The removal of content from Nexis threatens us all

It was just another email, one among hundreds, many of them survey requests of one sort or another.

At least this one was from a company with whom I do business.

I was probably never going to answer it. I know the Millennials and Zoomers respond to surveys as a matter of reflex. When no one thinks to ask their opinions, Millennials and Zoomers write reviews anyway. But this is not how I was brought up.

I imprinted on Mike Royko's position (paraphrasing here): If trapped into answering a survey (or poll), lie. But better by far not to get trapped.

I will admit that I have read online reviews from time to time. There are so many gizmos I know nothing about; sometimes I think that maybe, just this once, reading reviews will help me decide if I want to buy this product or that one. But then I read the reviews: About half seem as if they were written by the seller's mother; the other half appear to have been written by the seller's competitors. Or worst enemy from junior high.

Not helpful.

I looked at the first question on the survey:

As a valued Lexis customer, your feedback is very important to us and will help us prioritize improvements to our products and services.

Please begin our short survey by answering the first question below:

How likely are you to recommend Lexis to a colleague, associate or friend?

I was supposed to respond on a scale of 0 to 9 where 0 means "not if you put a gun to my head" and 9 means "with me around you'll never need to pay for advertising."

If I answered that question, the survey would continue online.

But I wondered whether completing the survey would give me a real opportunity to express my serious issues with Lexis/Nexis -- and, if I did, whether anyone in authority would read and address my concerns.

After I stopped laughing at myself for having such a ridiculous thought, even for a nanosecond, I concluded that I would have a better chance of reaching the decision makers at RELX, Inc. (the current corporate overlords of Lexis/Nexis) if went into my backyard and screamed my concerns into an indifferent wind or if I wrote about it here. Writing about it here seems less likely to trigger the involvement of the police, so here we are.

I pay several hundred dollars a month for the privilege of access to Lexis and Nexis. There are far more economical ways to keep track of Illinois case law. But, from time to time, when I have had insurance coverage work (as I used to, anyway, before the Pandemic) I have discovered that, while the reviewing courts of Illinois might not yet have had an opportunity to weigh in on the meaning of a particular policy provision or endorsement -- some court in Oregon or Florida or Montana has. If you promise to pay Lexis enough money each month, Lexis will grant you search capabilities for all federal courts and the reviewing courts of all 50 states.

I promised to pay.

To get the best possible (i.e., lowest) price for this access, I had to agree to a term of years.

But, to overcome my resistance, I recieved access to Nexis as well.

At one time, Nexis had a comprehensive library of every major newspaper in the world, and most of the minor ones. Maybe I couldn't read today's Washington Post or New York Times on Nexis -- but everyting would become available in a day or two.

Having access to the Tribune and Sun-Times archives was particularly helpful for me when researching judicial candidates. Lawyers in private practice routinely put all sorts of stuff on line hoping to snag a unicorn, such as a client with a good case and the means and willingness to pay for it -- but career prosecutors or PDs don't have those concerns. And, at one time, though our newspapers very seldom covered a civil case, they published all sorts of stuff about doings in the Criminal Court.

But that was then.

As newspapers have erected paywalls around their content, they have also stopped sending content to Nexis and, in many cases, removed their content entirely. The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin was one of the first to disappear. I may still have been on Westlaw when that happened. Not only did I lose an invaluable resource for keeping track of judicial candidates, a decade's worth of columns I wrote for that paper disappeared as well. Vanished down the memory hole. But I had my original (unedited) articles. So my work was not entirely lost. Also, I still had a subscription to that paper (though it has since lapsed) and, while I missed the ability to conduct proper searches on judicial wannabes, I coped.

Recently I had a story idea that required me to search past issues of major newspapers in an effort to confirm my recollection of events a year or two past. But Nexis was the online equivalent of a ghost town. I could find nothing.

Sure, sure, you say. If I weren't such a cheapskate, I'd have bought subscriptions to all these 'papers of record' and then I'd have access to the information that I sought. Granted, I've made no secret of my disdain for digital subscriptions and the random pricing thereof. And because I don't have separate subscriptions to each of these publications, I can't say with certainty that they are less searchable than was Nexis. But, the truth is, I was already paying for subscriptions to all these papers, via Nexis.

And now Nexis has been effectively emptied. Though the price Lexis/Nexis (or RELX, Inc.) charges me has not decreased by a penny.

If you've stayed with me to this point, you may be experiencing pangs of regret: Why should you have to put up with my whining about paying for services not received? You have problems of your own.

And I'm sure you do. But, I humbly submit, whether you know it yet or not, this problem with Nexis is another problem for you. How can a newspaper be a 'paper of record' if there's no independent record of what it said on any given day? Libraries will have pre-Nexis microfilms; we've all used these at one time or another in our pasts. But did libraries continue to microfilm newspapers that were available on Nexis?

I've never been entirely comfortable with putting our official reports -- our Illinois case law -- online only. I'm sure the court system has the best possible security. But computer security evolves, action and reaction, strike and countermeasure. But this much remains certain: No hacker can ever change a book.

Now our courts have every reason to ensure the veracity and accuracy of our case law. In a profession that celebrates the doctrine of stare decisis (if sometimes only in the breach) we need to know what was said, and by whom, and how, before we can follow or abandon the principles espoused in the cases.

A "media" company is under no such obligation, legal or moral. Without a Nexis to preserve it, if a past story becomes embarrassing, it, too, can be pushed down the memory hole. Times change. Opinions change. Opinions that were mainstream a century ago, or even a decade, or maybe even a year ago, may now be inconvenient or worse. An old article may be jettisoned. Or rewritten to suit current fashions. And who will be able to contradict it without Nexis or some comparable national archive? New ownership may wish to 'sanitize' the unsavory opinions expressed in the property just acquired. If the Murdochs ever fade away, their successors may be mighty tempted....

We celebrate newspapers as the 'first draft of history.' But if we are to understand our history, and learn and grow from it, we need convenient access to those unedited first drafts.