Keeping Up with the Vendors – In Their Own Words

February 25, 2022 by Leave a Comment

Tracking developments in legal information vendors’ products and policies is an important part of many law librarians’ jobs, and it’s a valuable pursuit for keeping current in the profession.

While the major legal database and content providers all offer a variety of access points and formats for news about changes to their platforms and offerings, being aware of them all, let alone connecting with them regularly, can be a challenge.

To help, the list below brings together resources for staying abreast of announcements and product-related communications from Bloomberg, Fastcase, HeinOnline, LexisNexis, Westlaw, and Wolters Kluwer. Be sure to bookmark, subscribe, follow, etc. whichever are useful to you, and/or save this blog post for future reference. Please email me at christensena@wlu.edu if you know of anything missing; I’ll plan to keep it updated.

Bloomberg Law

Fastcase

HeinOnline

LexisNexis

Thomson Reuters Legal / Westlaw

Wolters Kluwer

Filed Under: CRIV General, Legal vendors Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Wolters Kluwer Sells Legal Book Business to Private Equity Firm

October 1, 2021 by Leave a Comment

Wolters Kluwer (WK) announced in a September 27 press release that it has signed a binding agreement with Transom Capital Group (Transom) to sell its legal education business for $88 million in cash. WK reports this move “will allow Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. to further advance its focus on supporting legal professionals with the domain expertise and state-of-the-art solutions that they need.” The legal education business produces student textbooks and digital education materials for law students, and is reportedly profitable with revenues of $33 million in 2020.

So what is Transom? Records show it is a privately held equity company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Los Angeles. Transom makes mid-market buyout investments in various sectors, and it focuses on “middle management investment opportunities that exhibit great potential.” Transom was founded in 2008, and started out investing in companies that make audio equipment, concert tee-shirts and promotional items. Transom has a broad and eclectic investment profile and its current portfolio includes, among other companies, Cross Pens, Beauty Quest Group, Bravo Sports, Makie audio, and Scantron.

Although holdings such as Bridge Tower Media may show Transom putting a toe in the publishing pool, academic publishing appears to be a new venture. In a 2017 news story reporting the Cross Pens acquisition, Transom was described as having a “hands-on approach that provides operational involvement and support without overwhelming the management team.”[1] This may come as some comfort to the 50 full-time employees currently working for WK Legal & Regulatory. We will all eagerly await what this deal means for our students and our faculty who rely on WK legal textbooks.

[1] 2017, Nov 16. Transom Capital Acquires A.T. Cross Company: Nation’s oldest and largest manufacturer of writing instruments poised for expansion with growth capital. NASDAQ OMX’s News Release Distribution Channel.  

Filed Under: Legal vendors Tagged With:

Additional Update — Wolters Kluwer Cheetah

February 7, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Wolters Kluwer has provided an additional update and clarification to the CRIV blog post of February 4, 2020 on the Cheetah platform regarding missing content.  From Wolters Kluwer:

As of August 2017, Wolters Kluwer has added all of its trusted legal content onto the Cheetah legal research platform. At AALL 2018, Wolters Kluwer announced that all of its law firm and corporate customers would be migrated from Intelliconnect to the Cheetah platform by the end of the year as their contracts came up for renewal.

Academic customers were provided with additional time to make the transition from Intelliconnect to Cheetah. Even today, some law school libraries still have dual access to their subscribed content on both Intelliconnect and Cheetah as the continue to make the transition.

If you are an Academic customer who has not yet transitioned to Cheetah and would like to discuss your transition plan with Wolters Kluwer, you may contact Sean Hearon, Academic Sales Lead, at SeanHearon@wolterskluwer.com 

If you are already a Cheetah customer and have questions about your account, you can contact Wolters Kluwer at 1-800-955-5217 or email: CheetahSuport@wolterskluwer.com.training-support/cheetah.

