
Westlaw and Lexis Nexis: Are Your Days Numbered Yet? - burritofanatic
http://www.williamha.com/westlaw-and-lexis-nexis-are-your-days-numbered-yet/
======
lkrubner
Lexis Nexis is a good example of how far a tech company can fall when it no
longer thinks of itself as a tech company. One thing this article doesn't
mention is how utterly Lexis Nexis used to dominate the industry. In the 1980s
and 1990s, the entire law profession was entirely dependent on it, and it was
massively profitable. And it was independent.

Lexis Nexis got started in the 1960s. They came up with their own proprietary
format for storing and searching over legal briefs (most of the technology we
have now, such as SQL databases, did not exist then). Their format started off
as text files over which they could do regex, based on your search parameters,
but then they ran into issues of storage and how should they show related
items? (Graph databases were a long way in the future.)

They came up with a solution that would seem primitive to us now, but which
was cutting edge in the 1960s, and so they became very successful.

Then they focused on hiring sales people to be sure that every law firm in the
country was dependent on them. That was surely the right move in the 1960s,
but they stopped developing innovative technology. They made no significant
changes to their technology till after 2000, when they were clearly in
trouble.

Just to repeat that, they went 40 years without making any significant changes
to their technology. The lawyers and the salespeople were running the company
and their attitude was something like "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." This
is a reasonable attitude if you are in a mature, steady, unchanging field, but
they weren't.

They ignored the rise of SQL databases, but they could not avoid the Internet.
Around 2001 they formed a committee to explore a possible switch to an XML
storage format, and they explored RDF as a way of representing the poly-
hierarchy that is natural in law. RDF tools were emerging that would allow
them to do graph searches.

I am not sure what technology they eventually decided upon. I know they did
eventually modernize their technology, but they were dragged to it by the
Internet, they did not do it happily.

I have an admiration for the startup advice that Steve Blank gives, but when I
think of companies like Lexis Nexis, I find myself doubting the line "A
startup is a temporary organization in search of a business model, it must
eventually transition to an organization that is focused on executing a proven
business model." My problem with that idea is that things change over time,
and all business models eventually die, and most businesses die (Lexis Nexis
was eventually bought) so all businesses should be thought of as "a temporary
organization in search of a business model" \-- the moment you stop searching
is the moment you start to die.

------
Roboprog
I was at LN (Examen subsidiary) from 2005 to 2010.

Back in 2010, they were working hard on a new search engine and front end UI
for it. Alas, they had been sold on a .NET stack, so I imagine that was more
expensive to make and scale out than a POSIX based tool set. I have no idea
what became of that initiative. I remember pushing to use REST based services
for product integration, rather than SOAP, but it wasn't until a year or so
after I left that company architects finally got the nod from Gartner and the
like that REST is OK, which leads me to think that the central tech group (at
the time?) might not be the most forward thinking.

They do have other products, such as the one I was working on to track cases
and/or claims, as well as (specialized) integrated billing processing, or, the
anti-money-laundering package that my next employer was using in one project.

However, last year, they closed down the Sacramento office where I had worked.
I suspect they can make it, but they are going to have to take a lower margin
and make more products, rather than just feed off of a document search engine
gravy train. Those days are gone.

~~~
burritofanatic
That's right, I do remember using their billing product while I was working at
a firm - Billing Matters.

Come to think of it, both Westlaw and Lexis Nexis actually have a suite of
enterprise software. Even if WL and LN dies in terms of search, they're pretty
deeply rooted in the marketplace elsewhere where a lot of money is coming in.
I completely neglected this part of their business.

------
igurari
> So I’m now seeing that NLP (Natural Language Processing) as confirmed by
> Quora, is hard, meaning that Westlaw and Lexis Nexis is actually pretty
> decent?!

NLP and search are hard to get right in a nuanced and high-accuracy-requiring
field like law. And Westlaw and LexisNexis have done a pretty good job with
those. It's not easy (or rather, it's not cheap -- think tens of millions of
dollars) to build what they have built. Even Google hasn't with Scholar --
though to be fair, Google hasn't tried very hard to get legal search to that
level.

Ultimately, in the future legal search is not going to be a money maker, and
Westlaw and LexisNexis will take a big hit when free happens.

As I see it (i.e., from the vantage point of Judicata), search will ultimately
be free, just as Google search is free. And just as Google has been able to
make boatloads of money on "ancillaries" to the results (ads), the ancillaries
will be the big money makers here -- but in the forms of extremely precise
analytics and AI. Want to see cases Shepardized on an individual point of law,
and other on-point or conflicting cases? Here it is, for a price. Given a set
of facts and a procedural context, want to know the best argument to make to a
particular judge? Here it is, again for a price. Given a legal brief
presenting your opponent’s argument, want to see a line by line teardown? Here
it is, and once again, for a price. Want your own legal brief automatically
outlined? You’ve got it, and again, it costs money.

Of course, getting there is not easy (it’s a long road that requires going
over every single case out there with a fine toothed technological comb), and
so while I'd say that Westlaw's and LexisNexis's days are numbered -- that
number is well over a thousand.

