RSS feedsThere’s always a problem with strengthening an existing brand. The art of re-inventing a well-known name in a specific field is fraught with the potential problem of suggesting a period of previous under-achievement.
That is one of the challenges facing information provider LexisNexis. Once one of the three major players in the UK’s online information market, alongside Dialog and Factiva, LexisNexis has recently taken a number of initiatives to enhance its products, services and branding.
Owned by Anglo-Dutch group Reed Elsevier, the LexisNexis group is based in the US. Its UK division incorporates former specialist UK publishers Butterworths and Tolley (see below). In 2005, LexisNexis UK appointed a new managing director, Josh Bottomley.
Dominic Riley, former marketing director at LexisNexis, who left the company last year, and who is now managing director of conference and training provider Hawksmere , says LexisNexis has made great strides in the right direction.
“When I left, I felt LexisNexis Butterworths was the best performing global division within Reed Elsevier for revenue and growth,” he comments. “We had had two fantastic years and had turned around a business that had been flat."
One of the ways in which the business has changed has been the disposal of much of its book publishing. “We sold off about a quarter of the books we were publishing, which probably only accounted for about 2% of our business,” says Riley. “That enabled us to focus our resources on areas of growth and on LexisNexis Butterworth as an online platform. That’s the key: you have to focus where the money and the customers are.”
In terms of today’s market, Dialog has faded since its takeover by Thomson. Last year, several Dialog services were rebranded with the Thomson name. That has left LexisNexis and Factiva battling it out, with LexisNexis perceived as a leader in the legal market. It supplies information services, for instance, to every judge in England and Wales. But Factiva remains strong in the corporate market. “There is more competition in the corporate market and Factiva is a tough competitor,” acknowledges Riley.
In order to remain competitive, LexisNexis has been taking action to enhance its online platform. This is a global development, being rolled out in all the countries where the company operates. “The platform was significantly improved by its UK launch in mid-2005,” says Riley. “It was originally set for a later launch, but when I came into the company, we agreed we needed an earlier launch in the UK, because the market needed a new version of the platform. I strongly encouraged that earlier launch.”
Riley describes LexisNexis as a “terrific business”. But has the UK division done enough to keep ahead in an increasingly tough market?
“This is an opportunity for us to take the business further in the direction of meeting the needs of different customer segments,” says managing director Bottomley. “We are seeing a whole load of different groups of people needing information for different things, such as people who use our information to check on clients and potential clients, using our products to help them know their customers. We are looking to build specific applications for these different groups.”
Lucrative sets of customers
The challenge involved here is picking the most lucrative sets of customers for
which to segment out separate applications. “I must admit I didn’t realise quite
how many different areas of opportunity there were,” says Bottomley. “But I
think we are making good decisions in enhancing our products and services. In
the area of helping legal and tax practices understand what they need to do to
be successful, we have a very clear view of the tools that we can provide to
help that market.”
The legal market is itself going through a period of change and upheaval, which will mean law firms looking for ever-greater information about the market in which they operate, says Bottomley.
He also points out that UK law firms still lag well behind US law firms in terms of the amount they are paying for information services. “The US legal information market is very competitive, but the average US fee earner is still paying twice as much for information as in the UK,” he says. This suggests there are still many opportunities for selling information into a developing UK legal market.
In the corporate and public sector markets, Bottomley says the really big opportunities for information providers like LexisNexis are around the issues of compliance. “The cost of compliance is increasing and companies can meet their compliance needs either internally or by using external providers,” he points out.
“There is a lot of technology out there to help customers manage compliance effectively and turn these compliance issues into a better practice strategy for their companies. Customers are looking for this kind of service from a company that understands how regulations are changing. We are very well-placed. We understand regulations and their context in the legal market.”
Another major push for LexisNexis is to cut its existing information database into more differentiated segments, providing more focused products and services for a wider range of customers. In this respect, Bottomley believes his firm is well-placed and has the edge over rival Factiva. “We have significantly more sources than Factiva,” he says, “and we have significantly more scope to deliver a breadth of applications.”
One major development for LexisNexis has been to make its search facility easier to use. The company has invested £80m in improving its system so it can be used by both novice users and experienced information professionals. The move is an acknowledgement by LexisNexis that its old system was too difficult to use.
“We had three times as many quality sources as our nearest rival, but it wasn’t easy to use,” says Simon McLoughlin, head of corporate development at LexisNexis, at the launch of the new system in May . The move has been partly in response to Google, with its profound impact on making search facilities easier, but McLoughlin also acknowledged that LexisNexis had been feeling the heat from Factiva, following the launch of Factiva’s Search 2.0 search tool.
“It is true that we have had some usability issues,” comments managing director Bottomley. “But we are now in a very strong position regarding both our content and our platform. One thing that gives us a good deal of confidence is that we get a great deal of positive feedback from expert users.”
