Ever since I was in law school, I was trained on using Lexus and Westlaw, and obviously they are in many ways the gold standard. Certainly in this day of AI, when people are concerned about LLMs hallucinating cases, it’s always good to be able to go back and check with Lexus and Westlaw. However, I will say that I have been with, for a time, Westlaw in my law firm, and I was very unhappy with the way that they interface with our clients. I was very unhappy with the way that they priced. I was very unhappy with the way that they try to lock you down and increase prices. And I made a switch after a couple years to Lexus, and you know what I found? Exactly the same level of dissatisfaction. And so is Lexus and Westlaw necessary evil? It has been for me. I’ve used one, and at times both of them over the years, I currently am subscribed to one of them.

However, in the last six months, it’s become evident to me that there are other alternatives out there that are being integrated directly into legal technology, not ChatGPT, but something that is as powerful, that has the ability to do more than some of the AI functions that I’ve seen in Lexus and Westlaw that are becoming commercially available. And so even though I have been with Lexus and Westlaw over the course of the last six years for various times, and I have choked on what I thought were unfair terms in terms of how they’re charging me and unexpected charges and how to get out of contracts and how to get into contracts. I’ve been generally dissatisfied with every inch of it. I’ve kind of choked on all of it because I thought I didn’t have another alternative. But I can tell you that when my current contract expires with the one of the two companies that I am with right now, I have no plans to renew with either Lexis or Westlaw.

We are finally at a point now where I don’t think it is necessary to have either one of those. And you will not miss a beat on quality of legal research. There are many other options now that are out there. A few in particular, I think are particularly good. And I believe that I am coming into the last year of the time when I am going to be a patron of either Lexus or Westlaw. And before you get yourself locked into a multi-year contract, you might want to take a look at what some of the other alternatives are. They really were not viable solutions, in my view, until the last maybe six months or so. But I think that as of February 2026, that has all changed.