LEXIS®

An online legal information service that provides the full text of opinions and statutes in electronic format. Subscribers use their personal computers to search thelexisdatabase for relevant cases. They may download or print the legal information they retrieve.

The Lexis service began in 1973. In 1979, the Lexis service was joined by the companion Nexis® news and information service. Lexis contains more than five thousand legal sources, and Nexis contains more than ten thousand news and information sources. The services add approximately 17.3 million documents each week to their more than three billion documents online.

The Lexis service contains major archives of federal and state case law, statutes of all 50 states, state and federal regulations, and public records from major U.S. states. The Lexis service has 41 specialized libraries covering all major fields of practice, including tax, securities, banking, environmental, energy, and international law. Group files combine legal information from all jurisdictions and, where appropriate, add sources of relevant business, financial, or general news.

Lexis also has a public records service that provides online access to information from selected states about real and personal property assets, uniform commercial code liens, secretary of state corporation filings, a verdicts and settlements library, and court indices and dockets.

The company is a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc., part of Reed Elsevier P.L.C., a group of international publishing and information businesses with headquarters in London. Lexis-Nexis is based in Dayton, Ohio. During the 1990s and into the 2000s, Reed Elsevier purchased a number of other publishing companies; many of the materials published by these companies are available on the Lexis system. Among the most notable companies are Matthew Bender & Co., which publishes several popular legal practice materials, and Shepard's, which publishes shepard's citations.

further readings

LexisNexis Website. Available online at <www.LexisNexis.com/anniversary/30th_timeline_fulltxt.pdf>, specifically, corporate timeline at <www.LexisNexis.com/anniversary/30th_timeline_fulltxt.pdf> (accessed August 5, 2003).

cross-references

Computer-Assisted Legal Research; Legal Publishing; Westlaw®.