We are delighted today to welcome Dick Cassin of CassinLaw LLC and the FCPA Blog to the Knowledge Mosaic Blogwatch. With offices in Washington, DC and Singapore, CassinLaw is uniquely positioned to assist clients with all matters involving international commerce.
From its base in Singapore, the FCPA Blog can offer a fascinating voice and unique perspectives on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, an important cornerstone of US government efforts to root out corruption in the dealings of US companies with foreign governments and businesses.
With Knowledge Mosaic rapidly expanding its focus to cover topics of vital interest to financial and business institutions operating in global markets, we are excited to publish the FCPA Blog as part of the Knowledge Mosaic Blogwatch. We expect to add commentary on AML and other Patriot Act issues to the mix in short order.
Also, our roster of blog contributors has grown to the extent that our daily Blogwatch emails are sometimes quite long. To keep the content sufficiently bite-sized, we are planning to split the SM Blogwatch email into two separate daily emails, once delivered in the morning and one later in the afternoon. If anyone has strong feelings about this - pro or con- please write to me (pschwartz@knowledgemosaic.com) and let me know.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Nought-60 in 3 Seconds: Legal Research in a Ferrari
I thought I was done with my speculations on Bloomberg Law, but recently ran across articles about the Bloomberg legal platform that were so interesting that I could not pass up the opportunity to offer additional commentary.
The first essay is a laudatory, high-fiving blog post about the wonders of Bloomberg Law published early in 2006 in Adam Smith, Esq. "Adam" (Bruce MacEwen) is agog at Bloomberg's lavish new headquarters and positively enraptured by Bloomberg Law. The brazenness of the pricing for this service - $1,500 per month per terminal per attorney - only fuels his admiration for the Oz-like wizards at Bloomberg.
And why not? How can one not find lovable Bloomberg Law's irrepressible and charming British-born leader, Constantin Cotzias, who besides being an indefatigable runner and triathlete, can with disarming insouciance compare his service to Westlaw and Lexis in the following manner. "Well, if you want an Audi, you should buy an Audi, but if you want to go nought-60 in 3 seconds, you really need a Ferrari, don't you?"
And there we have it - Bloomberg Law lets you drive nought-60 in 3 seconds. In a million years, would anyone at Westlaw or Lexis use this language to characterize their products? Of course not. Bloomberg is not like any other financial or legal publisher. Privately owned. Fabulously wealthy. Blindingly brilliant and innovative. If Westlaw and Lexis are Microsoft, Bloomberg is Apple. If Westlaw and Lexis are Ringling Brothers, Bloomberg is Cirque du Soleil. If Westlaw and Lexis are Atlantic City, Bloomberg is Las Vegas.
But here's the deal. In my previous post, I offered the theoretical possibility that Bloomberg Law might dethrone Westlaw and Lexis. I have now reconsidered this possibility, largely because Constantin's Ferrari metaphor crystallized for me the otherworldliness of the Bloomberg Law vision.
Visiting the Bloomberg headquarters is not unlike what Charlie experiences when he passes through the gates of the Chocolate Factory in Tim Burton's film interpretation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. While one might be loath to cast Johnny Depp as Michael Bloomberg, there is more than a passing resemblance between interiors of the two buildings - in the bright and bold colors; the geometric and glass architectural conceits; the pervasiveness of electronic media; the futuristic transportation devices; the sanitized and omnipresent security; and the profusion of free, delicious comestibles. If one allows for the substitution of beautiful women for Oompa-Loompas, you pretty much cannot distinguish the two environments.
While it would be pointless to dismiss the immensity of Bloomberg's product achievements in the past 20 years, there is an undeniable sense in which much of what the company provides - on its terminals and in its headquarters - is eye candy. Even the Bloomberg news - which fills an important niche in the market for real-time information - can hardly be called hard-hitting journalism. It is easily consumed, and more easily forgotten.
The Ferrari metaphor for Bloomberg Law inspires what I am sure is an unintended, yet meaningful, corollary image - that Bloomberg Law may not be much more than a toy for rich legal professionals - research bling, as it were. In an era of gas prices that are swallowing the budgets of ordinary folks, and a looming economic recession that has fossilized law firm research spending, only Bloomberg continues to have the audacity to introduce its legal platform as the equivalent to a high-performance, high-octane driving experience for the rich and famous.
