Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Lexis Nexis Announces atVantage, while Thomson Acquires LiveNote

I was recently invited to an 'Advisory Council' meeting by Lexis to discuss their future plans with InterAction and how to better leverage content within it. This meeting was on the heels of their announcement regarding atVantage, a new iteration of Market Intelligence.

Lexis has begun to realize the power of pushing content into InterAction and atVantage is the first attempt to do just that. They briefly showed us some screen shots of the new system and spent a lot of time getting feedback from the group as to the direction they should take with the product. I was encouraged that it truly wasn't a sales pitch, they really wanted to hear how they could better meet the needs of large law firms. The main take away from the session was that there is a lot of data that lawyers need to see related to a contact. Some data is generated by the firm and some sits externally, Lexis needs to figure out how to aggregate the data and present it in an easily consumable format for the lawyers. It may take a while, but it appears that Lexis is on its way towards a better, more information rich InterAction product.

Meanwhile....

Thomson announced last week that they have acquired LiveNote. I truly marvel at the Big 2's appetite for buying companies and then figuring out how to make it work in their product structure. Given that Lexis has the Applied Discovery offering, it shouldn't be long before Thomson/West look to also acquire a company that provide an online review tool for e-discovery.

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