Lexis Shoots Itself in the Foot

I learned yesterday that when students extend their Lexis accounts for the summer this year, they will only get access to Lexis Advance, not to lexis.com. If a student needs access to materials beyond what is available on Lexis Advance, e.g., international law, then we will need to contact our academic representatives to get the student access to lexis.com. If all or most lexis.com content had been migrated over to Lexis Advance, this decision might make sense, at least from the corporate point of view. I can understand Lexis wanting to push students over to the new platform, but I'm not sure this is the best way to do it. Not all content has been migrated, and this is going to create a serious disincentive to use Lexis Advance this summer. For instance, we have a Land Use Law Center here at Pace Law School that hires many student interns to work over the summer; municipal regulations on which they depend are not on Westlaw and they are not yet on Lexis Advance. I already mentioned international materials and municipal regulations, but Lexis Advance is also missing some news sources and secondary legal materials. I can't help but think that this is a wrongheaded decision that will ultimately push students to use WestlawNext. It's also going to create administrative headaches for the reps, who will have to intervene to get lexis.com access for those students who need it. This policy is almost as annoying as the decision to require a new password for Lexis Advance in the first place!

Bad Lexis

Lately, I have talked with a number of students who are planning to set up solo law practices after they graduate and pass the bar exam--not surprising given the job market for new lawyers. Most of them plan on doing something else part time to pay the bills while trying to establish their practices, and they have very little money to devote to start-up costs. One big fear revolves around the loss of "free" access to Lexis and Westlaw once they graduate. New graduates know they have gotten dependent on these databases, and they wonder how they will cope without them. I have suggested a number of free, reliable websites for primary sources, and the Pace Law Library has a good online research guide that gathers together free and low-cost sources. I have recommended that graduates start with the free sources, and then go to Lexis when they need fee-based content such as Shepard's or Matthew Bender publications. Lexis had a good, pay-as-you-go option that allowed researchers to access only the materials they needed using a credit card. That option has been ended, according to an announcement Lexis posted recently. Lexis's reason for cutting off this option doesn't make a lot of sense to me: "This decision is part of our effort to create and support products that better meet those needs identified through collaboration with our customers ..." So exactly how does cutting off access by credit card affect that effort? The only thing that Lexis is trying to support is its own bottom line. Credit card access to pieces of the Lexis database meant that some users cancelled their subscriptions because it was more cost effective to do so. Lexis's decision really hurts the solo practitioner and the small law firm at a time of deep economic distress. Shame on you, Lexis!

A Coup for Lexis

Lexis has announced that as of May 1, it will be the "exclusive third party online distributor of ALM's broad collection of industry-leading legal content worldwide." What this actually means is that Westlaw will no longer offer access to The National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, New York Law Journal, New Jersey Law Journal, and a host of other publications. All of these titles will be available on Lexis, where they will help to level the playing field between the big two legal database vendors. As a teacher of legal research, this news is heartening. Students sometimes ask why they have to learn Lexis (students at my school tend to favor Westlaw, perhaps because we use TWEN), and access to the ALM publications will be a strong incentive.