LexisNexis, a pioneer of information technology, has selected big data specialist MarkLogic to power components of the new platform behind Lexis Advance, its legal research solution. A member of Reed Elsevier, LexisNexis serves customers in more than 100 countries and more than 15,000 employees worldwide and, according to Bill Veiga, vice president of solutions marketing, at MarkLogic, is among MarkLogic's most sophisticated customer implementations. LexisNexis has billions of documents with complex connections to one another. For example, a verdict settlement may force updates to hundreds of thousands of documents. MarkLogic enables LexisNexis to call up its content in milliseconds and make changes in real time on commodity hardware. MarkLogic's flagship product, MarkLogic Server, is a purpose-built database for unstructured information.
LexisNexis, which had built its first search engine on the mainframe in the 1970s, began its implementation of MarkLogic in October 2010, says Veiga. The company has been continuing since then, leading up to the launch earlier this week of its new release of Lexis Advance, which serves primary users of online legal research such as associates at law firms and staff attorneys at corporations and in government. LexisNexis is now off the mainframe, says Veiga, who notes that among LexisNexis' concerns were the aging of its mainframe specialists. Other applications utilizing the new technology platform include Lexis Advance for Solos, TotalPatent, Verdict & Settlement Analyzer, Litigation Profile Suite, and CourtLink.
With MarkLogic, LexisNexis has built a simple, familiar search system which provides full search across all content with industry-leading relevance results. Search relies on MarkLogic to execute 30 or more targeted searches simultaneously and to deliver precise results to users in less than a second. In addition, LexisNexis has been able to develop intuitive and interactive interfaces to analyze rich data sets and spot trends in case law. This includes Shepard's Citations Services and other features that allow users to find and cite obscure case connections. MarkLogic enables these applications by combining multiple, previously separate, data into a single operational database.
For more information about MarkLogic, visit www.marklogic.com.