~~~
burritofanatic
Yeah, I'm certainly curious about Judicata. For anyone wondering where
Judicata is in terms of progress, I found this comment from someone
purportedly involved in the startup: "Judicata is very much alive. We're
tackling a hard problem, with little margin for error, and focused on doing it
right. It's a very different model than most startups, but then again, law is
a very different beast."
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9528321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9528321)

~~~
igurari
Your quoted comment came from me (I'm the author of the above comment as
well), the CEO of Judicata.

~~~
burritofanatic
Major fail on my part. I have a habit of not looking at usernames, and I'm
embarrassed. My apologies.

------
7Figures2Commas
> The cases are mostly barren, and the ones with annotations aren’t
> particularly insightful like the earlier ones from when Casetext was first
> announced. This problem, I absolutely understand, given that it’s a
> relatively new service and the amount of case law out in the wild. Having
> meaningful annotations for a substantial amount of cases will be a challenge
> compared to a discography of 90s era rap music where the number most
> influential tracks can potentially be narrowed down to 50.

> My money is still on Casetext to do some damage given that easy access to
> annotations from practitioners and academics are important to legal
> research.

This is a good example of how easy it is to underestimate the importance of
momentum when evaluating startups.

Casetext has been around since late 2013. If "the cases are mostly barren, and
the ones with annotations aren’t particularly insightful like the earlier ones
from when Casetext was first announced" nearly two years later, it calls into
question the model.

There are lots of opportunities in the legal market, but trying to take
Westlaw and Lexis Nexis on directly is insane.

~~~
dmix
> trying to take Westlaw and Lexis Nexis on directly is insane.

No, stating that any startup founded in 2013 could be capable of being a
competitive product in 2015 - if they only had momentum - is insane.

Building hard things takes a long time. Casetext will only get better but it
will take years for them to get it right.

Silicon Valley is obsessed with short-term projects and failure to its
detriment.

As long as Casetext gets enough early adopters to stay afloat and improve
their model, they could very well catch up one day and offer a far superior
product.

~~~
burritofanatic
I'm sure they've discussed this at length: what is the incentive for a user to
annotate case law?

Law happens in such slow motion and not exclusively at the computer that you
don't really get the feedback as you would in programming (fixing a bug versus
arguing a motion) - which is one of many reasons why Stackoverflow is
successful (not that this is really a fair comparison anyway - more of an
example). If my immediate success on compiling is dependent on trying out one
of these suggested solutions, I'll certainly have an incentive to comment,
upvote, and potentially contribute later on knowing how much it helped me.

------
jacobheller
Casetext CEO here. First, thank you for writing this. Hearing honest feedback
from people who try out our service and improving is precisely how we’re going
to get better. And I love that you share both our enthusiasm for the idea and
our optimism for the future of legal research.

I wanted to note that we will be getting a lot better. Keep checking in over
the next few months, and expect to see a lot of major improvements on the
issues you noted as well as many other things as well. Until very recently we
were a very small operation, and as it turns out, building a competing product
to LexisNexis and Westlaw is exceptionally hard. (I don’t want to make excuses
– trust me, nobody wants Casetext to be much better more than I do – but the
reality is that a perfect product couldn’t be built overnight.) That said,
with the backing of amazing investors [1], we just assembled a killer team
[2], and now have the people and resources to get there.

Another commenter (dmix) put it well: “Building hard things takes a long
time.” Think of how long it took for a lot of the best sites on the web to
become what they are today. We’ll get there – I promise.

Finally, we do have the case you were searching for [3]. Why it didn’t show up
in search is something we’ll be looking into this weekend.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/03/legal-tech-startup-
casetext...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/03/legal-tech-startup-casetext-
raises-7-million-series-a-round-led-by-union-square-ventures/)

[2] [https://casetext.com/about](https://casetext.com/about)

[3] [https://casetext.com/case/people-v-
powell-521](https://casetext.com/case/people-v-powell-521)

~~~
burritofanatic
Thanks for getting back to me Jacob. In regards to note 3, I'm sure you
figured it out by now, but I was using the citation from California Appellate
Reports as opposed to the California Reporter.

~~~
jacobheller
Yeah we saw that. The real question is why we didn't have the parallel
citation in our database. We'll investigate.