Filed Under: Legal vendors Tagged With:

Wolters Kluwer Cheetah Update

February 4, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Several law school libraries that subscribe to Wolters Kluwer’s Cheetah database and platform have experienced multiple issues with unexpected and unpredictable missing content for several months.  Briefly, here is what happened and an expected time frame for fixing the issue.

Originally, tax content was managed by the Tax and Accounting (TAA) division at Wolters Kluwer.  In August of 2019, the Legal and Regulatory (LAR) division took over management of the tax content.  The missing content problem stems from the period when TAA was managing the content.  When renewals came up this past year, TAA renewed content to Intelliconnect, the prior platform, instead of to Cheetah.  To update the system properly, LAR has had to move content manually from Intelliconnect to Cheetah on a law school by law school basis, which is taking time to complete based on the volume of content that needs to be transferred.

Completion of the manual movement of content to Cheetah is expected by the end of February this year.

Filed Under: Legal vendors Tagged With:

CRIV-Wolters Kluwer Bi-Annual Liaison Call

December 4, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Conference call took place on Thursday, November 21, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. PST.  Call adjourned at 10:15 a.m. PST.

Participants:

  • Jenna Ellis, Wolters Kluwer Liaison
  • Vani Ungapen, AALL Executive Director
  • Karen Selden, AALL, CRIV Board Liaison
  • Cynthia Condit, AALL, CRIV Wolters Kluwer Liaision

Agenda:

Wolters Kluwer Programs, Activities, or Business of Interest to CRIV and/or AALL

  • Announcements/Updates:
    • Smart Charts.  At the July 2019 AALL annual meeting Wolters Kluwer gathered a focus group of librarians in the legal field.  Many in the focus group indicated strong interest in the practice tool that creates multi-jurisdictional surveys called Smart Charts.  Based on the feedback, Wolters Kluwer will be making Smart Charts its own document type for searching.  The Smart Charts are currently under development.  There is no exact roll-out date, but expecting it to be sometime in 2020.
    • “Did You Know?”  To increase awareness of some useful products that people may not know about, Wolters Kluwer is providing focused introductions to these products.  Access to products depends on your specific subscription.  In today’s call, Jenna drew attention to a group of over 65 white papers written either internally by Wolters Kluwer or more often by law firms.  The white papers are highly used and well liked.  Some professors attach them to course syllabi.  However, the white papers do not appear in the usual topical area search results.  Instead they must be searched for separately in their own content category under News & Commentary.  When accessed, you can browse and word search the white papers.  Please see the screenshot below for more detail.

WK-WhitePapers-Nov2019

    • Cheetah.  Jenna noted that Cheetah has now been up and running for a full year.  There have been no further outage issues.

Requests for Advocacy

  • One outstanding request – resolved:
    • Question: Why did Wolters Kluwer stop collecting sales tax on tangible items in California since the beginning of 2019?
    • Response: California (and Wisconsin) do impose a sales tax on initial purchase of a loose-leaf subscription (they published the letter ruling).  Sales tax must be paid, according to the California State Board of Equalization, on initial purchases because purchasers are receiving binders, (tpp), with the subscription and the binders are not sold separately from the subscription.  Because the binders are taxable, the entire initial subscription is taxable.  The renewal of the subscription is not taxable because the customer receives monthly updates (i.e., more than 4), and therefore the renewal qualifies as an exempt subscription.
  • No new requests

AALL Programs, Activities, or Business of Interest to Wolters Kluwer

  • Sponsorship contact for AALL annual meeting:
    • The new sponsorship point of contact for the AALL annual meeting is Rocco Impreveduto, Director of Marketing at Wolters Kluwer.

