If you had to guess which legal research service law students prefer, you’d probably answer Westlaw. After all, back in the early days of legal research, West pioneered the idea of giving law students free access in the hope of creating career-long customers.
But a survey published today finds that law students have a new favorite, Lexis Advance. The survey, commissioned by LexisNexis Legal & Professional and conducted by the independent research group PwC Research, part of PwC LLP in the UK, polled 5,051 law students at 201 ABA-accredited U.S. law schools.
In what LexisNexis is calling the Next-Gen Legal Tech Study, law students were asked which is their preferred platform for legal research. Of those surveyed, 50% said Lexis Advance, compared to 46% who said Westlaw. Another 0.5% said Bloomberg Law, 0.5% said other, and 2.5% said they had no preference.
Asked what drove their preference (whichever platform they answered), the top factor was ease of use (73%), followed by ability to find information quickly (62%). Other factors that drove their preference were attractive design, satisfaction with search results, and depth and breadth of content.
The survey further found that law students believe it is helpful to use newer research tools such as visualization, analytics and artificial intelligence. Seventy-six percent said they find analytics helpful in their research and 77% said they find visualization helpful.
These findings, LexisNexis says, validate its own internally conducted surveys in recent years that have shown a growing preference among law students for Lexis Advance over other legal research platforms.
The bigger takeaway, LexisNexis suggests, is that this validates that its platform has the features that Gen Z-ers prefer. As these law students become lawyers, these are the features they will want available to them in their firms.
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