The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I stayed up too late on Wednesday running through tutorials on Lexis Nexis. I got through as many as I could stand, which was four, although I was allowed to do as many as six. OK, technically I was allowed to do all of them, but I could only get bonus points for six of them, and Wednesday was the last day I could get any points at all. So while it wasn't a bad pedagological exercise, the real reason for the effort was point acquisition...

For non-law people, Lexis Nexis (like Westlaw) is an online information service that students get free access to while in law school in order to get us hooked on their brand of digital crack and thus be willing to pay through the nose for it when we are practicing attorneys. Both services like to throw lots of perks our way to get us to use them, including via a system of reward points you can eventually cash in for things.

Since I could no longer accrue points I cashed out today. I suppose compared to some I didn't have that many points - only 4105. Some people end up in the tens of thousands, I think, although I don't exactly know how (but if I had to hazard a guess, probably by seizing every possible opportunity to collect bonus points). And some may have fewer because they use Westlaw more, so many of their points may be on that system. I should actually go see how many I have over there (assuming I still can) because early on in law school I mostly used Westlaw. But about halfway through, I think , I got fed up with Westlaw and switched to Lexis. The problem with Westlaw is that if I went idle for a few minutes it would kick me off the system and I'd lose my place in my document. I found this very disruptive to my work flow and so switched to Lexis, which would let me stay in the same place for days and days and then continue on when I was ready, without needing to log in again.