Saturday, July 26, 2008

Bye Bye Lexis.

If you search for any law student blogs ("blawgs" as we nerds call them), you'll find early on the same posts during everyone's 1L year regaling the first days of library work where Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw are introduced. They are the 2 major databases for legal reference used by everyone (yay oligopoly -- when will Google buy them out?), and much like drug dealers, I mean, smart businesspeople, they make their services free during law school and then jack up the prices for professionals. I won't go into that part of it much more (seriously, just google for "1L" and "blog" and you'll see the same posts talking about how confusing both databases are -- again, yay oligopoly).

As part of their bait, they have reward points for using their database, sort of like frequent flyer miles, because you know, doing online research is exactly the same as flying to Fiji. If you're awesome, you might accumulate enough points for really cool stuff, like a digital camera, or a TV. Sort of like all that stuff on the top shelf at the arcade that you used skee ball tickets to try and get. I was never patient enough, so I ended up settling for tootsie rolls and Now 'n Laters. So you can imagine how my Lexis point acquisition turned out.

After 3 years: A $25 gift card to iTunes and 2 $10 gift card to Barnes and Noble. Supreme Court library, watch out, I'm a legal researching MANIAC.

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