Legal information growth? It depends...
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Nothing less than transformation is forecast for the legal, tax and regulatory information sector as it struggles to emerge from some uniquely troubled times.

Small wonder, therefore, that Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis continue striving to outdo each other in the product innovation stakes. [Note: The two Thomson Reuters releases referred to in the next two paragraphs appear no longer to be available. LiveWire is investigating this with the company's press office.]

Thomson Reuters' latest offering claims to be 'the world's first global tax software workstation'. Based on a number of workflow solutions from TR's OneSource platform, the product is designed to address the demands of an increasingly complex system of cross-border tax and compliance requirements, linking global staff, controllers, finance, and even tax advisers and auditors, on one system (http://digbig.com/5bctkf).

Almost simultaneously, Thomson Reuters also announced the commercial release of Engage, its engagement planning and management solution designed to help law firm leaders meet client demands for transparency and predictable costs. It exploits a firm's experience and previous matter history to create plans and budgets, analysing various scenarios of resource allocation to enable firms to optimise plans within a client's budget and timelines (http://digbig.com/5bctkg).

LexisNexis, meanwhile, is determined to catch its customers early by offering junior lawyers eLearning opportunities whenever they need them. Focusing initially on dispute resolution, Lexis Mentor is designed to help lawyers in their first four years post-qualification, reducing the need for face-to-face training while helping them get off the routine work and onto the higher value stuff as quickly as possible (http://digbig.com/5bctkh).

Just as well, really, because another LexisNexis product, recently adopted by United Kingdom law firm Pannone, shows just how little of the routine work there's going to be before too long. Lexis Check is designed to validate legal references, speeding up the checking of citations, minimising the time spent on research and fact-checking, and reducing the risk of lawyers using out of date or inaccurate information (http://digbig.com/5bctkj).

In fact, lawyers aren't the only ones eager to graduate from the routine work. Pannone's librarian Helen Pearson says that she is only too happy to invest in tools that make life easier for her fee earners and professional support lawyers.

You could argue that innovations such as these would have come anyway, as competing information providers worked hard to differentiate their products and lock their customers in – but there have been other imperatives lately too. Earlier this year Outsell talked of 'unprecedented revenue pressure' on the sector and warned that the difficult market conditions would continue (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29615 for background). Now its newest forecast report (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bctkk) is only marginally less downbeat. Citing a string of developments all putting pressure on traditional models of delivering legal information and expertise, it adds ominously: 'Prospects for growth in the coming year depend... on how the sectors respond and reorganise themselves as the economy recovers.'

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