Cost of West and Lexis Databases

Cost of West and Lexis Databases in the United States

The costs of database subscriptions can be quite expensive (Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, and the Legal Information Market, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 797, 830 (2006)). In large part, this is due to market concentration in favor of just two vendors—Westlaw and Lexis (Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, and theL egal Information Market, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 797, 821 (2006)).

With a 90% market share in the legal information industry, these companies form a “duopoly,” which can drive up prices. Hall suggests that the inability of smaller firms to pass legal research costs to clients adversely affects their ability to access expensive databases, which puts them at a disadvantage and “perpetuates the notion that the legal world is run by the ‘haves’ at the expense of the ‘have-nots.’” David Hall, Google, Westlaw, LexisNexis and Open Access: How the Demand for Free Legal Research Will Change the Legal Profession, 26 Syracuse Sci. & Tech. L. Rep. 53, 67 (2012). See also Michael E. Heintz, Comment, The Digital Divide and Courtroom Technology: Can David Keep Up with Goliath?, 54 Fed. Comm. L.J. 567 (2002) (arguing that an inability to pay for software and hardware for courtroom presentations and law practice technology could lead to a “digital divide” and that courts should continue to provide basic technologies to “level the playing field”).

Typically, charges for using these databases are incurred through a combination of hourly, transactional, and flat-rate billing (Sarah Gotschall, Teaching Cost-Effective Research Skills: Have We Overemphasized Its Importance?, 29 Legal Reference Services Q. 149, 155 (2010)). Under any combination, subscriptions can be cost-prohibitive because fees incurred outside of a flat-rate plan can be unexpectedly large and fixed rates can increase annually with increased usage (Sarah Gotschall, Teaching Cost-Effective Research Skills: Have We Overemphasized Its Importance?, 29 Legal Reference Services Q. 149, 156–57 (2010)).

One scholar argues that these characteristics make Westlaw and Lexis “particularly suited to large law firms that bill clients.” (Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, and the Legal Information Market, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 797, 830 (2006)) Because such pricing might be cost-prohibitive for a substantial number of legal information consumers, these vendors have offered limited access products for reduced fees to attorneys in smaller settings (Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, and the Legal Information Market, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 797, 831 (2006)).

These products are fundamentally different in that they are often severely restricted by jurisdiction or practice area or both, and there is no option to retrieve documents beyond a predetermined set of databases (Sarah Gotschall, Teaching Cost-Effective Research Skills: Have We Overemphasized Its Importance?, 29 Legal Reference Services Q. 149, 157 (2010)). Additionally even reduced access can be relatively expensive (Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, and the Legal Information Market, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 797, 831 (2006)).

Small firms are not well positioned to pay the high costs of traditional legal database subscriptions.

According to the Legal Information Buyers Guide and Reference Manual, between 1995 (the year before the Thomson acquisition) and 2008 West’s print prices increased 232%. During that same period Lexis/Matthew Bender print prices increased a mere 70%.

Cary J. Griffith and Vicki C. Krueger, in their book “Recovering Online Legal Research Costs: Best Practices
for Enhancing Small Firm Profitability and Service to Clients” (2005), said that “online research
can be one of the biggest expenses incurred by modern law firms—often second only to personnel
costs as the highest overhead item in a small firm’s budget”.

As Citypages says:

“From 1996 to 2005, the price for initial editions of Thomson’s legal books went up about 4.5 percent each year—just slightly above the increase in inflation, and comparable to LexisNexis’s 4.2 percent annual increase for similar materials.

But during the same period, Thomson’s price for supplementation—updates to the initial books after changes in the law occurred—rose 11.5 percent each year, far higher than both the rate of inflation and Lexis’s increase in prices for the same service.”

West

Westlaw

Westlaw is a commercial online legal database that emphasizes U.S. case law, statutes and regulations, legal texts, news and other information. Westlaw is part of the West Group, which traces its roots to the very beginning of the American legal publishing industry with the publication of a systematic case reporter series for American case law. The West Group is also known for the development of its “key number” system for identifying legal concepts or issues within the headnotes of the cases it publishes. Some of the more well known titles published by the West Group include The American Digest System, American Jurisprudence, Corpis Juris Secundum, American Law Reports, Black’s Law Dictionary, as well as numerous case reporters and legal textbooks. In addition to its online services, the West Group also publishes a wide variety of CD-ROMs. In 1996, it was somewhat ironic that the West Group — a leading American publisher — was acquired by Thomson Corporation, a Canadian news organization (Thomson Corporation is also the parent of Carswell).

