Online self help could threaten professions
Jinfo Blog

13th January 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Although it doesn’t appear to have publicised it formally yet, LexisNexis is reported to have invested just over $2 million in RocketLawyer http://www.rocketlawyer.com/ an American provider of legal forms together with online tools to enable laypeople to complete them successfully. The story seems to originate from an interactive forum for the private equity community called peHUB, which sourced it http://digbig.com/4ycnc from a United States Securities & Exchange Commission filing. Speculating on the reason behind the investment, peHUB talks about the rivalry between Reed Elsevier’s LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw as one possible motive – but this seems like a pretty capricious reason for spending such a substantial sum of money. More likely, surely, is the steady move by LexisNexis – and by its information provider and aggregator competitors – from simply offering content to providing the tools to enable people to leverage that content effectively. peHUB mentions a couple of relevant LexisNexis purchases back in 2007 – of document processing software developer Image Capture Engineering, and of Juris, which sells time, billing and accounting software. Just over a year ago http://www.vivavip.com/go/e3721 LexisNexis launched a service called Statistical Datasets, enabling end-users to build their own statistical tables from multiple sources – and in an exclusive interview in VIP 57 last August http://web.vivavip.com/go/vip/ its UK boss Josh Bottomley commented on his company’s imminent acquisition of risk management services provider ChoicePoint and on the creation of a Professional Services & Consulting Group to help his customers find tailored solutions for their information needs. Services like these, riding on the back of large repositories of content, could threaten at least the more routine activities of a wide range of specialists. Last October, for example, LexisNexis launched http://digbig.com/4ycne an enhanced version of its Know Your Customer (KYC) service, which could leave the discredited credit reporting agencies wondering whether at least parts of their business remain safe from the attentions of clever competitors. Now its investment in RocketLawyer could eventually do the same for routine legal services – a development coincidentally predicted by a recent book The End of Lawyers http://www.vivavip.com/go/e14453 in which Richard Susskind foresees a world where online systems and services replace solicitors. If Susskind is right, then LexisNexis’s $2.09 million may have been very cannily spent.

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