We have a number of Anon’s supplying us with opinion. This piece just came in from one of our industry insiders and illustrates that Bloomberg Law isn’t the magic bullet to cure the malaise of legal database culture, by the sound of it it’s as popular as SARS at the moment !
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Bloomberg is the hope of a lot of blogs to dethrone WEXIS. The reality is they are even smaller than Fastcase.
When I speak to the people there and I ask a question like, “What is the strategy to become #2 in the market?” They shrug their shoulders. The Bloomberg technology folks seem to be mushrooms. They know about what they do but have no idea about the end-to-end system
Part of the problem is Bloomberg has no legal culture. I have heard they are Bloombergizing all the BNA facilities, transforming them into wide open newsrooms. They have lawyers work on Bloomberg Financial Terminals. Yuk!
Their product is simply awful too. It is hard to be worse than Lexis Advance but Bloomberg has done it. Search is simply dreadful. I have heard that they they are the best at dockets but that’s the only positive comment I have heard about the product. I don’t use dockets so I can’t don’t know the real status.
In my own limited playing with Bloomberg Law, I have seen nothing that is an improvement over what is already out there. What’s the market for Bloomberg? If you’re going to pay their price, you might as well get Westlaw. If you’re willing to take reduced functionality, you might as well get Fastcase that is a better product.
