LexisNexis

LexisNexis (often called "Lexis" or "Nexis" by customers), a division of Reed Elsevier, offers a widely used, searchable, and identically named archive of content from newspapers, magazines, legal documents and other printed sources. LexisNexis describes itself as the "world’s largest collection of public records, unpublished opinions, forms, legal, news, and business information" , and targets its products to a wide range of professionals in the legal, risk management, corporate, government, law enforcement, accounting and academic markets. Typical customers of LexisNexis include lawyers, law students, journalists, and academics. "It's how you know" was the primary slogan for LexisNexis for over a decade, but in 2007 it transitioned to a slogan of "Total Solutions."

Contents 1 Content offerings 1.1 Lexis.com 1.2 Nexis.com 2 Other offerings 3 Business operations 4 History 5 Competition 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

Content offerings

LexisNexis services are delivered via two websites that require separate subscriptions: www.lexis.com is intended for legal research, while www.nexis.com is intended for journalism research.

LexisNexis also offers several diverse product lines. Risk and Information Analytics offers Risk Management solutions such as fraud detection, collections management, and identity screening. LexisNexis also offers legal solutions for full-service firms, specialized firms serving corporations or government, firms serving small businesses and individuals. Corporate and Professional business solutions, Academic and Research tools, and solutions for Government professionals are also offered by LexisNexis.

To serve its user population of about 5 million subscribers, LexisNexis hosts a total of about 30 terabytes of content on its 11 mainframes (supported by over 300 midrange UNIX servers and nearly 1,000 Windows NT servers) at its main datacenter in Miamisburg, Ohio.^[1]

Lexis.com

The Lexis database contains all current United States statutes and laws and nearly all published case opinions from the 1770s to the present, as well as all publicly-available unpublished case opinions from 1980 onward. Since 2000, Lexis has begun building a library of briefs and motions as well, although coverage is still geographically spotty and somewhat erratic.

Lexis also has libraries of statutes, case judgments and opinions for many other jurisdictions such as France, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom. Lexis has databases of law review and legal journal articles for all the countries for which it has materials.

Lexis has a library of public records consisting of over 1 billion records covering over 200 million households and over 700 million phone numbers.^[2] It has real property deeds and mortgages for nearly all states, and for many states, it also has criminal records, civil judgments, voter registrations, motor vehicle registrations, marriage and divorce records, professional licenses, liens, UCC filings, and death certificates. A related feature, SmartLinx, is quite popular with law enforcement officials; it enables a user to rapidly search all Lexis public records databases to build a comprehensive profile of a target subject.

In 2001, LexisNexis acquired CourtLink Corporation and their electronic-access and electronic-filing and -service products. LexisNexis File & Serve (also known as Justicelink/Courtlink eFile) is the world’s first web-based electronic filing and service product. File & Serve allows law firms to file documents securely with the court and serve documents electronically upon other case participants while cutting costs, time and paper consumption. The product offers an alternative to courts allocating taxpayer dollars to fund "special projects" to streamline the volume of incoming documents and gives firms more control over the delivery and management of their cases. LexisNexis also leads the U.S. in the latest trend in document delivery, eService. Firms can now stipulate to electronically serve other case participants in instances where the court may not be ready to implement electronic filing.

As part of its current^[update] publishing deal with the California court system, Lexis has a stripped-down free site, available from the California Courts Web site, for the public to search California opinions. It also has a stripped-down free site, called LexisOne, that has case law available for state and federal jurisdictions for the last ten years^[update] as well as all United States Supreme Court cases.

Nexis.com

Nexis.com makes available news stories from the majority of English-language periodicals worldwide back to 1986, and there are a number of articles available as far back as the mid-1970s. A sampling of top news stories are offered free at the LexisNexis News website.

Other offerings

LexisNexis also offers products for students at colleges and universities. Its flagship product in this market, LexisNexis Academic, combines news, business, and legal content. Also available are specialized services that index, abstract, and provide full text content to congressional publications, statistical data, environmental publications, and government periodicals. In the high school market the company sells a product called LexisNexis Scholastic.

LexisNexis also has a textbook-publishing division, primarily dedicated to printing casebooks for law schools.

Since recent years they began expanding their Intellectual Property services with products like TotalPatent (webbased patent search application), IP DataDirect (webservices to access the patent collection) and PatentOptimizer (patent analysis).

Tolley Tax Training, a part of Lexis Nexis, provides courses for taxation professionals looking to become ATT or CTA qualified in the UK.

The LexisNexis Conferences and Training Department delivers accredited professional training in the UK, producing approximately 250 events per annum. These events cover recent practice and procedure in many areas of law and tax.

In the UK, LexisNexis publishes magazines and journals, both in hard copy and online. Titles include Taxation Magazine.

