Does anyone have any experiences to share about The Law.net? I have been receiving a lot of email from them. Some competition for Lexis and, especially, Westlaw is welcome, but is this option really competition?

How can they beat Lexis for $40/month with access to all libraries, including newspaper?

John Bradley
District Attorney
Williamson County, Texas

John:

John

Attempt 2 (I seem to have lost the ability to edit messages)

Your point is well taken. But without any experience on The Law.net, I wondered what its pros and cons might be.

It is a tough market to enter -- possibily the concept will fade away rather like the attempt a few years ago to establish competition for Premise.

I did a quick Google of Law.net and doesn't look to me to be competition for Westlaw or Lexis. http://www.law.net. It looks closer to U.S. Law Week or Martindale Hubble. I could be wrong.
It would be nice to have some sanely price competition for Lexis. IMO many aspects of Lexis are just awful. For exampe, "core concepts" are a joke compared to keynumbers and headnotes.

John: I agree with David, the service provided by Turnpike seems quite different from computerized legal research, but I too have no experience with it. By the way, your editing job looked very complete to me.

Now, David, isn't Lexis with core concepts much better than Lexis without core concepts? But, I agree, if West didn't want $75/month for less database, we would probably all be married to Westlaw.

An alternative to Westlaw and Lexis is LoisLaw. We had it for a year before we finally went to Lexis here at DPS' Office of General Counsel. Unfortunately, we don't have the great rate that the state's District and County Attorneys were able to get. Much more than $40 per month and we don't have access to the Nexis part or things like law reviews, specialized treatises, etc. without paying extra. One reason we went for Lexis--other than the fact it was cheaper than Westlaw--is that Lexis permits linking to any thing cited in a document without charge regardless if it is in database that is normally not in the subscription. Now if our internet connection would work a bit faster, all would be well!

The other major competitors are itislaw.com (which is available in part for free thru mytexasbar) and fastcase.com. Fastcase claims to have better search and sorting tools than westlaw, but has a smaller database and a higher pricetag-$1500 per year (as does itis- $80/mo). Much like the airline industry it will be hard for any of these newcomers to break into the market. At least we can be thankful thompson group has a competitor. By the way do you realize most lawyers are now at least bilingual, having acquired boolean as a second tongue?

Better a second tongue than a forked tongue! I guess every service is some sort of compromise. It is hard to beat the way Westlaw works, but the price is prohibitive. Lexis seems to be the next best thing.