Finding the laws that govern us

Mead-Data (Lexis) came in during the 1970s with its Wang-style dedicated workstations and its newly formed databases and had a huge disruptive effect by offering the first system of electronically retrievable legal authorities ever. The system was very clunky when I used it in law school in the 1976-78 era but has since been highly refined and is highly useful for those willing and able to pay the high price associated with the service.

Lexis eventually undercut the West monopoly and sent West scrambling for a competitive response (hence, Westlaw).

The competition between Lexis and Westlaw did lead to far better pricing for some users, from the old "x dollars per minute" model to flat-rate pricing for users in specific categories (e.g., small firms), but this still involved hundreds of dollars per month at minimum (anything beyond the specific categories remained x dollar per minute).

Of late, other services have cropped up (LawNet) that have made a lot of the case law available at much cheaper fixed pricing (e.g., under $100/mo) but their offerings were incomplete.

The trend is unmistakable. For Lexis and Westlaw to compete, they will eventually have to lower their pricing considerably. Even then, there is a serious question whether their resultant margins will leave them with a viable business model. Only time will tell on this.

By the way, the downward trend for Lexis/Westlaw is tied to the vast disruption that has occurred with Big Law, which, in its heyday, was a massive user of such services that paid little attention to the cost aspect (costs were simply passed on to clients). In our cost-conscious era, Big Law is reeling in the short term, as are Lexis and Westlaw.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_hol...

West certainly provided added value in the beginning, but that kind of service needs relentless quality control of a kind that West hasn't served up for a long time.

I was not saying in my above comment that Google will replace Lexis/Westlaw. What I am suggesting is that they will change how lawyers perform legal research. What this does is separate case search from case hosting. And case search is the really expensive part. Basically, as I see it, lawyers will start their searches on Google, and eventually migrate to Lexis/Westlaw when they've narrowed their focus, or run into a dead end. And if that happens, all those searches that migrated to Google, are searches that are no longer run on Lexis or Westlaw (and for which they can no longer charge a fee).