One of the new offerings from Lexis was an interface for Microsoft Office Outlook and Word. Essentially the Lexis plug-in will scan the document for any key words for any piece of litigation and highlight them, and will hyperlink any citations or other documents that can be retrieved from the Lexis service, allowing the recipient of such a document to quickly retrieve and Shepardize cases and materials from an opponent's, or his own, brief. Currently the program is available for Lexis subscribers at no additional fee, although the sales rep hinted that as the program matured additional charges would likely apply. The brief demo of the program was nice, and if I was a Lexis user I would certainly get it. Lexis hopes that users of the program will be more quick to click on a hyperlinked case and immediately download it from their service at around $5 a case, rather than take the time to search for the case on one of the free services like Casemaker. Currently the product does not work nativity with PDF's, although you can OCR the PDF, then paste the text into Word and then use the program. I do not know if the program is available or can be used with a Lexis account obtained through Jenkins Law Library, which allows 20 minutes of daily Lexis use for $150 per year (previously posed on here) but if it does then that would certainly be the most economical way to use the service. Either way, the product is a nice premium enhancement, which is what Lexis is going to have to continue to do if it wants to keep charging premium prices for information that is increasingly available from other sources for free.
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