Decisis, the legal research service that LexisNexis parent RELX launched in 2021 to compete against Fastcase for a share of the bar association partnership business, has expanded over just the past year from 10 to 20 bar partnerships, including 14 state bar associations. In fact, two of those state bars have yet to publicly announce [\u2026]<\/p>\n
Decisis<\/a>, the legal research service that LexisNexis parent RELX launched in 2021 to compete against Fastcase<\/a> for a share of the bar association partnership business, has expanded over just the past year from 10 to 20 bar partnerships, including 14 state bar associations.<\/p>\n In fact, two of those state bars have yet to publicly announce their move and still list Fastcase on their websites as a member benefit.<\/p>\n I first wrote here in 2022 about the \u201cquiet\u201d launch of Decisis<\/a>, which was developed as a subsidiary of RELX under the corporate name Legal InQuery Solutions Inc., but whose website makes no mention of either LexisNexis or RELX.<\/p>\n In a subsequent 2022 interview<\/a> with\u00a0Jeffrey S. Pfeifer<\/a>, who is chief product officer for LexisNexis in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., as well as president of Legal InQuery Solutions, he confirmed that Decisis was created primarily for the purpose of targeting bar association affinity partnerships.<\/p>\n Its launch followed not long after Fastcase acquired Casemaker in 2021<\/a>, ending what had been a longstanding competition to be the preferred legal research member benefit for state and local bar associations. (Pfeifer told me the product was not a response to the acquisition and had been in development before then.)<\/p>\n Once Fastcase made that acquisition, it effectively cornered the bar association market, becoming the sole legal research provider for the bar associations of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and four-dozen metropolitan, county and specialty bar associations.<\/p>\n That gave Fastcase \u2013 which has since merged with international legal research company vLex<\/a> \u2013 a total number of users of more than 1 million lawyers, out of an estimated\u00a01.3 million lawyers<\/a>\u00a0in the country.<\/p>\n When I last talked to Pfeifer about Decisis in 2022, two state bars had signed on with the service: the Ohio State Bar Association<\/strong><\/a> (OSBA), which began offering it to members in October 2021, and the Nebraska State Bar Association<\/a> (NSBA), which started with the service on May 2, 2022.<\/p>\n Since then, Decisis has continued to add new partnerships, bringing its current tally to 14 state bar associations, four local bar associations, and two plaintiffs\u2019 lawyers associations.<\/p>\n The Decisis product is currently overseen by Jake Nelson<\/a>, general manager of emerging products at LexisNexis and formerly global product leader for AI\/ML at LexisNexis.<\/p>\n In an interview this week, he told me that the Decisis product is, by design, a very basic legal research service that does not have the generative AI features of other legal research platforms. That bare-bones approach allows the company to provide Decisis to bar association at a price that makes it affordable for them for the long term, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve kept it simple so we can maintain a place in this market long term, and so we can continue to serve those bar associations over an extended period of time,\u201d Nelson said.<\/p>\n This keeping-it-simple strategy involves maintaining a \u201csteady state\u201d in which the service focuses on \u201cmeat and potatoes content\u201d sourced primarily through LexisNexis, while avoiding frustrating users with features that would requiring upselling or paywalls.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you approach a product, it\u2019s not always the product that has the most features and feature functionality, it\u2019s the one that\u2019s easiest to use,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cSo I think that\u2019s really the angle that we\u2019ve taken in terms of what we\u2019ve created and our effort to keep it simple.\u201d<\/p>\n As Pfeifer told me in 2022: \u201cIt is a very streamlined product experience intentionally. It is meant to be self-trained, so you can intuitively figure out the contents and a user can easily jump in. It looks a lot different than the Lexis product.\u201d<\/p>\n Decisis does include a citator. It was developed specifically for this product and is not based in any way on LexisNexis\u2019s Shepard\u2019s Citations Service.\u00a0Unlike Shepard\u2019s the citator in Decisis flags only negative treatments of cases.<\/p>\n But if users want AI legal research tools, Nelson said, he encourages them to upgrade to Lexis+ AI. In fact, he concedes that he hopes Decisis will serve as a springboard for some users to upgrade, and Decisis regularly presents educational programs for bar association members on the benefits of AI.<\/p>\n According to Nelson, Decisis has added 10 bar association partners in just the past year. Here is the full list of current Decisis partners. (Links are to bars\u2019 pages describing the Decisis benefit.)<\/p>\n State Bars<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Local and Specialty Bars<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Many of the bar associations now using Decisis previously had relationships with Fastcase, which, as already noted, had established itself as the dominant provider in the bar association market.<\/p>\n Its dominance was strengthened in 2021 when it acquired Casemaker, ending the longstanding competition between those two services and leaving it the sole legal research provider for bar associations across the country.<\/p>\n It was that acquisition that spurred Ohio, the first state bar to sign on with Decisis, to began looking for a new legal research provider.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce we were informed that our longtime legal research tool, Casemaker, would be sunset, our board and staff looked at this as an opportunity to seek out a next generation legal research platform to support our membership,\u201d OSBA\u00a0CEO\u00a0Mary Amos Augsburger<\/a>\u00a0told me in 2022.<\/p>\n A group of OSBA members tested Decisis and \u201cit came out the clear winner,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are a bar that embraces innovation and Decisis is a streamlined interface that was created towards making legal research easier and more accurate.\u201d<\/p>\n Nebraska, another early adopter of Decisis, liked \u201cthe uncluttered interface, the reliable and consistent search results, and how intuitive Decisis is to use,\u201d as I reported in that 2022 post.<\/p>\n As noted above, the Wyoming State Bar\u2019s governing body voted to switch from Fastcase to Decisis on Nov. 1, 2024. According to minutes of that Nov. 1 board meeting<\/a>, the bar\u2019s executive director reported that she was surprised to have learned \u201chow much some of our members dislike Fastcase.\u201d<\/p>\n Those minutes indicated that Decisis offered a more favorable pricing structure than Fastcase and that a working group that tested it found it more user friendly. Given all this, one board member said, the decision to switch was a \u201cno-brainer\u201d \u2014 a point on which the minutes reflect, \u201cAll were in agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, thanks to the advent of generative AI, legal research products have evolved significantly since 2021, when Decisis came on the market and Fastcase acquired Casemaker.<\/p>\n That evolution creates an even sharper distinction between Decisis and Fastcase than previously existed. Fastcase has since gone on to merge with vLex \u2014 and the merged vLex-Fastcase product has been gaining recognition for its gen AI capabilities<\/a>, including high marks in the Vals Legal AI Report<\/a> and in an \u201cAI smackdown\u201d conducted by law librarians<\/a>.<\/p>\n Nelson made clear that Decisis is committed to maintaining its streamlined approach \u2013 with no AI \u2013 while offering pathways for attorneys who want more advanced features to explore Lexis+ AI and other premium services.<\/p>\nSimple By Design<\/h3>\n
Bar Association Partners<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Competition with Fastcase<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Gen AI Factor<\/h3>\n