WestLaw March Towords Online Legal Databases Of China Market

Westlaw is generally recognized as the best legal online database provider in law indutry, and it is almost the necessary on-line legal research tool to U.S. legal practitioners and law students. My knowledge of Westlaw originated from “Black’s Law Dictionary”. At that time, I heard that it is the Bible of a lawyer. Therefore, I bought one of version 7 against many setbacks. And several years ago, I bought the latest version 8. In last year, I bought a Black’s Law Dictionary® Digital. I guess I can be regarded as great supporters of Westlaw. So, when being invited to participate in the “FDI and Westlaw” theme Sharon sponsored by Westlaw, I was really pleasantly surprised. I finally had the opportunity to have close understanding of Westlaw.

On June 12th, 2008, the “FDI and Westlaw” theme Sharon was held in Shanghai FourSeasons Hotel as scheduled by Westlaw. In addition to the speeches of the senior lawyers, Mr. Yao Songbo, CEO of Westlaw China Area, introduced the company's origins and organizational framework, and focused on the “Westlaw万律” —— a localized Chinese legal online database product. This is a good news to the domestic lawyers. The domestic enterprises such as Chinalawinfo.com should not turn a blind eye to the intervention of this aircraft carrier. In the near future, perhaps we can feel the benefits of competition.

From a live demonstration of the “Westlaw万律”, it mainly provides the data retrieval of Chinese laws, regulations and cases. It is inferior to Chinalawinfo in data quantity now, but its classification or topics are quite good such as FDI and so on. I have manually made some of these topic before making retrieval to my project experience, but there is no time for me to do detailed notes, for example: Law and Regulations, and Collection of Regulations of International Forwarders. Chinalawinfo is still to be improved in the aspects of legal practice themes classification retrieval. Its “intelligent association” two-way link technology can only solve the relevance retrieval initially. However, theme retrieval of high-quality requires the experts’ re-classification and treatment. It is estimated that it may have thorough changes if Chinalawinfo can hire hundreds of full-time lawyers like Westlaw.

I am very surprised that Westlaw does not focus on the research and development in both Chinese and English bilingual legal data. Although its staff denied my point of view, from three years’ research and development results of “Westlaw万律”, the bilingual data is extremely few (I feel it arranges a few symbolically). It undoubtedly shows that Westlaw’s strategic focus is on building pure localized Chinese legal databases, and will directly compete with domestic enterprises.

In my opinion, there is a slight lack of respect in the market research and strategic layout that Westlaw does not attach importance to the bilingual legal data. Looking at the domestic market, only 2 to 3 companies can provide bilingual legal data retrieval. The whole level of quality of their English translation is still unsatisfactory and the price is also high. However, even those companies of relatively large size as Chinalawinfo do not provide products of the bilingual database of contracts and legal instruments. If Westlaw began the research and development of such a bilingual database three years ago, perhaps the domestic companies could not compete with it. Of course, Westlaw is fully justified to win the domestic market relying on its great strength through several years, but I think this is sort of far away. And it does not really take it advantages.

In addition, there’re no signs of entrance to the Chinese market of Westlaw’s Brother, Elite (both are Thomson’s products), perhaps because Thomson and Reuters have just completed mergers and acquisitions. Elite’s ProLaw is a veteran of the legal practice management software. I made telephone and e-mail contacts several times before, but it ends up with nothing definite. I bought the Front & Back Office (Time Matters / Billing Matters) 9.0 Pro of LexisNexis at last. Time & Billing Matters and ProLaw are both the best legal practice management software in the United States. I hope that I can have a trial of ProLaw11 through Westlaw China at this time to see who the real king is, and spend some time on writing down some feelings for the domestic lawyers’ reference.

Author: Zhong Yi, Attorney at Law, Shanghai Runhe Law Firm