This puff piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune…
They write
Thomson’s Eagan HQ is strong and growing and appears the biggest employment beneficiary of the global merger one year ago of New York-based Thomson Corp. with London-based Reuters.
The combined publisher of financial markets, legal, accounting and health care information has weathered a stock-value decline and integration-related layoffs at the respective home offices.
But the Eagan headquarters for the Thomson Reuters global legal business is in the middle of adding about 300 people this year to what should be a 7,300-employee campus that supports growing businesses in North America, Europe, China, the United Kingdom, Chile, Argentina and Australia.
The Eagan-based legal business, driven largely by overseas expansion, employed about 6,300 in 2005. The flagship product, Westlaw, is now used by lawyers and courts in 60 countries.
"We’re very grateful," said Peter Warwick, chief executive of the Eagan-based legal business.
"Legal has 13,500 employees worldwide and more than 7,000 are in Eagan. Even with all of the economic difficulties, we are still in a position of being a growing business."
Operating profit in legal grew 9 percent to $1.1 billion as revenue grew 6 percent to $3.5 billion in 2008.
"There is incredible demand for information about Chinese commercial law in the U.S., the U.K. and Europe," said Warwick, a 10-year Thomson Reuters veteran who moved to Eagan in 2005.
Recent visitors to the former "West Publishing" campus, which a decade ago employed about 4,000, included lawyers and administrators from the "Supreme Peoples Court" in Beijing.
In the United States, we spend about 1.3 percent of our economic output on legal billings and about one in 300 of us are lawyers. China, one of the fastest-growing economies on Earth, spends 0.07 percent of economic output on legal billings and one in 8,500 is a Chinese lawyer.
Yet again – it’s the same mantra .. China is our saviour . We don’t want people to lose their jobs so we hope it’s true as well .. but it’s harder to make money in China than some think and especially with a fluid legal system that still is a long way off being codified we do worry that too much emphasis is being place on a market that might not perform as soon as many hope or think.
