Ambrogi writes
Decisis, the legal research service that LexisNexis parent RELX launched in 2021 to compete against Fastcase for a share of the bar association partnership business, has expanded over just the past year from 10 to 20 bar partnerships, including 14 state bar associations.
In fact, two of those state bars have yet to publicly announce their move and still list Fastcase on their websites as a member benefit.
I first wrote here in 2022 about the “quiet” launch of Decisis, which was developed as a subsidiary of RELX under the corporate name Legal InQuery Solutions Inc., but whose website makes no mention of either LexisNexis or RELX.
In a subsequent 2022 interview with Jeffrey S. Pfeifer, who is chief product officer for LexisNexis in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., as well as president of Legal InQuery Solutions, he confirmed that Decisis was created primarily for the purpose of targeting bar association affinity partnerships.
Its launch followed not long after Fastcase acquired Casemaker in 2021, ending what had been a longstanding competition to be the preferred legal research member benefit for state and local bar associations. (Pfeifer told me the product was not a response to the acquisition and had been in development before then.)
Once Fastcase made that acquisition, it effectively cornered the bar association market, becoming the sole legal research provider for the bar associations of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and four-dozen metropolitan, county and specialty bar associations.
That gave Fastcase – which has since merged with international legal research company vLex – a total number of users of more than 1 million lawyers, out of an estimated 1.3 million lawyers in the country.
When I last talked to Pfeifer about Decisis in 2022, two state bars had signed on with the service: the Ohio State Bar Association (OSBA), which began offering it to members in October 2021, and the Nebraska State Bar Association (NSBA), which started with the service on May 2, 2022.
Since then, Decisis has continued to add new partnerships, bringing its current tally to 14 state bar associations, four local bar associations, and two plaintiffs’ lawyers associations.
