Information Technology in the United States

Electronic Legal Information and the Legal Information Technology Market

The market for electronic legal information is currently dominated by LEXIS-NEXIS, which is
owned by Reed-Elsevier, Wolkers Kluwer, Bloomberg Law and West Group, a division of The Thomson Corporation. These companies are both large, well-established companies. They offer large legal databases. LEXIS-NEXIS has been in operation for over 41 years and West Group has been in operation for over 115 years. They also have a great name recognition, larger customer
bases and significantly grea financial, technical and marketing resources. This enable
them to undertake extensive marketing campaigns, to respond more quickly to new or emerging technologies and changes in customer requirements or to devote greater resources to the development, promotion and sale of their products.

LEXIS-NEXIS and West Group have significant penetration in the large law firm market. Also, both LEXISNEXIS and West Group maintain web sites that offer access to their legal databases. All of their legal information is in hypertext markup language, which is the standard format language used on the Internet, , which enable them to better serve their customers.

There are Internet portal companies that offer free access to government-sponsored sites that provide some of the same information that we provide. These companies often expect to
achieve high enough usage to allow them to achieve profitability by selling advertising on their sites.
Substantial amounts of free legal information is also available over the Internet and from other sources,
such as courts and other government agencies.

Resources

Further Reading

• Information about Information Technology in the Gale Encyclopedia of American Law.