Can law tech’s big beasts Lexis and Thomson stay on top in a changing industry?

So ubiquitous have two companies become in legal tech circles that they are rarely discussed directly, just accepted as facts of life, like gravity or air. Those two are, of course, LexisNexis and the legal division of Thomson Reuters, which have over the last 30 years positioned themselves as the dominant providers of the informational ‘plumbing’ law firms require to ply their trade.

For LexisNexis that key moment came in the 1970s when an arm of the Ohio State Bar Association commissioned a project to deliver an information service exclusively aimed at legal research, named Lexis. During the same decade West Publishing was Lexis’ main competitor, using a computer-assisted legal research project that would later be branded Westlaw.