According to CityPages, Westlaw “charges a firm of six to ten lawyers as much as $30,000 a year to access its state and federal databases. But since attorneys’ time is worth a lot of money, the service pays for itself. After all, the more work they can do, the more money they can make.”

A subscription is required for using Westlaw, but special, free academic subscriptions are available for law students. In Canada, academic access to Westlaw is provided through WestlaweCarswell.

Westlaw allows for searching using terms and connectors (boolean operators), a template or a natural language system called WIN (Westlaw is Natural). One powerful feature of Westlaw is its online case citator called KeyCite that allows the user to quickly and accurately note up American case law and federal legislation. KeyCite warns the user through the use of “flag” symbols about the strength of the case being noted up: a red flag warns that the case is no longer good law for at least one point it contains, and a yellow flag warns that the case has some negative history but hasn’t been reversed or overruled.

Westlaw provides online documentation on how to use its databases, in addition to training that will be provided by law library staff.

CityPages says:

“In 1995, West’s management decided to put the company up for sale. Thomson Corporation, a Canadian information mega-firm, purchased West for $3.45 billion. Though the Department of Justice antitrust division got involved, Thomson West came out controlling about 40 percent of the legal publishing market.

At the time, people said Thomson paid too much. They doubted that Thomson would be able to squeeze more profit out of West, which was already posting 25 percent returns. But since its takeover, Thomson has consistently managed to attain 30 percent or higher profit margins.”

Lexis-nexis

Lexis-Nexis is the other leading vendor of American online legal resources, although it also offers extensive news databases and law-related information from around the world, including Canada and the United Kingdom. Lexis-Nexis, based in Dayton, Ohio, is a division of Reed Elsevier Inc, one of the world’s largest publishers. As such, Lexis-Nexis has a common parent with other well-known legal publishers such as Matthew Bender, Martindale-Hubbell and Butterworths Canada. Lexis-Nexis began its operations in 1973.

Lexis-Nexis has a fairly easy-to-use web-based search engine interface. One key feature of Lexis-Nexis is its online citator called Shepards, the citator well known in its print format and now kept up-to-date on a daily basis to allow researchers to note up American cases online.

Westlaw Classic and WestlawNext

In Westlaw Classic, additional search (beyond the databases agreed) costs more. Therefore, some legal researchers limit the number of content databases they search in. In practice, this means, in the case of users, opting for primary sources and ignoring secondary sources.

In WestlawNext, searching is included within the West subscription plans. It is possible to search without limit, but the underlying content has a separate cost.

In February 2010, Thomson Reuters published its “WestlawNext Pricing Guide for Commercial Plans”. This guide is the only publicly available source of information that exists about WestlawNext
pricing to date. This pricing guide confirms that WestlawNext costs a researcher $60 per search for running or editing a search. That document also summarizes what it calls “Chargeable Events,” and it lists per-minute and transactional charges that users will incur for opening various types of documents, for example: cases ($13.00); state statutes, court rules, and regulations ($16.00); federal statutes, court rules, and regulations ($25.00); secondary sources (journals and law reviews, practice guides, and jury instructions) ($30.00); premium secondary sources (A.L.R., C.J.S., American Jurisprudence 2d) ($46.00); Fifty-State Surveys ($250.00); trial court filings (pleadings, motions, memoranda, and court orders) ($75.00); or New York Times ($36.00). KeyCite is also a chargeable event costing $7.00 per citation.(1)

West offers other pricing plans for WeslawNext, which would impact researchers costs (and, therefore, use) differently.(2)

A blogger wrote that an attorney could run up a $3,300-per-hour bill on WestlawNext when viewing appellate briefs or could spend $3,400 to view a state survey.(3)

Thomson Reuters, like Lexis, is open to price negotiations with solos and law firms. The results of these negotiations are covered by a confidentiality clause, and therefore clients of Lexis or West databases are required to not disclose the specific subscription terms of their access to the databases.

