Fastcase acquires rival legal-research company Loislaw
Legal research company Fastcase has acquired the competing service Loislaw from Wolters Kluwer.
In a Monday post on his blog LawSites, Bob Ambrogi reported that the transaction is an “assets-only deal” that includes the Loislaw brand and website, and will move Loislaw’s subscribers over to Fastcase. According to Ambrogi, Loislaw subscribers began receiving messages over the weekend that the deal was done and that Wolters Kluwer would terminate the Loislaw product as of November 30. Neither Fastcase nor Wolters Kluwer disclosed the purchase price. Wolters Kluwer, an information services company based in the Netherlands, had previously purchased Loislaw in 2000 for $95 million.
Fastcase confirmed the transaction on its website, stating that it was “excited to welcome Loislaw subscribers to the next generation of online legal research.”
According to the statement, current Loislaw users will be allowed to subscribe to the Loislaw Libraries at Fastcase at their current membership pricing plans and will retain access to Wolters Kluwer’s vast library of secondary legal sources and treatises. Their memberships will not transfer automatically, though; they will have to affirmatively subscribe, Fastcase CEO Edward J. Walters tells the Journal. Ambrogi reports that Fastcase users will not have access to those secondary sources but posited that they will at some point.
“Lack of secondary research sources such as treatises remains one of the key differentiators between lower-cost research providers such as Fastcase and the large, established providers,” wrote Ambrogi. “Adding treatises to Fastcase would be significant.”
“In the continued evolution of our business we feel the time is right to further focus our investments in providing the highly valued expert interpretations, insight, guidance, and solutions that enable customers to enhance their decision quality, drive their workflows, and inform confident outcomes,” wrote Deborah Sauer, executive director strategic communications at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory, in an email to Ambrogi.
Updated on Sept. 22 to make it clear that current Loislaw users can keep their pricing plans, but their memberships will not automatically be transferred.
