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March 5, 2012
Adoption Rate Watch: WestlawNext vs. Lexis Advance
The latest data from Thomson Reuter's 2011 Year-End report has been add to the below table. Do note that WLN as a percent of the Westlaw Revenue base does not indicate that the actual revenue from WLN has been disclosed. The % of Westlaw Revenue base figure represents total revenue from Classic Westlaw subscribers who have acquired the WLN premium add-on to their Classic Westlaw costs. No one, by which I mean, no one in the investment community has ever asked the question, "how much revenue is being solely generated from WLN" in any investor call during the below listed quarterly reporting sessions.
Unlike the 2011 3Q investor call, this time there was no mention that "in order to ensure the return on these [WLN] investments, we intend to continue selling our product at a premium in the market." Quoting from LLB's November 2011 post, Taking the Pulse of WestlawNext Sales. Let's just add that it is pretty damn hard to perform any sort of ROI calculation when WLN financial data is not broken out in TRI's reports.
The question "how much revenue is coming in from Lexis Advance?" can be answered easily. Basically it is $00.00 although LA may generate some additional revenue from increased out-of-plan transaction charges that are allowed in Classic Lexis licenses because of LA's federated search capabilities. Once fully rolled out to all Classic Lexis account holders, LA's initial adoption rate will approach 100% because LA access is free.
We will really only know what WLN and LA adoption rates end up being and what revenues they will eventually generate when both vendors kill off their legacy systems unless some industry analyst in the investment community poses the WLN standalone revenue question before then. But free is a whole lot better than paying a premium to expose an install base of existing users of Classis WEXIS to a next-gen current-gen very expensive online legal search service. [JH]
| Quarter | Customers | WLN as % of Westlaw Revenue Base |
| 2010 1Q | 2,300 | Not published |
| 2010 2Q | 5,700 | Not published |
| 2010 3Q | 9,000 | 18% |
| 2010 4Q | 15,000 | 31% |
| 2011 1Q | 18,500 | 34% |
| 2011 2Q | 24,000 | 41% |
| 2011 3Q | 29,000 | 46% |
| 2011 4Q | 34,000 | 54% |
March 5, 2012 in Electronic Resource, Legal Research, Products & Services, Publishing Industry | Permalink
Comments
We are a resourceful, smart group of professionals. We can determine which investment analysts follow Thomson and collectively or individually send them a letter requesting that for the next quarterly investor call to ask questions ( we could give them examples) that will give rise to more transparency and a true financial picture of the legal division of the company.
Posted by: cookie lewis | Mar 6, 2012 8:48:48 AM
