I am not a lawyer, thank you very much, but I am married to one. So, you may imagine that I am familiar with more than a few members of the breed. I’ve heard every lawyer joke there is (but if you want to send me a couple of your favorites, that would be OK).
In the mid-1980s, the early days of Lynch Ryan, I often heard my attorney friends saying they had to search “Lexis” for one thing or another. Since they were occasionally charging me for doing that, I wanted to know a bit about “that Lexis thing.” Over lunch one day I was educated about this remarkable innovation for the legal community, an innovation that was actually saving me money.
The whole thing began as a searchable database experiment of the Ohio State Bar in 1967. In 1970, the Mead Corporation’s Mead Data Central took it over and named it Lexis. In 1973, Mead made Lexis’s full text search available for all cases in Ohio and New York. In 1980, after a 7-year key punch effort (you read that right), Lexis went nationwide for all federal and state cases. That same year, Mead launched the Lexis sister, Nexis, which allowed journalists to search news stories related to law.
In 1994, Mead sold LexisNexis to Reed Elsevier for $1.5 billion. Not a bad return on investment from those Ohio State Bar days.
Starting in 2000, LexisNexis began to get into the risk solution business, primarily by acquisition: Riskwise in 2000 and ChoicePoint, a data aggregator, in 2008. By the time of the ChoicePoint buy, LexisNexis had become profoundly involved in risk, especially workers compensation. It became a leading publisher of workers compensation material, including Larson’s Workers Compensation Law.
The LexisNexis Senior Editor for all things workers compensation is Robin Kobayashi, a ridiculously smart and talented person (Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA — by contrast, the closest I ever got to Phi Beta Kappa was admiring Gary Anderberg’s pin).
Robin is the visionary who decided to recognize workers compensation bloggers, beginning in 2009. That year there was only one winner, and I’m proud to say we were it. However, beginning in 2010, Robin expanded the award to the top 25 blogs, realizing that there was a wealth of insightful Web commentary that cried out for recognition.
Recently, LexisNexis announced the top 25 workers compensation blogs for 2014, a most distinguished list, and we congratulate everyone on it. However, during this time of recognition, I thought it might be a good idea to shine the Workers Comp Insider arc light on the far-sighted professional who made this award possible, thus deepening and expanding the workers compensation community in a meaningful and long-lasting manner.
For her vision and dedication, we salute Robin Kobayashi.