“(T)he practice of charging a fee for each opened document will discourage researchers from opening and reading documents. It will cause researchers to examine fewer documents and discover less information….Pricing structures like WestlawNext’s, which discourage the practice of opening and reading multiple documents during the research process, will surely result in less thorough and less productive research.”(4) Users have no means to know if a document in the search results will be valuable only by viewing the document’s citation and a few sentences of text displayed in the screen.

“This type of research is sloppy at best and at worst could amount to malpractice. It would be reckless for lawyers to decide to cite to authority after scanning the few lines of text that appear in a WestlawNext search result.”(5)

Lexis and Lexis Advance

The pricing model for Lexis Advance for solo practitioners is different. Solo attorneys pay a monthly flat fee of $175, with no additional charges incurred per full document viewed.

References and Notes

1. Westlaw Next Pricing Guide for Commercial Plans (Feb. 2010), available at http://west.thomson.com/pdf/librarian/L-356047.pdf.

2. See Westlaw Quick Reference Guide: Westlaw Pricing for Plan 1 Subscribers (Apr. 2006) available at http://west.thomson.com/documentation/westlaw/wlawdoc/billing/wlplan1.pdf (listing pricing options for “private plan subscribers”).

3. Greg Lambert, WestlawNext Pricing: Up to $3,400 per Hour!! 3 Geeks and a Law Blog (Mar. 3, 2011), available at http://www.geeklawblog.com/2010/03/westlawnext-pricingup-to-3400-per-hour.html

4. Ronald E. Wheeler Jr., Does WestlawNexr Really Change Everything?, The Implications of WestlawNext on Legal Research 376 Law Library Journal, Vol. 103:3 [2011-23]

5. Lee F. Peoples, Testing the Limits of WestlawNext, pag. 137, Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 31:125–149, 2012, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

See Also

      • Low cost internet US legal research
      • Study Aids
      • Westlaw Classic
      • WestlawNext
      • Lexis Advance
      • Lexis Nexis
      • Lexis
      • How to search legal journal indexes?
      • Secondary Sources in Legal Research
      • Montreal Declaration on free access to law

Further Reading

  • Lee F. Peoples, Testing the Limits of WestlawNext, 31 Legal Reference Services Quarterly 125-49 (2012)
  • Kendal F. Svengalis, Legal Information Buyer’s Guide & Reference Manual 152 (New England Law Press 2011).
  • http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2012/10/no-sacred-cow-models-sole-provider-primary-provider-or-multiple-narrow-focused-providers-for-online-.html
  • Jennifer Twa, The New WestlawNext Customer Resource Center, WestlawInsider (March 27, 2012) available at http://westlawinsider.com/westlaw-next/the-new-westlawnext-customer-resourcecenter/
  • Lisa D. Kinzer, The ‘Next’ Generation: Measuring First-Year Student Use of WestlawNext 9 (Jan.21, 2011), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1791885
  • Catherine M. Dunn, The Next Generation of Westlaw: WestlawNext, 54L. Lib. Lights 4 (2010).
  • Jason Wilson, WestlawNext Review: Ending the Tyranny of the Keyword? Rethink (Jan.28, 2010), available at http://www.jasnwilsn.com/2010/01/28/westlawnext-review-ending-the-tyranny-ofthe-keyword;
  • Tom Boone, WestlawNext and the Future of Legal Research, TomBooneDotCom (Jan.29, 2010), available at http://tomboone.com/library-laws/2010/01/westlawnext-and-future-legal-researchinstruction
  • Lee F. Peoples, Testing the Limits of WestlawNext, Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 31:125–149, 2012, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
  • Ronald E. Wheeler, Does WestlawNext Really Change Everything? The Implications of WestlawNext on Legal Research, 103 L. Lib. J. 359–377 (2011).
  • Joe Hodnicki, WestlawNext: Pros and Cons and General Comments from Law Librarians, L. Libr. Blog (June 16, 2011), available at http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2011/06/westlawnext-pros-and-cons-and-general-comments-from-law-librarians.html

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