Decisis, the legal research service that LexisNexis parent RELX launched in 2021 to compete against Fastcase for a share of the bar association partnership business, has expanded over just the past year from 10 to 20 bar partnerships, including 14 state bar associations.

In fact, two of those state bars have yet to publicly announce their move and still list Fastcase on their websites as a member benefit.

I first wrote here in 2022 about the “quiet” launch of Decisis, which was developed as a subsidiary of RELX under the corporate name Legal InQuery Solutions Inc., but whose website makes no mention of either LexisNexis or RELX.

In a subsequent 2022 interview with Jeffrey S. Pfeifer, who is chief product officer for LexisNexis in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., as well as president of Legal InQuery Solutions, he confirmed that Decisis was created primarily for the purpose of targeting bar association affinity partnerships.

Its launch followed not long after Fastcase acquired Casemaker in 2021, ending what had been a longstanding competition to be the preferred legal research member benefit for state and local bar associations. (Pfeifer told me the product was not a response to the acquisition and had been in development before then.)

Once Fastcase made that acquisition, it effectively cornered the bar association market, becoming the sole legal research provider for the bar associations of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and four-dozen metropolitan, county and specialty bar associations.

That gave Fastcase – which has since merged with international legal research company vLex – a total number of users of more than 1 million lawyers, out of an estimated 1.3 million lawyers in the country.

When I last talked to Pfeifer about Decisis in 2022, two state bars had signed on with the service: the Ohio State Bar Association (OSBA), which began offering it to members in October 2021, and the Nebraska State Bar Association (NSBA), which started with the service on May 2, 2022.

Since then, Decisis has continued to add new partnerships, bringing its current tally to 14 state bar associations, four local bar associations, and two plaintiffs’ lawyers associations.

Simple By Design

The Decisis product is currently overseen by Jake Nelson, general manager of emerging products at LexisNexis and formerly global product leader for AI/ML at LexisNexis.

In an interview this week, he told me that the Decisis product is, by design, a very basic legal research service that does not have the generative AI features of other legal research platforms. That bare-bones approach allows the company to provide Decisis to bar association at a price that makes it affordable for them for the long term, he said.

“We’ve kept it simple so we can maintain a place in this market long term, and so we can continue to serve those bar associations over an extended period of time,” Nelson said.

This keeping-it-simple strategy involves maintaining a “steady state” in which the service focuses on “meat and potatoes content” sourced primarily through LexisNexis, while avoiding frustrating users with features that would requiring upselling or paywalls.

“When you approach a product, it’s not always the product that has the most features and feature functionality, it’s the one that’s easiest to use,” Nelson said. “So I think that’s really the angle that we’ve taken in terms of what we’ve created and our effort to keep it simple.”

As Pfeifer told me in 2022: “It is a very streamlined product experience intentionally. It is meant to be self-trained, so you can intuitively figure out the contents and a user can easily jump in. It looks a lot different than the Lexis product.”

Decisis does include a citator. It was developed specifically for this product and is not based in any way on LexisNexis’s Shepard’s Citations Service. Unlike Shepard’s the citator in Decisis flags only negative treatments of cases.

But if users want AI legal research tools, Nelson said, he encourages them to upgrade to Lexis+ AI. In fact, he concedes that he hopes Decisis will serve as a springboard for some users to upgrade, and Decisis regularly presents educational programs for bar association members on the benefits of AI.

Bar Association Partners

According to Nelson, Decisis has added 10 bar association partners in just the past year. Here is the full list of current Decisis partners. (Links are to bars’ pages describing the Decisis benefit.)

State Bars

Local and Specialty Bars

Competition with Fastcase

Many of the bar associations now using Decisis previously had relationships with Fastcase, which, as already noted, had established itself as the dominant provider in the bar association market.

Its dominance was strengthened in 2021 when it acquired Casemaker, ending the longstanding competition between those two services and leaving it the sole legal research provider for bar associations across the country.

It was that acquisition that spurred Ohio, the first state bar to sign on with Decisis, to began looking for a new legal research provider.

“Once we were informed that our longtime legal research tool, Casemaker, would be sunset, our board and staff looked at this as an opportunity to seek out a next generation legal research platform to support our membership,” OSBA CEO Mary Amos Augsburger told me in 2022.

A group of OSBA members tested Decisis and “it came out the clear winner,” she said. “We are a bar that embraces innovation and Decisis is a streamlined interface that was created towards making legal research easier and more accurate.”

Nebraska, another early adopter of Decisis, liked “the uncluttered interface, the reliable and consistent search results, and how intuitive Decisis is to use,” as I reported in that 2022 post.

As noted above, the Wyoming State Bar’s governing body voted to switch from Fastcase to Decisis on Nov. 1, 2024. According to minutes of that Nov. 1 board meeting, the bar’s executive director reported that she was surprised to have learned “how much some of our members dislike Fastcase.”

Those minutes indicated that Decisis offered a more favorable pricing structure than Fastcase and that a working group that tested it found it more user friendly. Given all this, one board member said, the decision to switch was a “no-brainer” — a point on which the minutes reflect, “All were in agreement.”

The Gen AI Factor

Of course, thanks to the advent of generative AI, legal research products have evolved significantly since 2021, when Decisis came on the market and Fastcase acquired Casemaker.

That evolution creates an even sharper distinction between Decisis and Fastcase than previously existed. Fastcase has since gone on to merge with vLex — and the merged vLex-Fastcase product has been gaining recognition for its gen AI capabilities, including high marks in the Vals Legal AI Report and in an “AI smackdown” conducted by law librarians.

Nelson made clear that Decisis is committed to maintaining its streamlined approach – with no AI – while offering pathways for attorneys who want more advanced features to explore Lexis+ AI and other premium services.

But Ed Walters, the former CEO of Fastcase and now chief strategy officer at vLex, told me this week that the service vLex offers bar members does include AI.

“I think Decisis offers them a less-for-less proposition – they can pay less and get less,” Walters said. “No judgment – that might be the right business model for some bar associations – but the vLex model is more for less.

“The idea is that people are going to get the same legal research service that we’re selling at the biggest law firms in the world. We are taking the AI products that we’re building and we’re packing them into the member benefit as much as we can.”

That currently includes four vLex AI skills included for free in bar memberships, Walters said, and possibly more in the future.

That said, Walters says he welcomes the competition from LexisNexis in the bar association market.

“We welcome this competition, especially if it marks a change in the LexisNexis business model, if this means that Lexis is committing more to democratizing the law, then that’s great.

“That’s why we got into this market. You’ve heard me say it a million times: the mission of Fastcase and now the mission of vLex is to democratize the law. And we welcome LexisNexis to that conversation.”

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.