LN Purchase Of Law 360 Now Official

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Advisers to the deal were New York-based Simpson Thacher & Bartlett for Lexis, which approached Law360 for the acquisition, and Palo Alto, Calif.’s Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for Portfolio Media. (For more on the deal and consolidation in the legal news and research business see the Am Law Daily’s report.)

Law360 formed in 2004. It will operate independently, maintain its separate New York headquarters, and will likely expand its staff, said Lexis’ Liz Mason, vice president of research and litigation.

However, the months ahead will bring content integration, Mason said. For example, Law360 articles could be cross-linked with cases and regulations in the Lexis research database, she explained. Law360 obtains information from the U.S. court system’s PACER service, which Lexis could supplement with data from its own products, she said.

Lexis may also share technology. Law360 may lean on its new parent’s experience in building mobile applications. Lexis recently announced mobile applications for the legacy Lexis.com, its next-generation Advance service, and the InterAction CRM software — the latter due to ship this summer. “If there’s anything we can offer to them to improve that experience, we’ll probably do so,” Mason noted.

Customers should not expect immediate changes or substantial savings. “That could happen. It’s not something we intend to roll out broadly,” Mason said.

That comment is disappointing, said Mark Gediman, director of information services at Best Best & Krieger, in Los Angeles. “We have from time to time looked at [Law360], and their pricing does not seem to be, for want of a better term, reasonable for our purposes,” he said.

Best and its 200 attorneys use Lexis, but the firm is not a Law360 customer. Still, “My initial impression was it’s a good thing for law firms because it’ll make the content on Law360 more readily available. As they have their unique content, from time to time that is important,” he said. “From our perspective, I’m glad Thomson Reuters didn’t buy them.”

Susan Hanrahan, manager of library services at Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, said her firm’s 380 attorneys already use both services, and they’re bound to feel hesitant about what the acquistion could mean. “It’s always disconcerting when you hear things like this because you don’t know [what will happen],” she said. Yet the services of Lexis and Law360 are both well-liked at the Columbus, Ohio firm, she said.

An encouraging sign is that Lexis kept its word not to alter risk management information services from Seisint when it bought that company for $755 million in 2004, Hanrahan observed.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear if Lexis, in Dayton, Ohio, will make additional acquisitions to better compete against rivals Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg. “I don’t know that I would ever sort of sit back and say I feel like we’re done,” Mason said. “There’s a lot of assets of Lexis. In talking to the folks over at Law360, I think it’ll be a great complement.”

Lexis in May 2011 began archiving legal news from ALM, which is the parent company of CorpCounsel,? as well as The American Lawyer, Law Technology News, National Law Journal, and eight regional publications.