Some people firmly believe that LexisNexis has the best news coverage of the two major online legal vendors. But Westlaw could always tout the Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones content, very high value stuff not available on LexisNexis. Not for long....by March 2005, LexisNexis will be the exclusive provider of Factiva content to the legal market.
The West Legal Directory has always suffered a bit of an identity crisis. Martindale-Hubbell is the gold standard for attorney directories, and it was always a challenge to convince firms that they should pay for another listing in WLD after shelling out the thousands of dollars for MH. When West's purchased Findlaw, the WLD, historically available free of charge, was incorporated into the other free Findlaw resources.
Thomson is hoping to provide an incentive for law firms to purchase enhanced profiles with their newly named Thomson Legal Record. They've enhanced the profile information provided by the firm, to include an attorney's "litigation history", incorporating links cases in which the attorney was involved, with the full-text easily retrievable for anyone with a Westlaw password.
According to PC Magazine, "search has become one of the hottest technologies in the computer industry." From products designed to search data on a single PC, to those aimed at small, medium or large companies, there is an ever growing number of vendors promoting full-text search products for document management systems(DMS), litigation support, databases, email, intranets, and some that try to do it all, high-end, enterprise search engines such as Autonomy, Verity and Recommind, just to name a few.
Where does WestKM and the Lexis Total Search products fit into the mix? Lisa Kellar, Practice Automation Manager at Hunton & Williams, explains the difference between these KM products and the enterprise search engines.
Westlaw Intraclips can now be delivered via RSS!
I've been wondering, okay, sometimes whining, occasionally outright complaining about the lack of RSS from either of the "big two" legal online vendors. So I was very excited to see the RSS option appear on the revamped Intraclips administrative interface.
RSS is not the only enhancement, but rather part of a fairly significant Intraclips overhaul. Another item on my wish list, wire services, is also now available for the first time via Intraclips for those who want REALLY current news.
Lexis and Westlaw introduced the web versions of their popular research services in 1998. The eventual phase out of the classic software was predicted and discussed on lawlib that same year. Since then law students have been trained exclusively on the web. But will we have to wait for a full generation before discarding the software? It's beginning to seem so! The results of a recent LawLibTech poll shows that 67% of law firms still offer the classic software of one or both vendors.
I was pretty darn excited to see that Westlaw has announced WestCheck.com, due out April 2004.
Just think, no longer will we have to evaluate and install Westcheck upgrades. We'll be able to do EVERYTHING on the web. If there's an update, it will automatically be made in one place, Eagan. Technology departments all over the country will be jumping for joy. Or at least, they should be!
Last week I was bemoaning the fact that secondary sources in legal research are getting short shrift. I suggested that the online services should push the appropriate treatise, ALR, etc. resources to the user based on the user's search terms.
So perhaps it wasn't an original thought. It turns out that Westlaw is doing just that with their new product, ResultsPlus.
