Unexpected Candour From a Publisher

Occasionally, a publishing representative will blurt out what we suspect – that customers for legal information are simply sheep to be shorn.

Double digit growth is what LexisNexis is aiming for, even in a highly competitive legal and tax information market that has taken to the net with a vengeance.

One of the ways in which the business has changed has been the disposal of much of its book publishing. “We sold off about a quarter of the books we were publishing, which probably only accounted for about 2% of our business. That enabled us to focus our resources on areas of growth and on LexisNexis Butterworth as an online platform. That’s the key: you have to focus where the money and the customers are.”

The challenge involved here is picking the most lucrative sets of customers for which to segment out separate applications.

UK law firms still lag well behind US law firms in terms of the amount they are paying for information services. The US legal information market is very competitive, but the average US fee earner is still paying twice as much for information as in the UK. This suggests there are still many opportunities for selling information into a developing UK legal market.

There are lessons here for those who expect that QL will continue to exist – and be priced – much the same as before the Lexis acquisition