Technology

We Acquired SuperLawyers? For Real? (An Update)

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At LegalTech, Thomson Reuters celebrated Tuesday night’s announcement of acquiring the Minneapolis based SuperLawyers with all kinds of bells and whistles. Unfortunately the ringers on the bells were defective and the whistles were meant for dogs. No one from Thomson at LegalTech was prepared to really discuss anything regarding the SuperLawyers pick-up.
“Oh, that’s a Westlaw thing, you should go talk to Westlaw,” one Thomson rep told me. Unfortunately the Westlaw folks were giving me the same blank stares.
Not to say that LegalTech wasn’t an overall success. More after the jump.


This wasn’t such a big deal though. LegalTech was already quite a successful conference for Thomson with their unveiling of WestlawNext. But it would have given them an extra bragging point had anyone from their company working the conference been given a heads up about the deal in advance.
When the folks at Thomson Reuters headquarters saw the coverage of the SuperLawyer buy coming out of LegalTech, they decided to intervene. A person from the communications department of Thomson Reuters contacted me and clarified that “SuperLawyers will operate as a separate business within our Business of Law division, functioning independently from Westlaw and other Thomson Reuters businesses.”
Well, I guess now I can sleep soundly at night again now that that piece of the puzzle has been solved. SuperLawyers, whose purpose is to recognize some of the top lawyers in their respective fields, will continue to operate as an independent entity, with the minor exception that it will now be owned by a major corporation that markets its products and services directly to lawyers. An interesting acquisition indeed…

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