In the summer of 2000, my wife and sons hauled out from New England to San Diego, where we lived in one apartment and worked in the other. Shortly thereafter my Dad went to a yard sale and finally bought an answering machine. To this day it still plays the previous owner's greeting. If you find TheLaw.net easy to use, you have my Dad to thank. It was designed with him in mind.

     On August 1, 2000 we started contacting attorneys and sold 100 subscriptions our first month on the promise of delivering the service by Labor Day. We made good on our promise - barely - and TheLaw.net Corporation has been cash positive and self-sustaining ever since.

    Today nearly 400,000 attorney subscribers pay for access to the database.

    In our infancy all we had to sell was content and price. In this regard we played a meaningful role in leveling the playing field, promoting the rule of law and preserving civil liberties for everyday Americans by simply ensuring that all local practitioners could see all the law at all times. Our philosophy has always been, "Give everyone the same tools and let the best lawyer win!"

     Things turned dramatically in our favor when we began issuing the results of studies that proved West statutes annotated omitted relevant law.

     It is only with the benefit of technology that we are able to compare electronic search results against West's manmade taxonomy. Our recently released  "Apples To Apples" case study reveals the lack of continuity between WestlawNext search results and West's revered Statutes Annotated. Nearly 50% of the first ten opinions identified as Most Relevant by the WestlawNext algorithm receive no mention in the annotations of the related statute!

     Today it's not about the quantity of results but the quality of results. Who can put the most cited, most relevant, most binding opinions in your hands in seconds?

      TheLaw.net Corporation is in an ongoing competition with Canadian media conglomerate Thomson Reuter's (Westlaw) and British media conglomerate Reed Elsevier (Lexis) to see who can come up with the best algorithm. More accurately, since May 1, 2008, West and Lexis have been forced to play catch up. That was the day we released our game-changing version containing our first-mover, best-of-breed algorithm - CiteTrak - and the rest as they say, is history.

     T.R. recently released WestlawNext, a database that rents for as much as $3,400 an hour and does not deliver the detailed analytics and sorting mechanisms provided by CiteTrak, the algorithm undergirding TheLaw.net Equalizer 7. R.E. is working on something dubbed "New Lexis" so soon we'll get to see what that's all about. We're pretty sure it will still be really expensive.

     WestlawNext represents a tacit concession on the part of Thomson Reuter's that it can no longer primarily rely on 19th century book browsing - on the page or screen - and that it has no choice but to drag its market of large users into the world of 21st century computing where the task of finding the best cases that construe your code and/or concept is practically administrative.

     TheLaw.net is a true e-business. You won't read about us in the trades. We don't waste money on public relations or traditional advertising. We don't even have a sales staff. If you're here it's because we sent you an email or a friend referred you.

     We have a terrific inbound staff to field your calls and emails on the off chance this site is unclear or inadvertently raises more questions than it answers.

     After the sale we go to work on earning your renewal, by providing research and reference support and any needed individualized training for free. You also enjoy unlimited access to the Ultimate Portal and TheLaw.net Virtual Assistant. If you can't find it we'll find it for you and deliver it to your Inbox. If you're not getting the results you want, we'll give you the best query. If you need an ALR and we don't have it, we'll buy it for you and email it out directly. Our goal is to ensure you're never without a known item of information!

     There's one more thing you can't do with Westlaw. You can't sign up online. You are less than $50 a month and five minutes away from completely changing the way you think about the retrieval, selection and validation tasks that define legal research and perhaps best of all, you don't have to do a meet and greet with Willy Loman!

     We look forward to being of service!