Last week, we reported on a questionable offering in the Lexis-Nexis Rewards Program store: an “Asian Angels” calendar.

Shortly after our post went up, the calendar came down. It seems that legal research companies respond well to media coverage.

But the calendar, despite being quickly withdrawn from the Lexis swag offerings, still incurred the ire of the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association at UC Berkeley.

Read their response, plus a statement from Lexis, below.

LexisNexis has a rewards program that allows loyal users to accumulate points for certain research activities and then to use them to “shop from millions of items.”

One of the items makes us want to give LexisNexis an “ex” rating. An ATL reader and loyal Lexis-Nexis user pointed the item out to us, writing:

Search for it in the rewards store. It’s available for 1261 points. Pretty shocking if you ask me. The calendar that is, not the price.

We’re red-flagging this. Check it out, after the jump.

Did a number of you LexisNexis users receive this disturbing notice in the mail from LexisNexis?

Seisint (not to be confused with Skynet) is a data-mining company that LexisNexis bought for $775 million, back in 2004. The company created “the Matrix” which gave state and federal governments the ability to analyze records after 9/11.

Back in 2004, LexisNexis was jubilant about the acquisition:

“This is definitely next generation,” said Norm Willox, LexisNexis’s chief officer for privacy, industry and regulatory affairs. “This is the latest and greatest.”

But privacy experts were worried about the technology:

Civil liberties activists warned that the combination of Seisint technology and LexisNexis’s global reach could be massively intrusive if used in the wrong way. “It will hurtle us even faster toward a surveillance society,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It can’t be good news here.”

Willox said such fears are overblown because of the care his company takes to ensure that individual privacy is not abused. “LexisNexis has a long history and is well respected for going the extra mile to protect personal privacy,” Willox said. “This or any acquisition is not going to change that.”

Why did LexisNexis wait so long to tell people that its data-mining program had been compromised? More details from the letter after the jump.

As firms deal with the difficult economic environment, they’re looking for ways to cut back on costs (that don’t involve firing their associates). Kirkland got rid of the granola. K&L Gates went to one-ply toilet paper. A LittleLaw firm in Minnesota said goodbye to Kleenex.

We don’t know the status of the paper goods or bagels at Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell, but we do know the firm is cutting back on its legal research costs. A Locke Lord associate tells us the firm is embracing Loislaw for non-billable legal research:

Thanks to the faltering economy, we are now required to use Loislaw instead of Lexis or Westlaw for certain things.

Unlike its more expensive counterparts, Loislaw has one “low, all-inclusive flat rate, with no hidden charges for printing, copying, downloading, or hyperlinking to primary law or analytic materials outside the scope of a current subscription.” Loislaw will now be Locke Lord’s destination for primary legal research. To travel on to Westlaw or Lexis, a client has to be footing the bill. From the firm memo announcing the new policy:

* All non-billable legal research involving case law, statutes or regulations at both the state and federal level should first be performed using Loislaw. * Loislaw should also be used for billable research where appropriate, resulting in a much lower cost to the client. * If additional research is required on Lexis or Westlaw that research must be billed to a client/matter.

Full memo from Locke Lord on the switch to one-ply legal research, after the jump.

Probably not, ‘cause that’s Westlaw. H. Donald Wilson, who passed away earlier this month, was the founder of Lexis-Nexis. Fittingly enough for a man responsible for placing thousands of lawyers in front of their computer screens, for thousands of hours a year, Wilson died in front of his computer.

An interesting tidbit from the New York Times obituary:

A turning point for the acceptance of Lexis came in the early 1970s, when Mr. Wilson arranged for a skeptical audience at the Supreme Court to use the new system. The Lexis system found more cases than the court clerks found by using manual research methods.

Supreme Court clerks back in the seventies weren’t as good as the ones around today. Current SCOTUS clerks don’t need Lexis and Westlaw. They just commit all the cases to memory, down to the page numbers (a la David Boies).

The cause of death was a heart attack — and we can empathize. Finding out that your key precedent just got overruled can be a pretty jarring experience.

Everyone who has ever used Lexis-Nexis for legal research owes Wilson a debt of gratitude. May he rest in peace.

Donald Wilson, 82, Pioneer of a Database, Dies [New York Times]
H. Donald Wilson, 82; Developed LexisNexis [Washington Post]
Founder of LexisNexis Dies in Front of His Computer [TaxProf Blog]