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Lexis Closes Research Gap/LiveNote Acquires RealLegal

By Adam Schlagman
July 28, 2005

For years one of the major distinctions separating Westlaw from LexisNexis was West's headnote integration. Well, this gap in the capabilities of the two major legal research providers has apparently been closed with Lexis' recent announcement that its Shepard's Reports citation tool is now completely integrated with LexisNexis Headnotes. This integration of LexisNexis Headnotes into Shepard's will permit faster and more effective validations as well as “looping” Shepard's into the research process via Headnotes.

With the integration of LexisNexis Headnotes and Shepard's, legal researchers will benefit from:

  • Shepard's reports, which can be restricted by LexisNexis Headnote numbers.
  • Case Headnotes that can be displayed and printed in Shepard's.
  • The FOCUS feature and Custom Restrictions, both of which have been merged into a single form and LexisNexis Headnotes have been added to the form to allow researchers to restrict by LexisNexis Headnote.
  • The ability to select a Headnote in Shepard's and link to the position in the citing case that matches the language of the chosen Headnote.
  • The Shepardize-Restrict by Headnote link which provides researchers with a shortcut to a Shepard's answer set restricted by that Headnote, allowing them to immediately assemble a list of cases that both cite their case and discuss the issue captured in the chosen Headnote.
  • The new Restricted Shepard's Summary feature which provides researchers with a quick overview of the important information in a restricted or FOCUS feature answer set. It also provides a link to open the Unrestricted Summary to see an overview of the entire answer set.

The company has further announced that additional enhancements will be available to Shepard's Citations users later this year. Included in these enhancements is the Shepard's Alert, a proactive notification service similar to the ECLIPSE electronic clipping service available on lexis.com. For more information on Shepard's, visit www.lexisnexis.com/shepards.

LiveNote Acquires RealLegal:

The acquisition includes RealLegal E-Transcript Manager, a software product used by more than 75% of the U.S. court reporting agencies, as well as RealLegal Publisher, RealLegal Binder and RealLegal Exemplaris applications. The acquisition excludes RealLegal Practice Manager, which will be retained by its existing owner and will discontinue the use of the name RealLegal after a transitional period.

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