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May 24, 2012
The Marketing Gurus Have Taken Hold of Lexis Advance
LN's the nutty professor ad is my all time favorite from the marketing gurus at Lexis. This one, image right, for Lexis Advance, is not.
If one wants to be in a generous spirit, the ad implies that LA's SE is so good you won't be confronted with contrary legal authorities produced by someone else that is going to require additional research. Alternatively, it implies LA's SE is so good, its search output won't require follow-up searching because the initial results will hit the nail on the head.
Any experienced practitioner knows both are dead wrong. No SE will ever produce that good a "sleep well" search experience because "real world" searching is interested, not disinterested, searching. It's the arguments made and the transactions crafted by opposing parties which is the end result of legal research. Legal research is a means to an end and that end is interpreting materials in the most favorable light. Those interpretations oftentimes require re-searching.
In a less generous spirt, not having to perform follow-up topical searching for the research assignment at hand is just a myth. Remember the WLN video which promoted the truly asinine storyline that WLN is going to find you that one document,which answers all needs. Finding this sort of holy grail of legal research hardly ever happens and WLN's West Search hasn't been making it happen more often.
I guess that when vendors develop new SEs, they just can't restrain themselves from crafting epic myths about them as the selling point for their new platforms. This may be the story WEXIS marketing gurus want to tell but how much "real world" legal research experience do you think these Mad Men have? [JH]
May 24, 2012 in Electronic Resource, Legal Research, Products & Services, Publishing Industry | Permalink
Comments
You are the one who is dead wrong. The ad doesn't imply what you suggest. It speaks to the heart of Lexis Advance, which is the fact that you no longer have to run the SAME search multiple times in different databases. With Lexis Advance you run the search one time and it automatically searches across all LN content. Of course you may have to run a DIFFERENT search if your original search didn't hit the nail on the head. Get real. Stop promoting epic myths about evil vendors.
Posted by: Jeff | May 25, 2012 4:06:13 AM
I frankly think the "research" done by the N.D. Ga. court in the Georgia State case was done using WestlawNext - or else by a very lazy researcher - since there is 11th Circuit precedent directly contradicting the holding in the case that allowed Ga. State to prevail on so many of the individual instances - namely that, because the use is for educational purposes, the first fair-use factor (nature of the use) favors Ga. State.
The 11th Cir. case (in accord with Supreme Court precedent, which the judge in this case misinterpreted) said that transformative use *has* to be considered. If the district court would have distinguished the case, that's one thing, but to not even mention it tells me they just didn't find the case, which a simple search in regular Westlaw using search terms something like transform! /3 use would have discovered (and did, when I looked).
Posted by: Scott | May 24, 2012 7:16:50 AM
