Information facilitator LexisNexis moved to bolster its offerings Wednesday when it agreed to acquire Bellevue, Wash.’s CourtLink
Corp., which lets users file court documents via the Internet.
Fiscal terms of the purchase were not made public and the deal is subject to CourtLink shareholders.
What would seem to make this a happy marriage is that, although LexisNexis is widely used by students in universities and colleges,
its information database is equally appealing to legal professionals, which is where CourtLink comes in. As a leading provider of
Web-based legal document storage and retrieval, CourtLink can only increase LexisNexis’ court-related materials online.
CourtLink is credited as the first firm to create a single online platform for accessing records and filing documents with the
courts via the Web. CourtLink bangs out more than a million filed pages per month from 90 courts online. In total, users may search
and retrieve case information from more than 200 million court records in 1,400 federal, state and local court systems.
“We firmly believe the online services and emerging markets CourtLink has pioneered will bring tremendous value to the legal
profession at large,” said Lou Andreozzi, president and chief executive officer, North American Legal Markets, LexisNexis.
CourtLink will continue to operate from its Bellevue headquarters after the acquisition, operating as a separate business unit of LexisNexis. CourtLink CEO Henry Givray resigned to pursue other CEO opportunities, paving the way for Chief Operations Officer Ann Fullenkamp to run CourtLink in his stead.
In related news Wednesday, LexisNexis said it would work with media analysis firm CARMA international to deliver a new Web-based
tool for monitoring and evaluating media coverage of major corporations to the academic community.
