The 2016 leaders in UK legal information sources
Jinfo Blog

By Norma Beavers

Abstract

The results of Jinfo's "Research on UK legal purchasing preferences and needs 2016" are in and they make for interesting reading about satisfaction with the top four legal products - Westlaw UK, LexisLibrary, Practical Law and Lexis PSL. Our survey also gives insights about what respondents would like to change about these products.

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Jinfo's "Research on UK legal purchasing preferences and needs 2016" finds information professionals who responded to our survey have lots to say about what they would like to change about the products they use - Westlaw UK and Practical Law, from Thomson Reuters; and LexisLibrary and Lexis PSL, from LexisNexis.

The issues that kept coming up regarding LexisNexis products and features include:

• "Improve usability, particularly of case law and legislation"
• "It can be difficult to find particular content; search functionality is not intuitive; continue to improve relevancy search".

Recurring comments about Thomson Reuters products and features included:

• "Need more search result filters, especially within books"
• "Fix the authentication problems - current system wastes large amounts of time each week and frustrates users; inflexible".

... So plenty of things to be fixed or upgraded in the future by these vendors.

Understanding value and the return on investment associated with licensing content products and information services is difficult to do but our survey, the seventh since 2010, pushed ahead to ask respondents for their feedback. Using a scale of 1 to 4, where 4 is the highest rating, we asked how well each of the four products achieves return on investment in general. All four of the main products rated above 2.5, illustrating all are valued, with Westlaw UK rated highest.

Relationships and satisfaction

Our survey asked respondents to rate vendor relationship and pricing satisfaction. Results show LexisNexis products earned slightly higher average ratings for vendor relationship than Thomson Reuters products, but the two vendors were roughly the same on customer service.

Respondents were more likely to agree that they have insight into how Westlaw UK and Practical Law are used and valued than LexisLibrary and Lexis PSL. Presenting the survey analysis Robin Neidorf reports: "in fact, the agreement rating for Practical Law on this statement reached a high of 3.24 on the 4-point scale."

Find out more

Jinfo's research into purchasing trends and preferences in the UK legal market, finds partnership is a key theme regardless of which product is in use or the depth of changes you'd like vendors to make.

To see the full ratings for management of the content portfolio, the overall relationship with primary vendors, and exclusive comments about partnership that we received in follow-up interviews, read Jinfo's "Research on UK legal purchasing preferences and needs 2016".

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