White et al v. West Publishing Corporation et al

Filing 59

DECLARATION of Leigh Beauchamp in Support re: 45 MOTION for Summary Judgment.. Document filed by Reed Elsevier Inc.. (Hough, James)

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
EDWARD L. WHITE, P.C.,
Plaintiff,
v.

ECF CASE

Civil Action No. 12-CV-1340 (JSR)

WEST PUBLISHING CORPORATION
d/b/a “West,” and REED ELSEVIER INC.
d/b/a LexisNexis,
Defendants.

DECLARATION OF LEIGH BEAUCHAMP IN SUPPORT OF DEFENDANT REED
ELSEVIER INC.’S MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT
I, Leigh Beauchamp, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1746, hereby declare:
1.

I submit this declaration in support of Defendant Reed Elsevier Inc.’s Motion for

Summary Judgment. The facts set forth herein are based upon my personal knowledge,
information supplied to me by those working at my direction in the ordinary course of business,
or my review of regularly kept, contemporaneously made business books and records of Reed
Elsevier Inc. If called as a witness, I could and would competently testify about the matters
stated herein.
2.

I have been an employee of LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

(“Lexis”), since 2000, and have been Director of Content Development for Lexis since 2008.
3.

Lexis is an online legal research service that provides numerous products and

services for legal practitioners, law students, and other business customers. Lexis’s services
include electronic databases that contain case law, news and business information, public records
and other content.

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4.

In approximately 2005, Lexis began making available its Briefs, Pleadings, and

Motions (BPM) product offering.
5.

The BPM product is comprised of electronic databases that contain selected

attorney-authored briefs, pleadings, and motions that were filed, without seal, in federal and state
courts.
6.

The BPM product is intended to provide attorneys and other Lexis users with

research materials in targeted practice areas.
7.

Based on my understanding of customer usage and customer feedback, Lexis

customers do not purchase the BPM product to gain access to any particular brief or document.
Lexis customers purchase the BPM product for its comprehensive nature, specifically, for the
volume of briefs and the editorial enhancements.
8.

Lexis markets its BPM product directly to practicing attorneys.

9.

The BPM database currently consists of over 1.4 million legal documents.

10.

Lexis offers education packages to law schools that grant student users free access

to Lexis’s BPM product.
11.

A 2007 study conducted by Lexis concluded that the vast majority of legal

documents on lexis.com were accessed by law students.
12.

Lexis acquires legal documents for the BPM product through various sources.

Lexis retrieves documents filed in federal district courts primarily through the Public Access to
Court Electronic Records (“PACER”) system.
13.

Lexis pays the same rate as other private users to download legal documents from

PACER.

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14.

Lexis has relationships with certain courts to obtain documents filed in those

courts, and those courts send copies of legal documents directly to Lexis.
15.

Lexis also receives requests directly from attorneys and legal organizations to

make their legal documents available as part of the BPM product. For example, one state
government agency signed an exclusive subscription agreement, with a condition being that
Lexis make available in the BPM database the legal documents authored by that office.
16.

Lexis is selective in choosing what legal documents to include in the BPM

database. Lexis makes strategic decisions about whether legal documents will add value to the
BPM product, depending on whether a document pertains to a priority topic or practice area or is
from a priority jurisdiction.
17.

After a Lexis editor decides that a particular legal document should be added to

the BPM product, the document is downloaded from PACER (or is obtained in another manner).
18.

It is necessary for Lexis to copy the entire legal document, in part because the

whole copy is needed to make the BPM database comprehensively text searchable, which is an
integral feature of the BPM product. In addition, including only portions of legal documents in
the BPM database would limit the ability of Lexis users to use the BPM product to compare
forms and arguments in one legal document with another, as well as to evaluate the effectiveness
of those forms and arguments.
19.

A Lexis editor determines if the legal document should be split into multiple

documents (for instance, if a brief includes an attachment) or if previously split documents
should be combined.

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20.

A Lexis editor or Lexis’s outside conversion vendor reviews all legal documents

for sensitive information, such as social security numbers, financial information or information
regarding minors, and makes any necessary redactions.
21.

A Lexis editor captures and records certain “metadata” about the legal document,

such as the case name, the court, the type of document, any expert witnesses involved, and the
court opinion with which the legal document is associated. This allows for searching by
jurisdiction, document type and any other captured data field.
22.

Lexis then sends legal documents and corresponding metadata to an outside

conversion vendor that converts the pdf document into Lexis’s proprietary data file format that is
text and segment searchable.
23.

Following this conversion, Lexis runs a cite recognition program to identify

statutes, codes, regulations and court opinions cited in the legal document and to embed links to
those statutes, codes, regulations and court opinions in the converted document.
24.

Lexis also runs an algorithm program on the legal documents to identify relevant

practice areas, which allows Lexis users to search for legal documents by practice area.
25.

Hyperlinks are also added to and from other legal documents related to that

particular case, such as expert reports and jury instructions, as well as links to the converted legal
documents from the case law opinion(s) to which the documents are related.
26.

In most instances, Lexis includes with the converted document a link to the

version of the legal document as it is available in the court records, such as on PACER, for
convenience, verification and archival purposes. A Lexis user can only access the link to that
version of the legal document by first accessing the enhanced version of document through the
BPM database.

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