Other Items of Interest — None

Filed Under: Legal vendors, Vendor Relations Tagged With: ,

Wolters Kluwer/CRIV Vendor Liaison Call Notes from 11/27/2017

February 16, 2018 by Leave a Comment

CRIV/ Wolters Kluwer Semi-Annual Vendor Liaison Call
Monday November 27th, 2017
2pm Central
Participants: C.J. Pipins capipinsii@law.umaryland.edu, Kate Hagan khagan@aall.org, and Chris Pamboukes chris.pamboukes@wolterskluwer.com

Agenda
I. Welcome

II. Outstanding Requests for Advocacy – NONE

III. AALL Programs, Activities, or Business of Interest to WK
a. Getting ready for the AALL Annual Meeting in Baltimore next July. The annual meeting program committee met and selected programs for 2018. Kate will be in contact with marketing folks at WK to disucss their activities at the meeting, in late November
b. There will be a CRIV roundtable at the annual meeting in Baltimore. More details are forthcoming.
c. AALL is working on a survey to determine the State of the Profession. A group of AALL members from diverse library types is developing a survey to look at trends, challenges, and benchmarking that will be of value to our members when assessing their libraries and what they should be looking at to move their libraries forward. The hope is that it will be completed by next fall.
d. Wolters Kluwer should continue to send anything newsworthy to the AALL daily news message Know It All for distribution to AALL members. Product releases, etc. WK would like any current awareness sources from AALL.

IV. WK Programs, Activities, or Business of Interest to CRIV and/or AALL
a. WK is sun setting Intelliconnect. The Tax and Accounting platform, which looks similar to Intelliconnect, will NOT be sun setting. They will retain their tax content on that platform and that info will be mirrored on cheetah.
b. Recently WK extended the Standard Federal Tax Reporter historical content. Wolters Kluwer partnered with Hein to provide archives of materials from 1917-1985. Content includes the Internal Revenue Code, IRS publications, and the tax regulations.
c. The research folders from Intelliconnect have been renamed “worklists” for the cheetah platform. Thanks to a recent enhancement, users who do not access Cheetah through an IP range can now share and transfer ownership of worklists to others on the same account. Also, any user can go in and change their password; they no longer have to contact their account representative to get it changed.
d. WK is doing lots of academic training right now, and getting good feedback about cheetah. They are still migrating a lot of premium accounts.
Training and support Site for Cheetah
e. WK has also started focusing on more outreach to law students in addition to librarians. There are many ways to deliver law student training. Schools interested in exploring the training options should contact Chris or their Wolters Kluwer account representative.
f. ID manager 2.0 – For accounts that do not access Cheetah through an IP range, ID Manager 2.0 is a free service from WK where a librarian who is the site contact can manage their account’s user IDs. The site contact can also and go into individual’s accounts in their organization to customize that individual’s cheetah experience. This is really a back end tool to customize someone’s homepage on cheetah to highlight certain content for that person. ID manager also allows the site contact to create user IDs for individuals. To access it click ID Manager 2.0.
g. WK has cheetah widgets that provide functionality that was not previously available. You can search in a cheetah widget on your platform and you can embed the widget on a SharePoint page. That allows you to get access to the WK publications from right there. The widget is free and does not require the user to login. Widgets can help surface content for which users don’t normally search or don’t know exists. Anyone with a username and password can make a widget. Check it out here
Cheetah Widgets
h. For a while now there have been quick start cards to help users quickly see and understand the features available with a WK product. Now there are content specific quick start cards available on the training and support website. Users can also access training videos there as well. Also on this page under specialized training there is a legal pro virtual training option that specializes in one on one training with a person. Users can get a single WK-trainer who will spend 30 minutes to an hour with you. This feature is called Legal Pro Virtual Training. There are lots of options for choosing date/time, and don’t worry. Legal Pro Virtual Training does not count against your contracted hours of training and support time.
Legal Pro Virtual Training.

Filed Under: Legal vendors, Vendor Relations Tagged With: ,

CRIV/WoltersKluwer Semiannual Call

February 22, 2016 by Leave a Comment

On December 14th, 2015 CRIV had its first semiannual call with Wolters Kluwer.

There were no outstanding Requests for Advocacy involving WK products from the membership to discuss.

