LexisNexis
LexisNexis (sometimes simply called "Lexis" or "Nexis" among users) is a popular searchable archive of content from newspapers, magazines, legal documents and other printed sources. LexisNexis claims to be the "world’s largest collection of public records, unpublished opinions, forms, legal, news, and business information" while offering their products to a wide range of professionals in the legal, risk management,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. They have moved to a slogan of "Total Solutions".
Content offerings
LexisNexis is divided into two sites 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, speciailized 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.
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statutes and laws and nearly all published case opinions from the 1770s to the present, and all publicly available unpublished case opinions from 1980 onward. It 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 also has a library of law review and legal journal articles for all the countries for which it has materials.
Lexis has a library of public records, which includes current mailing addresses for nearly every living person in the United States. It has real property deeds and mortgages for nearly all states, and for many states, it also has voter registrations, motor vehicle registrations, marriage and divorce records, professional licenses, and liens. A related feature, SmartLinx, is quite popular with law enforcement officials, as it scans 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 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 all American jurisdictions for the last five years.
Nexis.com
News stories from the majority of English-language periodicals worldwide are available back to 1986, and there are a number of articles available as far back as the mid-1970s.
Other offerings
LexisNexis also offers products for students at colleges and universities. Its flagship product in this market is LexisNexis Academic, which is a combination of 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, which is primarily dedicated to printing casebooks for law schools.
Tolley Tax Training is a part of Lexis Nexis that provides courses for taxation professionals looking to become ATT or CTA qualified in the UK.
Business operations
After a 2007 move, LexisNexis is now headquartered at 125 Park Avenue, New York City, across the street from Grand Central Terminal. It was formerly headquartered in Miamisburg, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, and the Miamisburg location remains the single largest operational site in the United States[1]. Lexis also operates branch offices in cities all over the world. It employs over 13,000 people worldwide.
Pricing schemes of LexisNexis involve varying methods such as flat monthly rates, per hour rates (previously 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 be granted 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 is often charged for 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 often undertake Lexis searching and not lawyers themselves.
History
Anglo-Dutch publishing giant Reed Elsevier currently owns LexisNexis. 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 was purely a computer operation. 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.[2] 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. See Wexis.
When Toyota launched the Lexus line of luxury vehicles in 1987, Mead Data Central sued for trademark infringement on the theory that consumers of upscale products such as lawyers would confuse Lexus with Lexis. A market research survey was undertaken at the time, asking consumers to identify "Lexis" (it was only spoken); 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. 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 get along fine, 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 is the company providing the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX). These companies are part of LexisNexis' Risk & Information Analytics group[3].
On March 9, 2005 LexisNexis announced that personal information of some Seisint users may have been stolen. It was originally estimated that 32,000 users were affected [4], but that number greatly increased to over 310,000 [5]. 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
LexisNexis' chief competitor in the legal market is Thomson West's Westlaw. Because West and LexisNexis are so pervasive in the legal research market, some customers have jokingly imagined an organization called Wexis.[citation needed]
Loislaw, a unit of Dutch publishing group Wolters Kluwer, is an emerging provider of web enabled tools for legal professionals that competes with both LexisNexis and Westlaw.
See also
External links
- LexisNexis official web site
- Security Breach at LexisNexis Now Appears Larger
- Wired News interview (May 25, 2005) with the hackers
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