Everyone involved, including Lexis and Westlaw, understands that they are inevitably going to be affected by Internet-caused disintermediation. They are classic information intermediaries, and their businesses are not only vulnerable, they are doomed. The question is how long it takes, and how much money they can extract from everyone in the meantime.

Your analysis is accurate, but accuracy does not necessarily produce insight. Inequality of access is a shrinking problem, in the first place, though a problem, precisely because the complementary access mechanisms are reducing the exclusivity enjoyed by the duopoly for most of the last twenty years. Non-profit pricing, while hardly generous, does shift the access curve, as do the government acquisitions agreements. Less well-heeled private parties may now be the primary losers, and I'm not sure that's precisely a tragic outcome most of the time.

What will change, and that should have immediately attracted your attention, is the approach at the upper-levels of the profession. Once the biggest enterprises' legal services are transacted for at fixed prices (the transformation now going on that wipes out the jobs for first-year large-firm associates) the desire inside those practices to reduce research overhead becomes serious. Information cost was always next to labor cost for firms—when they ran big libraries and publishing operations, requiring all the costs of library management, immense printing and copying expenses, they put what they could on the disbursements account, and charged off the rest as overhead in the hours billed. What the research services did was to consolidate increasing proportions of those research costs in their bill: West used to get paid for many reporter subscriptions in the paper library, but it didn't capture the rent or the salaries, or all the other books and services, etc. Big practices reduced cost even when they paid the services plenty, by getting out of more inefficient information management operations. Which made the duopoly immense money.

Now the two companies will face off against one another to hold those dollars, as their biggest customers bargain for reduced prices that they can no longer pass along fully to their clients, as they also try wildly to deleverage their immensely-expensive workforce that is inefficient for fixed-price production. At the same time, existing complementary services that don't charge, along with the coming government-information revolution, ensure that the disintermediation meltdown will begin soon. It's not springtime for these little you-know-whats, I promise you.

In that environment, the best play the services have to increase their longevity is to hook more young people. The law schools can't start officially teaching you to do without them, or they'll have to go cold turkey from an addiction on which their library budgets also now depend. And the services keep handing out free heroin to students so that you never learn about the non-addictive substitutes, or contribute to them, which would be their immediate death.

What you see, you saw correctly. But what you missed is where the story is.