We discussed an ongoing project regarding MARC records. WK is creating MARC records for Intelliconnect and Cheetah. VRAG is working closely with WK to develop what the record should look like.

In terms of upcoming changes and developments- most content is moving over to the new platform, Cheetah. In addition, they recently changed brands. What used to be WK Law and Business will now be Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory Solutions U.S. The legal entity is still CCH Incorporated, but the business unit name has changed. The logo will not change.

WK stressed that they are very much interested in continuing to support AALL programming and educational activities. They would like to be on panels at the Annual Meeting.

Finally, our current liaison, Linda Dutton is retiring in February 2016, and a permanent replacement has not yet been named.

CRIV will hold another call with WK in Spring of 2016.

Filed Under: Legal vendors Tagged With: ,

Vendor News: Fastcase Acquires LoisLaw

September 22, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Fastcase has purchased LoisLaw from WoltersKluwer. Robert Ambrogi broke the news on Law Sites after current Loislaw customers started receive notices of the change. Fastcase has confirmed it, and posted some FAQs on the transition.

It looks like Fastcase has expanded it customer base by acquiring the current LoisLaw subscriptions and brand. The legacy LoisLaw subscribers look like they’ll have an option to continue accessing WoltersKluwer treatises as long as they continue their subscriptions, but it doesn’t look like anything will change for current Fastcase subscribers (i.e., no new windfall of editorial content showing up on Fastcase).

Thank you to former CRIV Chair, Liz Reppe, for bringing this to my attention.

Filed Under: Legal vendors Tagged With: , , ,

CCH Replacement Pages & Reports

June 11, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Responding to an inquiry from an AALL member about the demise of the CCH Replacement Pages & Reports tool, Linda Lev-Dunton, Manager, Librarian Relations, Wolters Kluwer Law and Business, explained the decision to remove the service in the following e-mail:

The CCH Replacement Pages & Reports tool has been retired as it was not sustainable. The tool was designed for a specific print on demand printer in the Peterson office that ceased to operate and was not viable to fix. We recently moved production and fulfillment to an outside vendor, but determined it was a faster turnaround for customers if they contacted Customer Service (CS) directly with their request for the replacements. CS is able to place the replacement pages order directly with the vendor and turn it around in just a few days.

The long term goal is to replace the tool, but this will not be in the immediate future. We are currently gathering requirements to upgrade MyAccount and our other customer self service capabilities, and this item is on our requirement list.

Customers can contact us via phone, email ticket or chat to request a replacement. CS will also go the extra distance to look for root cause as to why the customer may have not received the original and see if we can correct the issue from happening again.

Thanks to Linda Lev-Dunton for her response.

Filed Under: Legal vendors Tagged With: , , ,

Request for Assistance: Wolters Kluwer Supplement Numbering

June 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

A County Librarian contacted CRIV after discovering the number of supplements for two Wolters Kluwer (former Aspen) titles Americans With Disabilities Act Handbook and Sexual Harassment in the Workplace.  CRIV facilitated the discussion between the librarian and Wolters Kluwer.

Thank you to Wolters Kluwer for addressing this question.

Generally, our rule of thumb is that supplements carry the date of the following year when they release in August or beyond. For example, a supp releasing in September 2013 might be called the 2014 Supplement (because it will be in customers’ hands for at least eight months of 2014).

However, sometimes we release a supp earlier in the year than planned in order to publish current information. When we do that, we can’t repeat a number (that is, we can’t publish two “2013 Supplements”). So there may be a situation where we publish a supp in May or June that carries the next year’s date.

Although that happens infrequently, it did happen with the two titles you mention. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. We will adjust the numbering for next year’s releases, and we apologize for any confusion this may have caused the customer.

If you have a similar issue or any issue that CRIV can assist with, please use our Request for Assistance form available at http://aallnet.org/main-menu/Advocacy/vendorrelations/request-assistance.html.

Michelle Cosby, CRIV Chair

Filed Under: Legal vendors Tagged With: , ,