The problem with the Ferrari image is that Ferraris are barely street-legal and hardly a practical transportation option for satisfying the needs that cars meet for most people. They are dream machines for people with immense amounts of disposable income, not vehicles for shopping or shuttling the kids or driving from Seattle to San Francisco. If one must use the car metaphor to talk about other products and the market niches they occupy, the "Audi" image Constantin used to characterize Westlaw and Lexis (accompanied, one presumes, by a barely concealed sneer) is actually far more apt as the solution most law firms would choose to purchase for their daily legal research activities.
In this instance, it so happens that the "Audi" costs about the same as the "Ferrari", but for the purposes of this post, the pricing equivalence of the Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg platforms is less important than the the possibility that law firms might actually choose a Ferrari over an Audi to meet for the daily research needs of their attorneys.
Bloomberg Legal may well end up disposing of the competition the way Willie Wonka rid himself of Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But what now seems more likely is that it simply does not matter much, either way, to Bloomberg the company whether Bloomberg the legal product ever takes off and acquires significant market share. The product focus for Bloomberg Law seems to be tactical, not strategic, and hence not materially relevant or pivotal to the success of Bloomberg's core business.
The primary purpose of Bloomberg Law - to the degree one is discernible - seems to be to broaden the Bloomberg ecosystem of Wall Street users to include the attorneys at firms that serve Wall Street banking institutions. But this is a niche strategy that holds out little possibility of gaining much market penetration for Bloomberg Law beyond the universe its terminals currently serve. The fact that Bloomberg does not appear to be willing to sacrifice its terminal requirements to gain market share outside of Wall Street law firms provides further confirmation that Bloomberg Law exists to shore up existing markets, not carve out new markets in competition with Westlaw and Lexis.
As another review article mentioned (and a friend of mine confirmed yesterday), Bloomberg Law remains primarily a financial and securities law platform. In this article, Constantin himself correctly emphasized that Bloomberg provides superior securities and financial information to what can be found on Westlaw and Lexis. "Anything that's coming out of regulators, the SEC or the NYSE, we'll track that in real time and we'll allow you to monitor regulatory developments that will impact any market sector."
Constantin's right. But there's an equally complete, exceedingly nimble, and far far less expensive securities and financial information solution alternative to Bloomberg Law. It's called Securities Mosaic. It, too, goes nought-60 in 3 seconds. But it's easier to use. And it doesn't require its own terminal.
The first essay is a laudatory, high-fiving blog post about the wonders of Bloomberg Law published early in 2006 in Adam Smith, Esq. "Adam" (Bruce MacEwen) is agog at Bloomberg's lavish new headquarters and positively enraptured by Bloomberg Law. The brazenness of the pricing for this service - $1,500 per month per terminal per attorney - only fuels his admiration for the Oz-like wizards at Bloomberg.
And why not? How can one not find lovable Bloomberg Law's irrepressible and charming British-born leader, Constantin Cotzias, who besides being an indefatigable runner and triathlete, can with disarming insouciance compare his service to Westlaw and Lexis in the following manner. "Well, if you want an Audi, you should buy an Audi, but if you want to go nought-60 in 3 seconds, you really need a Ferrari, don't you?"
And there we have it - Bloomberg Law lets you drive nought-60 in 3 seconds. In a million years, would anyone at Westlaw or Lexis use this language to characterize their products? Of course not. Bloomberg is not like any other financial or legal publisher. Privately owned. Fabulously wealthy. Blindingly brilliant and innovative. If Westlaw and Lexis are Microsoft, Bloomberg is Apple. If Westlaw and Lexis are Ringling Brothers, Bloomberg is Cirque du Soleil. If Westlaw and Lexis are Atlantic City, Bloomberg is Las Vegas.
But here's the deal. In my previous post, I offered the theoretical possibility that Bloomberg Law might dethrone Westlaw and Lexis. I have now reconsidered this possibility, largely because Constantin's Ferrari metaphor crystallized for me the otherworldliness of the Bloomberg Law vision.
Visiting the Bloomberg headquarters is not unlike what Charlie experiences when he passes through the gates of the Chocolate Factory in Tim Burton's film interpretation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. While one might be loath to cast Johnny Depp as Michael Bloomberg, there is more than a passing resemblance between interiors of the two buildings - in the bright and bold colors; the geometric and glass architectural conceits; the pervasiveness of electronic media; the futuristic transportation devices; the sanitized and omnipresent security; and the profusion of free, delicious comestibles. If one allows for the substitution of beautiful women for Oompa-Loompas, you pretty much cannot distinguish the two environments.
