Having written several posts here at TaxProf Blog about Generative AI in the hands of law professors, I am reminded to note that the AALS announced a new AI-themed partnership with West Academic.
As usual, I have a comment, after the jump. But first:
From the press release, distributed during the AALS Annual Meeting last month:
The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and West Academic, a BARBRI company, announced a new multiyear strategic partnership aimed at deepening the legal academy’s engagement with artificial intelligence (AI). This collaboration, revealed during the 2026 AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, will focus on three initiatives: a national webinar series, developing online resources related to AI, and research on faculty and student attitudes toward AI.
Drawing upon West Academic’s standing as a prominent provider of legal education content and tools and AALS’ 125 years of expertise bringing law faculty together, the collaboration seeks to further understanding about how AI is reshaping legal education and the legal profession as well as equip academic leaders with the tools and insights to navigate this transformation.
Literally every law professor in the U.S. is aware of the foundational role that West Publishing played in constructing the systems and much of the content of the 20th century American legal system. It is hardly a surprise that West Academic wants to stake its claim to the AI-enabled 21st century American legal system. I’m not confident that most law professors know, today, that West Academic is part of BARBRI, long known as the leading provider of bar prep instruction. It is heir to the brand, which remains highly salient in the minds of most academics, but it is an independent company, not part of the publishing behemoth Thomson Reuters. It is not linked to Westlaw, the legal research and information provider.
Whether one considers West as brand or West Academic as an organization, my comment goes to the fragility of “West”‘s inherited leadership status and the wisdom of placing an early bet on West Academic as the “AI tentpole” in U.S. legal education.
For decades, the folks who brought us Westlaw and Lexis (later Lexis/Nexis) competed for law student attention in the hope that student orientation to their respective free legal research services would translate into practitioner demand for high priced legal research services. Practically speaking, aside from law practices and law departments that could not afford Westlaw or Lexis or who chose not to subscribe, the “Wexis” duopoly delivered almost all of the electronic legal research services that any lawyer could want, could need, or could access. Even taking into consideration the marketing pushes that both companies made in law school buildings, baking Wexis into the design of U.S. legal education, as part of first year legal research and writing curricula, made a lot of sense.
The duopoly is long gone, mostly because it turns out that when the law is in the public domain – as most law is, in the U.S. – then the barrier to competition was and is largely the cost of building an alternative database. And as that cost came down dramatically over the last few years, more and more robust alternatives to Wexis grew up. Add in Generative AI, and today it is likely true that Westlaw (again, recognizing that Westlaw and West Academic are no longer related in a corporate organization sense) and Lexis/Nexis are simply two of a number of legaltech alternatives available to lawyers – and law students, and law professors, and law schools. (For myself, just about the only time I use either one for “legal” research is to pull down an MS Word copy of a judicial report. And that’s *before* I think about Generative AI.) There is a robust sector of “Generative AI for law and lawyers” products and services out there, some of which have made significant inroads into legal education (Harvey.ai, Clio, and Josef, for example), and some of which are just now starting to find their ways into the hands of the more adventurous early tech adopters among the professoriate (Midpage.ai, which I learned about via Seth Chandler).
Against that background, does West Academic offer the best combination of products and services available, given the company’s track record and areas of expertise, the pace of technological change, organizational expertise, price, and the usual array of strategic considerations?
Maybe it does. But I don’t know, and I wonder whether anyone does, inside or outside of AALS.
