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Project Overview

LexisNexis Red is the world’s first referencing solution designed specifically to meet the unique needs of the legal profession.

Designed for both the iPad and Windows, LexisNexis Red provides access to specialised legal publications via a stylish, intuitive and efficient user-interface.

Developed by an Australian and New Zealand team, LexisNexis Red has proven so successful it is being rolled out globally.

Organisation

LexisNexis Pacific

Team

Matthew Lawrence, Product Strategy Manage (Project Lead), LexisNexis
Peter Wallis, Lead Technical Architect, LexisNexis
Jodie Monahan, Project Manager, LexisNexis
Paul Napper, Senior Technical Product Manager, LexisNexis
Shamus Hart, Senior UX Designer, LexisNexis
Ben Hoh, Creative Director, Digital Eskimo
Anthony Ditton, Design Strategist, Digital Eskimo

Project Brief

Lawyers rely on their loose-leaf services (periodically updated information services) like a climber relies on ropes. The content they contain is the guarantee the lawyer will have the information they need to argue their case accurately and professionally.

The brief was to deliver a mobile application (for tablets and laptops) controlled and updated via a content delivery and subscription back-end which:
- Exploits the strengths of the tablet devices.
- Provides reliable access to high value, current, legal content.
- Provide seamless updates.
- Meets the “referencing” needs of lawyers.
- Store personal annotations in a cloud-based environment.
- Inspires delight in the people who use it!

Key features:
- Dynamic table of contents – for rapid, reliable navigation to critical content.
- Hyperlinked index – with filtering to enable rapid location of specific terms.
- Search
- Annotations –highlights and notes to create personal content and structure.
- Recent history – easily jump back to recently accessed content.
- Automated updating – no need to track or file updates. Personal annotations are migrated across to the updated content automatically.
- A portable library – access to LexisNexis’ complete set of loose-leaf titles.
- A web-based subscription management tool to make it simple for large organisations to manage large groups of subscribers.

Project Need

LexisNexis Red is the world’s first referencing solution designed specifically to meet the unique needs of the legal profession.

Lawyers use loose-leaf services in a very different way to traditional books. Lawyers don’t read, they “reference”.

Referencing is a distinct activity in a legal context quite different from “reading”. While reading is a linear activity, referencing is a way of accessing information more like the way one would use a dictionary or encyclopaedia. That is, the information is accessed in a non-linear fashion (via the table of contents, index or search). A critical aspect is also the ability to annotate the text to enrich the content with personal comments and through that create a personalised structure.

The solution required a fresh approach – bridging the gap between familiarity with existing print products and the opportunities offered by a digital platform.

The heart of the solution is in usability. The combination of integrated user interface components, particularly the Dynamic Table of Contents, ensures the user is able to quickly navigate to the desired section intuitively and quickly.

User Experience

Lawyers are extremely time poor, so to be successful a productivity tool targeted at Lawyers must focus on ease-of-use.

The user interface is characterised by rich, three dimensional elements (for example, the subtle depth provided by drop shadow on the ‘book’ icons, and the content view has a subtle texture in the background to evoke the tradition of paper) to evoke a sense of substance, quality and familiarity.

The application needs to be extremely efficient and functional. Using LexisNexis Red, lawyers are able to quickly and effectively find, in high pressure situations, the relevant information needed within the current loose-leaf content.

The interactive elements have been designed to make the workflow intuitive and quick. The Table of Contents navigation toolbar is designed to facilitate navigation by ‘sections’ (instead of pages as you would for a book). The navigation toolbar automatically highlights previous selections to provide a clear indication of location within the text.

These design aspects were based on extensive user experience development and testing, and the involvement of leading designers. The application itself has undergone significant changes since release, actively responding to user feedback.

Project Marketing

The key elements of the marketing strategy include:

1. Close client engagement during the development process. These clients later became high profile early adopters. The initial target market were ‘litigators’ – those lawyers who routinely appear in court, who require litigation or procedural loose-leaf titles, traditionally use hard copy, and are seeking to use tablet or laptop devices. The first sale was made to NSW Police Prosecutors. This provided some great media opportunities and also put the product in the hands of every prosecutor in NSW. That meant that every time a barrister walked into a courtroom they were facing off against a prosecutor using LexisNexis Red.

2. Supporting bundles – a range of support services were provided via a third party, Mobile Mentor, as part of a bundle solution called “Mobile Lawyer”. This bundle includes leased iPad, mobile accessories, data plan and support services.