Knowledge Mosaic Rising

Here are some things I plan to write about in the next week or two:

• 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?

And ...

• The end of "race" - as in the remarkable and rapid disappearance of race as the axis of identity in American culture and politics.

Before I turn to those matters, however, I want to write a bit about my company, and the dramatic changes you will see in our vision and in our products over the next twelve months. The first of these changes occurred today, with the incorporation into Securities Mosaic of our massive Risk Factors database. Risk Factors search includes more than one million risk factors parsed from the SEC filings, categorized into more than 30 major categories and nearly 1,000 minor categories. Risk Factors Search is a remarkable tool for analyzing and mapping risk, exposing liability, and instantly locating relevant precedent language for risk disclosure.

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.