Filevine: LOIS Legal Research Alternative Targets Westlaw, LexisNexis

• Filevine has launched LOIS, a new legal research platform aiming to compete with Westlaw and LexisNexis.
• LOIS offers a comprehensive, daily-updated database of American case law from all state and federal courts, available for free until the end of October.
• Filevine claims LOIS provides superior citation analysis, addressing "structural deficits" found in traditional tools like KeyCite and Shepard's.
• Academic research by Professor Susan Nevelow Mart supports criticisms of legacy citators' reliability and completeness.
• The platform's introduction could significantly impact legal research costs and accuracy, prompting legal professionals to evaluate this new alternative.

The availability of a powerful, initially free platform like LOIS could democratize access to high-quality legal research, challenging the long-held dominance of expensive subscription services and fostering greater legal research innovation across the industry.

Filevine has introduced LOIS, a new legal research platform positioned as a direct competitor to long-standing industry leaders Westlaw and LexisNexis. The company asserts that LOIS offers a superior alternative, particularly in its comprehensive case law database and advanced citation analysis capabilities. To encourage adoption and evaluation, Filevine is making the LOIS legal research platform available for free until the end of October. This strategic move aims to disrupt a market traditionally dominated by two major players, inviting legal professionals to reconsider their primary research tools.

The LOIS platform boasts an extensive collection of American case law, encompassing decisions from every state and federal court since the nation's inception. This vast corpus is meticulously updated on a daily basis, ensuring that users have access to the most current legal precedents. Furthermore, Filevine has announced plans to integrate reporter pagination and citations for published opinions into the platform, beginning later this month, enhancing its utility for formal legal drafting. The compilation of this database involved leveraging a diverse array of public and licensed legal sources, including contributions from community-focused organizations such as CourtListener, alongside data from established legal-data providers whose services are utilized by some of the world's largest corporations.

For decades, Westlaw and LexisNexis have maintained a near-monopoly over public case law and legal research, a position Filevine characterizes as a "quasi-governmental hold" over essential legal information. While acknowledging their historical "best in class" status, Filevine contends that this is no longer the case, particularly in the realm of citation analysis. The company argues that the established citator tools, West's KeyCite and Lexis's Shepard's, despite their institutionalized authority, present significant limitations and "serious structural deficits."

These legacy citators, according to Filevine, compel legal professionals to adapt their research methods to the software's constraints rather than facilitating intuitive inquiry. Lawyers often face the challenge of mastering specialized search syntax, anticipating database taxonomies, and manually interpreting complex signals and citing references. This often leads to experienced practitioners struggling to use these tools reliably, frequently resorting to vendor help desks, delegating tasks to junior associates, or spending considerable hours validating authorities. Filevine posits that the perceived complexity of these systems is not an inherent aspect of legal reasoning but rather a byproduct of the tools themselves, highlighting their "brittle" nature and the often-disparate results they yield. John Rizner, Product Manager at Filevine, who holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago (2018), has observed that a lawyer's citation accuracy can be more influenced by the specific product they subscribe to than by the underlying case law being evaluated, an assertion that echoes findings by Paul Hellyer.

The criticisms leveled against traditional legal citators are not new, with academic research previously highlighting their shortcomings. Professor Susan Nevelow Mart, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado Law School and former director of the William A. Wise Law Library, has extensively documented these issues. Her work, including "The Relevance of Results Generated by Human Indexing and Computer Algorithms: A Study of West’s Headnotes and Key Numbers and LexisNexis’s Headnotes and Topics," published in 102 Law Libr. J. 221 (2010), and its follow-up, "The Case for Curation: The Relevance of Digest and Citator Results in Westlaw and Lexis," found in 32 Legal Reference Services Q. 13 (2013), provides a scholarly foundation for Filevine's claims.

In "The Case for Curation," Professor Mart and her research team compiled a set of 90 cases to analyze the effectiveness and reliability of these established tools, underscoring the "gaps in citator results" that Filevine now emphasizes as potentially "shocking to any practitioner." This independent academic validation reinforces the notion that while a robust case law corpus is essential, the ability to accurately and efficiently determine the current validity of legal precedents is paramount, an area where Filevine aims for significant improvement with its LOIS legal research platform.

The introduction of Filevine's LOIS legal research alternative presents a significant development for legal professionals, including lawyers and compliance officers. The platform's initial free access period offers a compelling opportunity to evaluate its capabilities against established Westlaw LexisNexis alternatives. Filevine's claims of superior citation analysis and a comprehensive, daily-updated free US case law database could lead to substantial reductions in research costs and improvements in accuracy, directly addressing common pain points associated with KeyCite Shepard's problems.

This innovation signals a potential shift in the legal research landscape, moving towards more accessible and potentially more accurate tools. Practitioners are encouraged to monitor and experiment with such developments for competitive advantage and efficiency gains. The availability of a powerful, initially free platform like LOIS could democratize access to high-quality legal research, challenging the long-held dominance of expensive subscription services and fostering greater legal research innovation across the industry.

Lawyers and compliance officers should evaluate Filevine's LOIS as a potential alternative to traditional legal research platforms like Westlaw and LexisNexis, especially given its claims of superior citation analysis and current free access, which could significantly impact research costs and accuracy. This development signals a potential shift in the legal research landscape that practitioners should monitor for competitive advantage and efficiency gains.

Source: Original reporting via Filevine's open letter.