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> So I’m now seeing that NLP (Natural Language Processing) as confirmed by Quora, is hard, meaning that Westlaw and Lexis Nexis is actually pretty decent?! NLP and search are hard to get right in a nuanced and high-accuracy-requiring field like law. And Westlaw and LexisNexis have done a pretty good job with those. It's not easy (or rather, it's not cheap -- think tens of millions of dollars) to build what they have built. Even Google hasn't with Scholar -- though to be fair, Google hasn't tried very hard to get legal search to that level. Ultimately, in the future legal search is not going to be a money maker, and Westlaw and LexisNexis will take a big hit when free happens. As I see it (i.e., from the vantage point of Judicata), search will ultimately be free, just as Google search is free. And just as Google has been able to make boatloads of money on "ancillaries" to the results (ads), the ancillaries will be the big money makers here -- but in the forms of extremely precise analytics and AI. Want to see cases Shepardized on an individual point of law, and other on-point or conflicting cases? Here it is, for a price. Given a set of facts and a procedural context, want to know the best argument to make to a particular judge? Here it is, again for a price. Given a legal brief presenting your opponent’s argument, want to see a line by line teardown? Here it is, and once again, for a price. Want your own legal brief automatically outlined? You’ve got it, and again, it costs money. Of course, getting there is not easy (it’s a long road that requires going over every single case out there with a fine toothed technological comb), and so while I'd say that Westlaw's and LexisNexis's days are numbered -- that number is well over a thousand. |