LexisNexis is an American data analytics company headquartered in New York. Its products are various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer information. During the 1970s, LexisNexis began to make legal and journalistic documents more accessible electronically. As of 2006, the company had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records–related information. The company is a subsidiary of RELX.
History
LexisNexis is owned by RELX (formerly known as Reed Elsevier). According to Trudi Bellardo Hahn and Charles P. Bourne, LexisNexis (originally founded as LEXIS) is historically significant because it was the first of the early information services to both envision and actually bring about a future in which large populations of end users would directly interact with computer databases, rather than going through professional intermediaries like librarians. The developers of several other early information services in the 1970s harbored similar ambitions (e.g., OCLC's WorldCat), but met with financial, structural, and technological constraints and were forced to retreat to the professional intermediary model until the early 1990s. An attorney named John Horty began to explore the use of CALR technology in 1956 to support his work on comparative hospital law at the University of Pittsburgh Health Law Center. Horty was surprised to discover the extent to which the laws governing hospital administration varied from one state to another across the United States and began building a computer database to help him keep track of it all. In 1965, Horty's work inspired the Ohio State Bar Association (OSBA) to independently develop its own CALR system, Ohio Bar Automated Research (OBAR). In 1967, the OSBA signed a contract with Data Corporation, a local defense contractor, to build OBAR based on the OSBA's written specifications. Data proceeded to implement OBAR on Data Central, an interactive full-text search system originally developed in 1964 as Recon Central to help U.S. Air Force intelligence analysts search text summaries of the contents of aerial and satellite reconnaissance photographs. (Before computer vision was invented, text summaries were manually prepared by enlisted personnel called "photo interpreters"; analysts then used those summaries as a catalog to retrieve photographs from which they could draw inferences about enemy strategy.) In 1968, paper manufacturer Mead Corporation purchased Data Corporation for $6 million to gain control of its inkjet printing technology. Mead hired the Arthur D. Little consulting firm to study the business possibilities for the Data Central technology. Arthur D. Little dispatched a team of consultants from New York to Ohio led by H. Donald Wilson. After Mead asked for a practicing lawyer on the team, Jerome Rubin, a Harvard-trained attorney with 20 years of experience was included. The resulting study concluded that the nonlegal market was nonexistent, the legal market had potential, and OBAR needed to be rebuilt to profitably exploit that market. At the time, OBAR searches often took up to five hours to complete if more than one user was online, and its original terminals were noisy Teletypes with slow transmission rates of 10 characters per second. The original OBAR terminals were belatedly replaced with CRT text terminals in 1970. OBAR also had quality control issues; Rubin later recalled that its data was "unacceptably dirty." In February 1970, Mead reorganized Data Corporation's Information Systems Division into a new Mead subsidiary called Mead Data Central (MDC). Wilson and Rubin, respectively, were installed as president and vice president. A year later, Mead bought out the OSBA's interests in the OBAR project, and OBAR disappeared from the historical record after that point. After Wilson was put in charge, he became reluctant to implement his own study's recommendation to abandon the OBAR/Data Central work to date and start over. In September 1971, Mead's management relegated Wilson to vice chairman of the board (i.e., a nonoperational role) and elevated Rubin to president of MDC. Rubin pushed the legacy Data Central technology back to Mead Corporation. Under a newly organized division, Mead Technical Laboratories, Data Central continued to operate as a service bureau for nonlegal applications until 1980.
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