Mead Data Central: A User Interface as a Competitive Issue

In 1992, customers of Mead Data Central's Lexis information service paid more than $300 million for the legal information it provides. At that time, it faced increased challenges from West Publishing, which packaged similar information in a different format and used a different billing scheme. In 1992, West introduced new capabilities, making it much easier for users to find the information they wanted. Compare the way Lexis forced lawyers to express their inquiries in a form much like a programming language to the new West system that permitted lawyers to type questions in English:

West: Can a travel agency or book publisher be held liable for injuries sustained by a tourist while visiting a recommended place?

Lexis: (travel w/15 agents or guide or brochure or literature) w/25 (injury or accident or death) w/25 (tourist or traveler)

In both cases, the computer system converts the lawyer's inquiry into a set of internal commands that it uses to find cases that may be pertinent to the client's case. If you were a lawyer working on a case related to an injury suffered by a travel agent's client, it would probably be easier for you to ask the question in English rather than in the code required by Lexis. However, asking the question in English might not always be advantageous. The Lexis code is very precise, and the lawyer knows exactly what question has been expressed. Since questions in natural language may be less precise and may leave some degree of interpretation by the retrieval program, the lawyer may miss some cases because the retrieval program misunderstands the question's intent. Some kinks apparently remained in the West system, and these might have been related to this problem.

Questions:

1. Use the WCA framework to organize your understanding of this case and to identify important topics that are not mentioned.

2. Look at the entire cycle, from deciding what is needed through debugging a system, to explain the extent to which using these systems is like programming.

Source: Berss, Marcia. "Logging off Lexis." Forbes, Jan. 4, 1993, p. 46.

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