The legislative tracking service State Net, which is owned by LexisNexis, is marking its 50th year in business by rolling out upgrades to its infrastructure and search and new analytics.
Founded 50 years ago in Sacramento, Calif., State Net was acquired by LexisNexis in 2010. Two years ago, LexisNexis put Daniel Lewis, vice president of product, in charge of the product. Lewis is the cofounder and CEO of Ravel Law, a legal research service known for its visualization and analytics tools, which LexisNexis acquired in 2017.
During a preview of the new features on Monday, Lewis acknowledged that legislative research differs from legal research in many respects. Nonetheless, he and his team have endeavored to bring to State Net similar visualization and analytics tools as he helped develop at Ravel Law.
Changes to State Net being announced today include:
A faster cloud-based infrastructure to support advanced analytics and the ability to serve more content from more sources. This was achieved by moving the platform from LexisNexis’s own servers in Dayton, Ohio, to Amazon Web Services. A new search engine that promises to provide faster and more-relevant results. New Momentum Analytics, designed to help professionals focus their time by identifying bills that are moving rapidly or slowly through the legislative process. A one-stop dashboard where users can track all the legislation that matters to them and see all the information and analytics that relate to specific bills.
In addition, over the past year, State Net has added monitoring of government activity for the largest cities and counties in the U.S. To date, it is monitoring 258 cities and counties, with more still to be added.
During the preview, Lewis demonstrated the new “one-stop” overview page for legislation. (See the image at the top of this post.) It provides an overview
