Febrile times in legal and tax
Jinfo Blog

16th March 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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While the legal, tax and regulatory sector continues to face difficult trading conditions it’s also innovating furiously, with both consumers and the back office firmly in its sights. There’s been a little crop of announcements from LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters in the last month or so alone – but Bloomberg is also lurking in the background ready to challenge both of them. It was at the start of February that Thomson Reuters in the United States announced the acquisition of Super Lawyers. Via magazine inserts and the web, the service rates ‘outstanding’ attorneys by state and practice area; it will now become part of Thomson Reuters’ suite of lawyer marketing and client development tools (http://digbig.com/5bbfwt). A month later LexisNexis in the United Kingdom announced that it was teaming up with Solcara, a software company that provides integrated search solutions to more than 20 law firms, government departments and other bodies. Using Solcara’s Solsearch federated search platform, customers will be able to add sources such as Lexis Library and Lexis PSL to their internal, free web and online subscription services (http://digbig.com/5bbfww). Meanwhile and almost simultaneously, Thomson Reuters’ Tax & Accounting arm was announcing the next generation of its Digita Tax Exchange software to simplify data collection for accountants. Claiming faster and more efficient compliance services, which the company says are now ‘barely profitable’ in many accountancy practices, it also adds that cheaper non-qualified staff can be used in the document collation process as a result (http://digbig.com/5bbfwx). More recently in the States, LexisNexis Claims Solutions is joining forces with insurance claim specialist Mitchell International to provide a new service to insurers dealing with severe vehicle injury and other expensive ‘special needs’ claims. Again, customer cost savings are the objective, as the predictive analytics of LexisNexis Claims Solutions combines with Mitchell's medical bill review and decision support workflow solutions (http://digbig.com/5bbfwy). Individually these developments might be regarded as routine product announcements of no great significance. Taken together, though, they may illustrate the efforts that the legal, tax and regulatory segment is currently having to go to in capturing market share in these troubled times (see Thomson Reuters’ and Wolters Kluwer’s recently announced results at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28063 and LexisNexis owner Reed Elsevier’s at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27969). Lurking in the background too is Bloomberg. Poised to challenge the other two (as Michele Bate reports at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27998) it’s now reported by paidContent to have acquired American government data publisher Eagle Eye Publishers (http://digbig.com/5bbfxa). Going further, the Talking Biz News blog from the University of North Carolina reports exclusively that Bloomberg is considering whether to launch a new product with the working title BGov to provide analysis of how business is interacting with regulatory agencies (http://digbig.com/5bbfxb). Febrile times!

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