Svengalis, Rhode Island state law librarian, is author of the Legal Information Buyer s Guide and Reference Manual, an annual publication. Although West and Lexis are still the most comprehensive services, Svengalis says, they nevertheless are offering packages to small practitioners that hadn t before been available. The rest was purchased by small law practices and other businesses. The big players acknowledge increased competition. A spokes- person for Lexis parent Reed Elsevier attributes the 1999 drop in revenues of Nexis the company s news and information service to industrywide pricing pressures.
Lawyers bill their time hourly.
They rarely have time to jump around from site to site to piece together the information they need. When asked about competition, a West spokesperson responded that the company bases its pricing on customer needs. West and Lexis also cite the comprehensiveness of their services and the broader and greater depth of cases going back many years. Indeed, many new services started by offering access to databases of a single state or group of states, earning them regional clients. Loislaw along with services such as VersusLaw and Quicklaw culls its own databases, drawn from state and federal courts and statutes.