The software and data sources for the three major legal market information services profiled in the March 2008 Issue.

By Larry Bodine

Competing software

LexisNexis’ offering is called atVantage. Maia Tihista, LN’s senior director of marketing, said “atVantage is designed for firms looking for business and competitive intelligence information to help define and direct their growth strategies.”  atVantage, she says, can help those firms “find the best cross-selling opportunities, and compare and contrast companies, industries and practice areas. atVantage allows firms to analyze markets and develop prospect lists. They can query the underlying data to reveal which companies in an industry or geography have cases or deals of certain types and in what volumes. This analytical strength allows firms to be very efficient in determining which companies and opportunities they need to get smarter on.”

Thomson West has a growing portfolio of products collectively called West Monitor Suite, built on the platform that began with West Litigation Monitor, formerly Firm360.  West Monitor Suite products aggregate information from disparate data sources, including information from across Thomson as well as outside databases, and couple it with powerful analytical engines to provide detailed, actionable information for driving key business decisions.

West Litigation Monitor analyzes litigation trends and activity by company, industry, practice area, jurisdiction, judge, law firm and individual practitioner. 

West Deal Monitor analyzes LIVEDGAR and other data to map relationships between attorneys, underwriters, issuers, buyers and acquisition targets.  

Slightly different in focus is West Peer Monitor, which provides accurate, current financial benchmarks by practice area and office location versus one or more groups of peer firms.

Allison Guidette, vice president of business of law at Thomson West, explains, “The key is not just amassing information, but the ability to apply analytical power over the proper data sets to provide the complete picture, whether it’s litigation activity, M&A and securities transactions, IP portfolios or law firm financial metrics.”

Data Sources

Both Thomson and LexisNexis have been on acquisition forays in recent years, and the sources of information reflect the companies they’ve purchased. 

LexisNexis combines hundreds of information sources for inclusion into its atVantage product including:

Company information available from America’s Corporate Finance Directory, Canadian Business Directory, CanCorp Plus, Company Intelligence – International, CoreData’s Canadian Institutional Database, Creditreform (GNB), D&B Global Duns Market Identifiers, Directory of Corporate Affiliations, Disclosure Online Database – U.S. Public Companies Profiles, EDGARPlus Database, The Executive Directories, Extel Cards Database, FBR Asian Company Profiles, Gale Group Inc, Company Briefs, Hoover’s Company Capsules, Hoover’s Company Profiles, Hoppenstedt Company Database, ICC Financial Analysis Reports, ICC Full-Text Quoted Company Annual Reports, INVESTEXT Database, Market Guide Company Profiles from Multex.com, Nelsons’ Company Research Reports, Nelsons’ Public Company Profiles, OneSource CorpTech Company Profiles Database, Pinnacor Stock Quotes and Charts, SEC Filings, Standard and Poor’s Corporate Descriptions, US Business Directory, Worldscope International Company Profiles and Zack’s Investment Research Inc.

AtVantage gets corporate transaction data from SharkRepellent (by FactSet), Mergerstat M&A Database, MergerMetrics, Private Investments in Public Entities (PIPE), Offerings and Vickers Securities Report. 

atVantage also includes in-depth litigation and intellectual property information from U.S. federal civil district court cases (from January 1995), the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory, Mealey’s Newsletters, the most recent year federal and state cases, combined federal and state trademarks, U.S. copyrights and patents. 

LexisNexis gets news from 22,000 total sources, including Dow Jones, Reuters, Barron’s, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Moody’s Investors ratings, Matthew Bender, Mealey’s CCH and BNA.

Thomson’s recent acquisitions of CourtExpress and GSI/LIVEDGAR combined with core assets such as Westlaw, Delphion and Derwent give West a host of valuable datasets for aggregation into Monitor Suite analytics. 

For litigation, West Litigation Monitor draws cases from all federal dockets and the most extensive collection of state and local dockets.  In addition to dockets, it adds all reported federal and state cases in Westlaw – all tied to the West keynote number system.  Jury verdicts and awards come from Thomson Litigator; other litigation information comes from Andrews Litigator Reporters. Company and industry information are drawn from a variety of sources, including Thomson Financial, Hoover’s, Dun & Bradstreet, Westlaw business records and Dialog, which covers 11,000 sources of information including The New York Times and other newspapers.

West Deal Monitor offers LIVEDGAR data from Securities & Exchange Commission filings, as well as data from Thomson Financial, including content about mergers and acquisitions, and corporate deals. Thomson Financial covers 30,000 public companies and hundreds of thousands of privately held companies.  Additional transaction information is generated by Dun & Bradstreet, the Westlaw company directory and secretary of state filings, Thomson Financial joint ventures, Investext analyst reports and more.

West IP Monitor will incorporate patent abstracts, applications and assignments from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, international patents from Derwent, and trademark information from TRADEMARKSCAN.

ALM Research Online

Users can look up a firm and get a report that includes billing rates, profits per partner, firm gross revenue, a list of major clients, a list of “Big Deals” and “Big Suits,” and which lawyer handled them, names of lateral partners who joined or left the firm, technology spending and more.  Corporate general counsel can compare the law firms that represent their company according to the year and type of cases handled.

ALM Research Online offers custom research and survey services. The target users for the database are large law firms in the Am Law 200® and NLJ 250 that want competitive intelligence on each other; corporate general counsel who want to profile firms they are using or might want to retain; and consultants, real estate companies and endemic vendors that target law firms as customers, says director of client relations, Chuck Lowry.

Some information is free, including a “Law Firm Search,” that searches over 1,000 law firm and legal industry websites for data; and “ALM Lists & Rankings Related Articles,” which includes all the published surveys with data about compensation, use of technology and companies represented.