexis is releasing a treatise on federal civil practice The Wagstaffe Group Practice Guide: Federal Civil Procedure Before Trial  that will be available in three formats: print, online in Lexis Advance and eBook. (LexisNexis Digital Library.)  This multimedia guide includes over 150 video
clips of two to five minutes in length. This is the

The members of the Columbia Law Revue –   these law students are not only smart, but they are also clever  and some of them sing like Broadway headliners. Maybe we should invite them to perform at the American Association of Law Libraries Conference this summer.   This is the best legal research video since Craig Runde and Bill Lindberg

In December I offered readers the opportunity to respond to the 2016 Start/Stop Poll in which they could vote for the best new products and features and highlight the products that they planned to say good-bye to. The results of the process part of the survey are posted here.For the second year in a