There may be no more concise way to sum up the changed nature or ambitions of the former West Publishing Company than what Roger Martin says: “We are sort of the next generation of Google—without the garbage—for professionals.”
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Editor’s Note: Twin Cities Business is published by MSP Communications, which is owned by Key Enterprises, LLC. Both are owned by the Opperman family, which had a controlling interest in West Publishing when Thomson bought it. The Oppermans were interviewed for this story (Vance Opperman is a Thomson Reuters director), but did not read it or inquire about it before its publication. |
West was the publisher of legal reference and college textbooks that had been around the Twin Cities since 1872, when John and Horatio West began selling legal compendiums and office supplies to lawyers in St. Paul. It got acquired by Thomson Corporation, a Toronto-based publisher and data-services business, in 1996. Then Thomson acquired Reuters Group, PLC, the London-based news and financial reporting company, in 2008. The two became Thomson Reuters Corporation, and what had been West became Thomson Reuters Legal.
Martin is a Thomson Reuters director and dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He’s been a champion of Thomson’s West and Reuters acquisitions, which both drew criticism that Thomson was overpaying.
And Google is—need anyone say it? The name is synonymous with online search.
In 2007, Martin published an article in his business school’s magazine underlining the value of Thomson’s West Publishing acquisition. Bringing West into the fold had made Thomson a star of the information services field, he asserted.
Thomson Reuters still publishes hardcover law books (48 million of them last year) just as West did. But increasingly, legal professionals have come to rely on services like Westlaw, a sophisticated online database and search engine created by West Publishing, to find the precedents and statutes they need. And Westlaw has become a wellspring of related products, both for the legal field and across Thomson Reuters’ other businesses in health care, science, accounting, and financial markets.