While it would be pointless to dismiss the immensity of Bloomberg's product achievements in the past 20 years, there is an undeniable sense in which much of what the company provides - on its terminals and in its headquarters - is eye candy. Even the Bloomberg news - which fills an important niche in the market for real-time information - can hardly be called hard-hitting journalism. It is easily consumed, and more easily forgotten.
The Ferrari metaphor for Bloomberg Law inspires what I am sure is an unintended, yet meaningful, corollary image - that Bloomberg Law may not be much more than a toy for rich legal professionals - research bling, as it were. In an era of gas prices that are swallowing the budgets of ordinary folks, and a looming economic recession that has fossilized law firm research spending, only Bloomberg continues to have the audacity to introduce its legal platform as the equivalent to a high-performance, high-octane driving experience for the rich and famous.
The problem with the Ferrari image is that Ferraris are barely street-legal and hardly a practical transportation option for satisfying the needs that cars meet for most people. They are dream machines for people with immense amounts of disposable income, not vehicles for shopping or shuttling the kids or driving from Seattle to San Francisco. If one must use the car metaphor to talk about other products and the market niches they occupy, the "Audi" image Constantin used to characterize Westlaw and Lexis (accompanied, one presumes, by a barely concealed sneer) is actually far more apt as the solution most law firms would choose to purchase for their daily legal research activities.
In this instance, it so happens that the "Audi" costs about the same as the "Ferrari", but for the purposes of this post, the pricing equivalence of the Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg platforms is less important than the the possibility that law firms might actually choose a Ferrari over an Audi to meet for the daily research needs of their attorneys.
Bloomberg Legal may well end up disposing of the competition the way Willie Wonka rid himself of Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But what now seems more likely is that it simply does not matter much, either way, to Bloomberg the company whether Bloomberg the legal product ever takes off and acquires significant market share. The product focus for Bloomberg Law seems to be tactical, not strategic, and hence not materially relevant or pivotal to the success of Bloomberg's core business.
The primary purpose of Bloomberg Law - to the degree one is discernible - seems to be to broaden the Bloomberg ecosystem of Wall Street users to include the attorneys at firms that serve Wall Street banking institutions. But this is a niche strategy that holds out little possibility of gaining much market penetration for Bloomberg Law beyond the universe its terminals currently serve. The fact that Bloomberg does not appear to be willing to sacrifice its terminal requirements to gain market share outside of Wall Street law firms provides further confirmation that Bloomberg Law exists to shore up existing markets, not carve out new markets in competition with Westlaw and Lexis.
As another review article mentioned (and a friend of mine confirmed yesterday), Bloomberg Law remains primarily a financial and securities law platform. In this article, Constantin himself correctly emphasized that Bloomberg provides superior securities and financial information to what can be found on Westlaw and Lexis. "Anything that's coming out of regulators, the SEC or the NYSE, we'll track that in real time and we'll allow you to monitor regulatory developments that will impact any market sector."
Constantin's right. But there's an equally complete, exceedingly nimble, and far far less expensive securities and financial information solution alternative to Bloomberg Law. It's called Securities Mosaic. It, too, goes nought-60 in 3 seconds. But it's easier to use. And it doesn't require its own terminal.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
From Documents to Data: More Change on Securities Mosaic
Okay, let's get the good stuff out of the way first. Yesterday, I mentioned that we had added our vast, classified repository of Risk Factors data to Securities Mosaic. In the same spirit of excitement and abundance, I can report this morning that we have also made a number of other significant new changes to the Securities Mosaic website in the past few days. Here is the rundown.
2) New Section Searching on the All SEC Filings page – New Section Search categories for Financial and Accounting Information and for Prospectus Information make available 16 new filing sections for internal text searches. We will be adding these sections to Item Extractor later this summer.
3) Expanded News Archive on Securities Mosaic – Expands archives of all of our Securities Mosaic News and Current Awareness alerts to include the last six months (rather than the previous 10 alerts).
As with Risk Factors Search, the enhanced Exhibits Search and the New Section Search are of special interest. Both are like the sliders on a Google Map - they give you the power to quickly zoom in on data landscapes and isolate detail in the data that would otherwise be inaccessible or, at a minimum, take hours to locate.
These enhancements to Securities Mosaic all extend and deepen the trend toward research organized around data extracted from documents. The documents themselves have become almost irrelevant, not because they are not appropriate vehicles for some kinds of data presentation, but because they are a variable now, not a given. In many legal research and legal practice contexts, the information in documents is best delivered to the practitioner via a data-rich search environment in which the document itself is irrelevant. Expect this trend to continue and, indeed, to accelerate.
Next: Legal Research in a Ferrari
2) New Section Searching on the All SEC Filings page – New Section Search categories for Financial and Accounting Information and for Prospectus Information make available 16 new filing sections for internal text searches. We will be adding these sections to Item Extractor later this summer.
3) Expanded News Archive on Securities Mosaic – Expands archives of all of our Securities Mosaic News and Current Awareness alerts to include the last six months (rather than the previous 10 alerts).
As with Risk Factors Search, the enhanced Exhibits Search and the New Section Search are of special interest. Both are like the sliders on a Google Map - they give you the power to quickly zoom in on data landscapes and isolate detail in the data that would otherwise be inaccessible or, at a minimum, take hours to locate.
These enhancements to Securities Mosaic all extend and deepen the trend toward research organized around data extracted from documents. The documents themselves have become almost irrelevant, not because they are not appropriate vehicles for some kinds of data presentation, but because they are a variable now, not a given. In many legal research and legal practice contexts, the information in documents is best delivered to the practitioner via a data-rich search environment in which the document itself is irrelevant. Expect this trend to continue and, indeed, to accelerate.
Next: Legal Research in a Ferrari
Friday, July 4, 2008
Knowledge Mosaic Rising
Here are some things I plan to write about in the next week or two:
What Risk Factors search presages is a broad, comprehensive, and sweeping renovation of our research platforms. By the end of the year, we will have integrated all of our individual web and news products - Securities Mosaic, SM Litigator, Communications Mosaic, and Energy Mosaic - into a single platform called, simply, Knowledge Mosaic, which will span the full breadth of business and financial regulation.
In addition to the integration of our current set of products into a single, unified news and research environment, we will add a wealth of currently unreleased data, of which the Risk Factors Search represents only one example. We also possess the full set of parsed Investment Adviser registration data from the SEC, as well as a broad range of items, sections, and data extracted from the SEC filings. Finally, we are incorporating a vast array of financial and business data - from the CFTC, FTC, OCC, FDIC, FINSA, and every other alphabet agency one can imagine, including deputized regulators such as FINRA, NYSE, and Nasdaq.
Layer this extraordinary range of business and financial regulation resources with state-of the-art productivity and collaboration tools, and combine both with our renowned commitment to reasonable pricing and unparalleled responsiveness to the needs of our customers - and Knowledge Mosaic will quite simply stand alone. I cannot communicate to you the excitement we experience as we work on this incarnation of a research platform designed from the ground up to meet the needs of legal practitioners in the 21st century.
More tomorrow on the vision behind the product.
- More on Bloomberg Legal and the "interesting" idea that the appropriate metaphor for a legal research platform would be a Ferrari.
- The rise and fall of the curious practice of charging back legal research costs to clients.
- What the legal profession can learn from the NBA.
- The ascendance of the Facebook generation and the arrival of visual learning.
- Who the heck is Max Boot?
- The end of "race" - as in the remarkable and rapid disappearance of race as the axis of identity in American culture and politics.
What Risk Factors search presages is a broad, comprehensive, and sweeping renovation of our research platforms. By the end of the year, we will have integrated all of our individual web and news products - Securities Mosaic, SM Litigator, Communications Mosaic, and Energy Mosaic - into a single platform called, simply, Knowledge Mosaic, which will span the full breadth of business and financial regulation.
In addition to the integration of our current set of products into a single, unified news and research environment, we will add a wealth of currently unreleased data, of which the Risk Factors Search represents only one example. We also possess the full set of parsed Investment Adviser registration data from the SEC, as well as a broad range of items, sections, and data extracted from the SEC filings. Finally, we are incorporating a vast array of financial and business data - from the CFTC, FTC, OCC, FDIC, FINSA, and every other alphabet agency one can imagine, including deputized regulators such as FINRA, NYSE, and Nasdaq.
Layer this extraordinary range of business and financial regulation resources with state-of the-art productivity and collaboration tools, and combine both with our renowned commitment to reasonable pricing and unparalleled responsiveness to the needs of our customers - and Knowledge Mosaic will quite simply stand alone. I cannot communicate to you the excitement we experience as we work on this incarnation of a research platform designed from the ground up to meet the needs of legal practitioners in the 21st century.
More tomorrow on the vision behind the product.
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