Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
Tom Blakely, a federal judicial law clerk and attorney, details how Westlaw and LexisNexis have established a duopoly over legal research, leading to high costs and stifled innovation, even as generative AI emerges. The article explains the historical context of legal research, the role of West Publishing's proprietary systems, and how a series of mergers and political dealings led to the current two-company dominance. It also critiques the government's PACER system for court records and calls for opening legal information to the public domain to foster competition and improve access to justice.
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i like the imagery of citizens taking a crowbar to the duoply.
artists and authors alike got a bad deal when it comes to LLMs and yet it gets justified in the steamroll of technological progress.
and yet entrenched monopolies on academic and legal writings seemed to have mostly escaped.
it may be a boring hill to fight on, but it seems worthy of public input and possibly one day, ownership.
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