Strengthening the LexisNexis brand in the UK has been one of Bottomley’s challenges since he joined the company in 2005. “We do want to change the way people think about LexisNexis in the sense that we want them to realise the relevance of our applications to their development,” says Bottomley.
As part of this drive, Bottomley has introduced a Customer Call programme, to encourage closer relationships between LexisNexis and its customers at a senior level. “In a medium-sized law firm, that would mean talking to a managing partner, at a strategic level,” he comments.
Another strategy is to work more closely with other parts of parent group Reed Elsevier. “We are not trying to do a big bang repositioning of the company and we don’t need to do that, because of our existing strengths, but in the UK, there are strong opportunities to combine the strengths of the existing Butterworths business with the LexisNexis technology and Reed Elsevier have made a very good decision to bring those together,” says Bottomley. “As LexisNexis Butterworths, we report to LexisNexis globally in New York, but there is a great deal of collaboration between us and other parts of the Reed network,” he explains.
Background in information services
Bottomley himself, though relatively new to LexisNexis, has a background in information services. Before joining LexisNexis, he was CEO of publishing business IMP Europe and was previously a director of the Financial Times group. “I’m not a programmer, but I think I’ve got enough technical background,” he says. “I know enough to ensure our technology is delivering. What I really need to understand in this job is how we can understand our customers better.”
Bottomley is well-connected in other ways – he is the son of Virginia Bottomley (former Secretary for Health and for National Heritage in John Major's cabinet, and now Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone) and Tory MP Peter Bottomley. According to Wikipedia, his uncle is Christopher Garnett, the chief executive of the GNER railway, and Peter Jay, the former British Ambassador to the United States, is a cousin of his mother. Politics and diplomacy must be in the blood.
Getting enhanced services out to customers in good time is one of the arts of managing an information company, acknowledges Bottomley. LexisNexis does a lot of its systems development in Dayton, Ohio, and applications development is a continuing cause of internal debate. “The big challenge is when customers want this service and we need to ask ourselves whether to deliver it now or to create extra functionality,” comments Bottomley. “So far, I think the way LexisNexis has handled this kind of internal conversation has been very good and has enabled our customers to see major improvements over time.”
On the back of its multi-million investment in new systems, LexisNexis is now aiming to increase its online revenue by a substantial amount. Five years ago, just 5% of the company’s revenue was from online products and services. Now, that figure has risen to 48% and the target is to reach 75% by 2008.
“Reed Elsevier is clear that we should be aiming for our double digit growth to continue and I think that is very achievable, if we pursue the right applications with the right customers,” says Bottomley.
“There is certainly a continuing need for law and tax firms to use technology to help them become more successful and while some law firms are very sophisticated in their use of technology, others are in a very different position today, so there are plenty of opportunities.”
One fruitful area is that of e-disclosure of documents needed for legal research. Bottomley estimates this could be worth £720m in the UK alone. “It’s a customer issue,” he says. “If you are running a large legal case and need, for instance, to track down that single, incriminating piece of evidence, it is a nightmare to try and find that manually. Even if you outsource it, you don’t know the quality of the search. Our software can save you time and money and is more likely to find the information you need.”
LexisNexis has customers around the UK, but its largest customers, not surprisingly, are in London, close to the company’s offices. “One of the nicest things about this job is being able to go and see our customers without even having to get a bus,” comments Bottomley.
While walking the streets at the heart of London’s legal profession, Bottomley will have time to consider the challenges facing LexisNexis. “We need to keep going, to pursue the right decisions about which customer segments to focus on,” he says. He points to the media market, for example. “We have always been in this market, to provide journalists with access to information, but the question is how to do this more efficiently. Sometimes journalists need a great deal of in-depth information on a specific company, but sometimes they just need what we call the taxi pack – three pages of information that will get them up to speed quickly.”
IN BRIEF: THE LEXISNEXIS GROUP
The LexisNexis Group, which is headquartered in New York, provides information to legal, corporate, government and academic markets and publishes legal, tax and regulatory information. It is the legal and information division of Anglo-Dutch publisher Reed Elsevier, whose other three divisions comprise business publisher Reed Business Information (RBI), science division Elsevier, and education division Harcourt.
LexisNexis has 13,000 staff, operates in 60 countries, and has more than 3.2m customers. The group has four business units: US legal markets, which is based in New York; US corporate and federal markets, based in Dayton, Ohio; Asia Pacific, based in Singapore; and LexisNexis Europe, Canada, Latin America and Africa, based in London.
The UK arm of the group is based in London and employs 1,100 staff. Its main office is in London’s Chancery Lane, close to the heart of London’s legal profession, but it also has offices in Croydon, Woking, Scotland and Ireland.
As well as legal publisher Butterworth, LexisNexis in the UK also includes the business of tax specialist Tolley. LexisNexis online services include LexisNexis Butterworths and the LexisNexis business and news service.
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