LexisNexis offers subscription-based business directory services through two of its products:

1. LexisNexis Corporate Affiliations offers business-directory services. Corporate Affiliations maintains financial, executive & merger information on public and private companies internationally.
2. The Advertising Redbooks serves as a directory of profiles of companies conducting advertising, as well as of advertising agencies.

In 2006 LexisNexis acquired the Concordance database product^[3] for text retrieval from Dataflight Software.^[4]

Business operations

In 2007, LexisNexis moved its headquarters to 125 Park Avenue, New York City, across the street from Grand Central Terminal. (Its former headquarters in Miamisburg, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, remain the company's single largest operational site in the United States.^[5]) Lexis also operates branch offices in cities internationally. It employs over 13,000 people worldwide.

Pricing schemes of LexisNexis involve varying methods such as flat monthly rates, per-hour rates (previously^[when?] estimated in the $300 range), or the more common per source rate (each source having differing access limitations and pricing). Usually, law schools and other educational venues will obtain either free or highly discounted rates, which they in turn pass on to their students through the use of a gateway or LexisNexis accounts for them to use.

In the U.S., both LexisNexis and Westlaw offer free optional training seminars for law-school students. These seminars supplement the mandatory training provided by law schools in how to perform traditional legal research in a law library. American attorneys are expected to be proficient at using either database to do their own research.

In the UK, Lexis Professional often charges per search, with each search varying in cost depending on the size of file searched and quantity of material downloaded. Searches cost at least £30 and sometimes a great deal more. This high cost and the complexity of the database means skilled researchers (rather than lawyers themselves) often undertake Lexis searching .

History

The Anglo-Dutch publishing company Reed Elsevier has owned LexisNexis and its predecessor company since 1994. At its inception in 1970, the database was christened LEXIS by Mead Data Central (MDC), a subsidiary of the Mead Corporation. It was a continuation of an experiment organized by the Ohio State Bar in 1967. On April 2, 1973, LEXIS launched publicly, offering full-text searching of all Ohio and New York cases. In 1980, LEXIS completed its hand-keyed electronic archive of all U.S. federal and state cases, a monumental achievement. The NEXIS service, added that same year, gave journalists a searchable database of news articles. (Notice the capital letters in the name; it was then standard to capitalize the names of online services.)

In 1994, Mead Corp divested itself of MDC to return to its core competency of office supply manufacture. In December of that year Reed Elsevier PLC acquired MDC, known as LexisNexis thereafter. During the handover, LexisNexis's website, the LexisNexis Communication Center, went online.

In its early years, Lexis operated purely on-line. But to compete against West's overwhelmingly powerful national brand, it gradually took over many smaller regional or specialized publishers such as: Michie Company, Martindale-Hubbell, Matthew Bender, Mealey's Litigation Reports, Anderson, Gould Publications, Weil Publishing, and Shepard's Citations.^[6] Some predecessors merged into Michie include The Allen Smith Company and Bobbs-Merrill's law book publications. As Lexis added more paper publishing products and West improved its online database offerings, the two eventually arrived at an uneasy coexistence in both the online and the offline legal research markets.

When Toyota launched the Lexus line of luxury vehicles in 1987, Mead Data Central sued for trademark infringement on the grounds that consumers of upscale products (such as lawyers) would confuse "Lexus" with "Lexis". A market-research survey undertaken at the time asked consumers to identify the spoken word "Lexis"; the survey showed that a minuscule quantity of people thought of the computerized legal search system, a similarly minuscule number thought of Toyota's luxury car division, and an overwhelming plurality thought of a soap opera character.^{[citation needed]} Mead lost on appeal in 1989 when the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit held that there was little chance of consumer confusion. Today, the two companies have an amiable business relationship, and in 2002 implemented a joint promotion called "Win A Lexus On Lexis!"

In 2000, LexisNexis acquired RiskWise, a St. Cloud, Minnesota company. Then, in 2004, it acquired Seisint, Inc, of Boca Raton, Florida for $775 million. (Seisint housed and operated Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX).) These companies are part of LexisNexis' Risk & Information Analytics group.^[7]

On March 9, 2005 LexisNexis announced the possible theft of personal information of some Seisint users. It was originally estimated that 32,000 users were affected,^[8] but that number greatly increased to over 310,000.^[9] Affected persons will be provided with free fraud insurance and credit bureau reports for a year. However, no reports of identity theft or fraud were discovered to have stemmed from this security breach.

Competition

Thomson West's Westlaw competes most comprehensively with LexisNexis in the legal market. Because West and LexisNexis are so pervasive in the legal research market, some customers have jokingly imagined an organization called Wexis.^[10]

See also

• Quicklaw
• Time Matters
• Casemap

References

External links

• LexisNexis official web site
• Security Breach at LexisNexis Now Appears Larger
• Wired News interview (May 25, 2005) with the hackers