Cost Effective Legal Research: LexisNexis & Westlaw Pricing

What the firm pays: 

Firms pay a flat rate for whatever piece of WestlawNext/Lexis Advance they purchase (or Classic Westlaw or LexisNexis).  For example, a firm may purchase an Ohio only package, and material from other states is outside the firm's plan.  The firm has unlimited use of materials in the plan during the duration of the contract, without additional charge. 

If an attorney gets a result in their search which is outside of the plan, they get a warning that the document is outside their plan.  If the attorney decides to access that document, they are charged an additional fee for that out-of-plan document. 

Sample (nondiscounted) costs:

• WestlawNext Subscriber Pricing Guide (In WestlawNext, click on Tools, Subscriber Pricing Guide).
• Lexis Advance Price Guide. (In Lexis Advance, click on Help)

Note that a document delivery charge for downloading/printing may apply in addition to the cost of viewing the document.  WestlawNext gives the option of hourly (charged by the amount of time you are on the document) or transactional (charged per document fee).   Of course, some of these out-of-plan documents may be accessed on the Internet for free, or from a lower cost database.

Cost Recovery: (what the firm charges to a client)  

Lexis Advance/WestlawNext:  The client may be charged $60 per search (or some other number, as the firm determines), plus a cost for each document clicked on, for both documents in the firm's plan or not.  Client billing may be based on nondiscounted retail costs, such as those listed in the pricing guides, above.   However, firms usually charge something less than the retail costs.  

Not all firms bill research costs to clients.  Some firms include research costs as part of overhead, or only pass along the out-of-plan costs.

Flat rate – Firms usually have a fixed rate contract negotiated with the vendor depending on firm past or predicted use.  Some of the databases may be outside the contract and incur additional fees for access.

Billing Costs for Out of Plan Charges or used as a basis to determine charges back to clients (cost recovery):

You can select either transactional or hourly billing:

• Transactional – You incur a charge for each search.  The price per search depends on the file you select – the larger the file, the higher the fee.  Start with the smallest file that you need, then conduct a broad search, using Focus or Locate commands to narrow results within your search results to avoid a new search charge.
• Hourly – The hourly fee for searching each file depends on its size and complexity. Start with the smallest file you need, print off a cite list, and view your results offline.

There may be an additional document delivery cost (printing/downloading/email).  You can choose per document or per line billing.  Westlaw may charge an additional communication cost per minute. 

There is a charge for retrieving a document via Get/Find a Document and and a charge to run a Shepard's or Keycite.

Cost Recovery vs. Actual Cost to the Firm - Even if a firm has a flat rate plan, the firm may still bill clients per transaction or hourly. Ask the librarian or other person in charge of databases and billing to find out how clients are billed so you can keep the costs down.

Costs have increased since 2010.

These are RETAIL (undiscounted) costs for a law firm in 2008.  While costs have increased since 2008, these are still illustrative of:

• Using a smaller database on the classic systems saves money
• Using get or find instead of a search saves money
• Each Shepard's or Keycite costs money
• The difference between hourly costs and transactional costs