Here’s the nub of the piece..
Do make an effort to read it all at
In my opinion Bloomberg Law should have been adopted by more law firms by now. It weaves business and legal content together seamlessly– but this unique approach was not enough to overcome the market’s primary objection. Bloomberg Law entered the market at the worst possible time – at the height of the Great Recession. Then Bloomberg executives made some strategic decisions which I believe have had a lasting and significant impact on the company’s ability to displace its competitors.
1. The product was priced too high.In 2009 when Bloomberg Law launched, the market was ready for a disrupter… at the right price. Although Bloomberg Law was only partially built out, it was priced on par with Lexis and Westlaw. Lexis and Westlaw enterprise contracts had ballooned between 1980 and 2000 because online research costs were being passed along to clients. By the time Bloomberg Law launched, clients were pushing back and online costs were viewed as overhead to be born by law firms. Bloomberg was right that lawyers were ready to stop billing clients for online research but wrong about the price they would pay to achieve that goal. Bloomberg didn’t recalibrate the Lexis and Westlaw price benchmarks down to a level which could be easily absorbed as overhead by a law firm.
2. The citator problem. Bloomberg Law launched as a litigation research product, but lawyers didn’t understand or trust the product’s citator. There were early problems with the citator which slowed adoption of the citator even after the problems were corrected.
3. Courts wouldn’t accept Bloomberg Law citations in briefs. As recently as 2015, most federal judges were not accepting Bloomberg Law citations in briefs. This is serious shortcoming for a product which is sold with a premium price tag. It also meant that firms “had to” maintain a subscription to Blaw’s competitor products. It is simply hard to me to believe that Bloomberg could not have done something to accelerate the federal judges access to Bloomberg Law… Seven years is a long time for a major product to lack this major “use case.”
In recent years Bloomberg has moved beyond being a caselaw research system. Bloomberg Law Transactions offers very sophisticated workflow and analytics capabilities. But the shortcomings outlined above had already burned through some customer confidence and good will. Bloomberg executives, even to this day seem reluctant to “own” the impact of these product shortcomings.
Missing the Early Big Data Opportunity. Maybe Bloomberg should have started with a product for transactional lawyers rather than one for litigators. In 1982, Mike Bloomberg successfully disrupted the financial data market when he launched Market Master (later renamed the Bloomberg Business terminal) to compete with Telerate and Reuters. Bloomberg decided to go beyond reporting market prices and started adding calculation functions to the terminals.
