Thomson Reuters acquired Pangea3 in November, 2010. The Dallas office, when combined with Pangea3’s major offices in Mumbai and New Delhi where more than 650 employees are located, will provide customers with a greatly expanded workday and a follow-the-sun workflow model for a number of Pangea3’s offerings.

Click here to read the full news release or check out the story in the New York Times.

As you can imagine, we’re delighted. 

In the news release announcing the award, Mike Dahn, chief marketing and product development officer, Westlaw U.S. (and a former law librarian, himself), said: “The WestlawNext team is honored to be accorded this recognition from the customers who best understand our service and its value. We look forward to continuing our work with AALL and the entire law librarian community to advance technologies that make legal research faster, more efficient and more comprehensive.”

Legal Current grabbed a few minutes with Dahn and his team to chat about the award in this short video interview.

The formal award presentation will occur during the 104^th AALL Annual Meeting & Conference in Philadelphia, July 23-26, 2011.

The gain in PMI was attributed to a slight rise in demand in the fourth quarter, coupled with a small increase in rates. Continued tight cost controls and restraint in adding new lawyers boosted both productivity and firm profitability.

A copy of the full report can be downloaded here.

With Folder Sharing on WestlawNext, anyone in an organization can create, share, and modify legal research folders, whether across the office or across the country. Each member of a team can now quickly share information, review research materials, and participate in the strategy of the organization’s matters.

Attorneys don’t have time to re-do what’s already been done, so it makes sense to rely on the best researchers in the organization and draw on the thinking of those most experienced in the issue at hand.

According to Stephanie Fox, director of New Product Development on the WestlawNext team, “Folder sharing was the feature most frequently requested by WestlawNext customers – a testament to their need for increased efficiency and productivity in today’s economy. The bottom line: folder sharing is a powerful feature that builds on an organization’s legal research and expertise by taking that research to a new level through collaboration with others in the organization.”

Legal Current chatted with Fox in this short video interview.

Read the news release or visit our website for more information about the folder-sharing feature in WestlawNext.

“WestlawNext allows you to complete your research in less than half the time and the workflow tools integrate where you work today,” Gleason said.

But how?

“Legal search engines are very literal – they look for exactly what you put in a search box. We knew we could do better than that.”

By talking to thousands of Westlaw researchers and leveraging proprietary Westlaw technologies, like KeyCite, The West Key Number System, attorney-authored editorial enhancements, statutory indices and ResultsPlus, Thomson Reuters has trained a search engine to automatically complete several steps that the best legal researchers perform, all quickly behind the scenes, to first broaden the search across 12 core content sets, then search within this content to present better ranked results. WestSearch also looks at aggregated customer usage – printing, foldering, emailing, etc – to further correlate documents and improve the ranking of results.

We asked Legal Research Center, an independent company, to perform an efficiency study on WestlawNext. Fifty legal professionals used Westlaw and 50 received an hour of training and performed the searches using WestlawNext.

“Thanks to WestSearch, the WestlawNext users were well over 50 percent more efficient,” Gleason said.

In her Thomson Reuters Innovation Theater session, “WestlawNext Goes Where You Go,” Senior User Experience Specialist Shannon O’Brien talked about the development approach that led to WestlawNext Mobile.

“We wanted to make WestlawNext available to all mobile users,” O’Brien said. “Rather than creating an app for every device, we made a compelling version of WestlawNext available to all mobile devices from a single URL: next.westlaw.com.”

The mobile URL is available to all WestlawNext customers and is already very popular. O’Brien said that customers use mobile to view the contents of their folders, KeyCite a document and run searches.

After her presentation, an attendee asked O’Brien if she and her team considered developing apps for specific devices. She said that they look at each device and ask if it is unique enough to warrant a specific app.

“Most smart phone users access WestlawNext Mobile to view document in a folder, write a note on a document or KeyCite a citation,” she said. “Because the screens are smaller, customers usually use their Blackberry, iPhone or other mobile devices to continue their research. The iPad offers more flexibility – it’s more an extension of their desktop experience, and that is why we are developing an iPad app.”

iPad users can use an optimized version of WestlawNext now on their devices; a WestlawNext app will be available later this summer.

The band was good and the Westlaw Business folks put out quite a spread – creating a perfect atmosphere to catch up with colleagues and acquaintances.

Legal Current caught up with Jennifer Perez, Westlaw Business senior marketing manager, and asked her about the event. “AALL is an important show for us and a great opportunity to catch up with a lot of our customers,” she said. “We wanted to gather our friends together and really enjoy what Denver had to offer … a cowboy band and buffalo burgers seemed a good place to start.”

Jennifer Perez is pictured here with Deborah Rusin, Reference Librarian for Latham & Watkins.

Thomson Reuters has released several video profiles of employees, including our own Stephen Yao, CEO of our Legal business in China, as well as iPhone app developer and senior software engineer, Jay Peyer, and others from across the business.

The purpose of the vignettes is to demonstrate the impact that individual employees can have on our business – how they bring its vision and values to life.

According to our Senior Vice President of Talent, Dimitra Manis, “the stories help us understand what Thomson Reuters stands for as an employer and aims to encourage us all to think about what each of us can do to create a best place to work.”

The stories appear on our refreshed Career Center on thomsonreuters.com.

They’re worth checking out. Let me know what you think.

From its inception in May 2009, Legal Current has worked to provide interesting content about the global practice and business of law, with contributions from Thomson Reuters leaders, employees and authors affiliated with the business. Legal Current also is a timely source of news and information about all the legal businesses of Thomson Reuters.

We particularly like using Legal Current to highlight events in the legal industry that bring together so many of you. A good example is our recent coverage from LegalTech New York, where we attended and recapped sessions at the conference and talked about legal industry trends with thought leaders and other attendees.

Simply put, we view Legal Current as a way to communicate with people like you who are passionate about the practice and business of law – all over the world. We appreciate that opportunity. And it’s gratifying to see that work recognized.

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.

So where does data leave off and intelligent information begin?

Rick King, chief technology officer for the Professional Division of Thomson Reuters, discussed just that at a gathering of chief information and chief technology officers at the CIO Forum, held in association with LegalTech New York.

“The core competency of Thomson Reuters Professional Division is integrating content and technology better than anyone, providing customers with Intelligent Information to create knowledge to act,” King told the group. “For example, we painstakingly extract data from opinions, briefs and other documents to create our authority files in Westlaw. This is important to bringing intelligence to our information, relating the previously unrelated, adding detail and lighting up pieces that were before in the dark.”

He went on to say that “Intelligent information begins with a deep understanding of how your customers work and how they use information. Then, the secret sauce is using the technology to really dissect the content – to mine all the data in your content sets, know what it is, map it to other data to deepen its context, and serve it up exactly when its needed.”

King talks about the role of technologists and the influence they can have in law firms and organizations in this video clip from the event: