The Florida State College of Law Research Center Blog

Inside the New Westlaw, Lexis & Bloomberg Platforms

The ABAJournal Law News Now has an article on the new Westlaw, Lexis and Bloomberg platforms.  Here's an excerpt:

LexisNexis also maintains its new platform will go beyond mere legal research to integrate the services of a variety of legal business and technology companies it has acquired in recent years, allowing it to offer Web design, billing systems, workflow analysis and more.

Lexis is taking a broader approach to its business, says Walsh. “We are marrying our information and data with productivity tools.

“It’s no longer sufficient to just deliver searchable case law,” he says. “We have to delight our customers. What we have learned in the marketplace is that it is unlike any other market. It is amazing how many problems your customers have; and if you can solve them and solve them well, they are going to want your product.”

For example, the new Lexis platform will include productivity tools to help lawyers evaluate the likelihood of winning a case, the cost of winning, and the potential value to both lawyer and client. The company says its new platform also will pull information from some of its other product lines, including the Martindale-Hubbell lawyer directory, to help lawyers learn as much as possible about every participant in a trial or deal. “We have the content and the tools to do it,” Walsh says.

For challenger Bloomberg, this is the second time it has tried to expand into the legal market. In 2004, it began offering its “B-Law” research product, but it didn’t gain a foothold in the market because it was only served up on Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals.

The new Bloomberg Law, which the company has been quietly beta testing over the past year in law schools and a handful of law firms in the New York metropolitan area, fixes that problem. It can be accessed from any PC, and its citation analysis summaries and strength-of-authority indicators “graphically display the treatment of your case and allow you to easily see the extent to which subsequent courts have analyzed your case,” according to promotional materials. A company representative declined to comment on the product for this article.

Read the article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Is Your Offsite Data Safe

Does the Fourth Amendment protect data stored on remote servers? Information Week Government, reports that it might not be protected.  Here's an excerpt: 

Americans take for granted that, except in the plots on popular television shows, the government typically cannot come into their homes without showing them a valid search warrant," Smith said. "But the courts have cast doubt on whether the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which provides this protection, applies to information that is transferred to a third party for storage or use.

Read the article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

The Google Case: When Law and Ethics Collide

From The Atlantic an interesting article on Google in China.  Here's an excerpt:

A fundamental precept for international companies is compliance with the law of the nation in which they do business.

But a recurrent dilemma is what happens when that "national law" (e.g. state censorship in China) collides with the corporation's global ethical standards (e.g. "no censorship" for a media company)?

The answers are not easy--or uniform. They depend, greatly, on the corporation's deeply held values and on strongly held views of important stakeholders (shareholders, creditors, employees, customers, suppliers).

Read the article here.

Court clarifies DNA review

From the SCOTUSBlog:

The Supreme Court, ruling Monday on a granted case that never came up for oral argument, decided summarily that flaws in presenting DNA evidence during a criminal trial do not necessarily undermine the value of a conviction based in part on that evidence.  After having the Nevada rape case of Troy Brown under review for nearly a full year, the Court decided it in an unsigned opinion and rejected two constitutional challenges to the conviction.  It sent back to lower courts a third challenge.  The decision was based mainly on a legal ground that neither side in the case believed remained in issue — the sufficiency of the DNA evidence, under Jackson v. Virginia (1979).

Read the blog here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

2009 ABA Journal Blawg 100

The 100 best Web sites by Lawyers for Lawyers, as chosen by the editors of the ABA Journal is available here.

Posted by Jon Lutz