By Jason Wilson
If you haven’t been paying attention, the proposed Canadian class action of Lorne Waldman v. Thomson Reuters Corp. & Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd. is continuing its slow trek to the certification hearing scheduled for late September. You might recall that this case is seeking $50m for copyright infringement of lawyers’ briefs that were made part of Westlaw Canada’s Litigator service. Back in February, Jilean Bell, Director of the Legal and Regulatory Strategic Market Group for Carswell, filed a record in the case on behalf of Thomson, et al. Her affidavit makes for some interesting reading on the history of Litigator and how Westlaw Canada’s court document service operates. There were a couple of surprising items revealed, such as the fact that Westlaw Canada claims they have about 1,300 subscribers for Litigator, with an estimate that over 10,000 lawyers across Canada have access to the service, and that the brief database includes the names of approximately 12 to 13,000 different lawyers and 6,500 different firms.
Now, assuming Westlaw’s U.S. Litigator service brings in $50 to $100m a year, I wonder how long it will be before some enterprising law firm decides to take up the cause on this side of the border.
[Image (CC) by Martin Deutsch]
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Someone raised the issue but it seems to have stopped with a letter to the California Supreme Court. http://www.dailyjournal.com/common/printemail/pri… Interesting to see those customer figures. Westlaw Canada won't license it to my membership-based law library.
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