Article – Law Libs Blog USA: The Role Model for Legal Publishing CEOs: Remembering Dwight Opperman

Her's the piece and link http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2013/06/remembering-dwight-opperman.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LawLibrarianBlog+(Law+Librarian+Blog)   We are saddened to hear the news of Dwight Opperman’s passing. Dwight’s great vision and dedication to our legal business was matched by his unwavering passion for the rule of law and service to the bench and bar. The employees of Thomson Reuters extend our thoughts and condolences to the Opperman family at this time. The foundation of the business that Dwight built – our commitment to editorial excellence, customer-focused innovation and a legacy of service to the bench and bar – remains the very bedrock of this business. Dwight’s stewardship of this business, and his passion for the rule of law, are enduring testament to his tenure as CEO of this business. -- John Shaughnessy, Vice President, Corporate Communications, Thomson Reuters Young-timers may not recognize the name but old-times certainly do. Dwight Opperman worked his way up the West Publishing Company ranks from an editorial position to CEO of the Company. Among his many accomplishments, he brought West into the online legal search era starting in the mid-1970s. The initial version of West's search service was not well received and rightly so; it was crap. West management recommended returning to its core print business. Instead, Opperman insisted that the search service be improved. "'The thing that really made West rich and big was electronic data and retrieval,' John Nasseff, a former West executive and friend of Opperman's, said... . Opperman had to convince a reluctant board of directors to stay the course on Westlaw in the 1970s." Quoting from Dwight Opperman, former West Publishing chief, dies at 89 (TwinCities, June 13, 2013). But for that decision West would have lagged far behind Mead Data Central's Lexis. Way back then Mead dominated the market. In a nutshell, that was because it created the commercial market for very expensive online legal search. West eventually found a toehold in the small law firm market due to corporate brand recognition. Remember Mead was known for its paper products. Westlaw started penetrating Lexis's BigLaw market using a marketing-sales strategy that emphasized retaining West print reporters, research and reference tools while using Westlaw to fine-tune print-based research results. That approach resonated with law firm librarians at a time when Lexis sales reps were pitching the mantra of "you can do it all online" in the 1980s. It certainly didn't help Lexis that the Company was still myopically focused on dedicated equipment leasing revenues in its online legal search business plan. West's PC-based requirements gave 1980s tech savvy law librarians the opportunity to justify the acquisition of PCs in the workplace. In many instances, the first PC installed in BigLaw firms was one for accessing Westlaw. Just like those of us in law libraries who at the time had one foot firmly planted in print and the other in online, under Opperman's leadership one can make the case that West turned two legal publishers into vendors who competed for both print and online sales. Of course, that led to the massive consolidation in the industry. Only West and Lexis had the financial and IT resources to digitize primary and secondary legal materials for electronic distribution in the dial-up era. Opperman is also credited with approving the integration of natural language searching into Westlaw. Like it or not and most law librarians did not like it, this advance was more lawyer-friendly even when NLS, as it typically did, produced less precise search output results compared to Boolean operators and field specific researching. All things considered, however, just imagine what might have happened to West Publishing if Opperman had taken his managers advice to kill off online legal research and stayed with the Company's traditional course of selling only print resources. Reportedly West Publishing Company's largest stockholder, Dwight Opperman handed over the operation of the Company to his son Vance in 1993. In 1996, West was sold to Thomson Corp. for $3.4 billion. About Dwight Opperman, Simon Chester wrote "I'm willing to wager that no-one else (before or since) has made quite as much out of legal publishing". Opperman gave to many philanthropies including, for example, establishing the Opperman Scholar Program at Drake University. A Class of 1951 graduate of Drake University Law School, he also endowed the Dwight D. Opperman Lecture in Constitutional Law. For more, see Stephan Miller's WSJ journal article, Legal Opinions for the Digital Age. Slaw's Simon Chester remembers that Dwight Opperman had "quite a sense of humour, which you can gauge by this wonderfully gossipy interview about the judges and politicians he knew." Chester adds For the best piece on what it was like in West Publishing before the sale, a piece from the American Lawyer by a reporter who is now the executive editor of The New York Times, see Jill Abramson's West Publishing: The Empire's New Clothes in Student Lawyer, Vol. 12, Issue 5 (January 1984), pp. 17-41 – it's on Hein Online. While I never met Opperman, Bob Ambrogi did. Quoting from his LawSites post: I had the occasion to meet Opperman several times when he was West CEO. He was always gracious and cheerful and seemed sincerely interested in ensuring that West’s products were of the highest editorial integrity and quality. He represented an era of legal publishing that has been lost to digital technology and mega-conglomerates. In a sense, his death marks the end of an era.