Emily Marcum of Lightfoot of Franklin & White, LLC recently conducted a study comparing the pricing models of WestlawNext v Westlaw Classic.
Although the full study is not available, the abstract from SSRN appears below:
WestlawNext and Classic were each used exclusively in transactional mode for eight days. Cost to the client was assessed using a discount off retail model. Classic was found to be 51.6% cheaper. This difference was so stark that the experiment was terminated early and only two days of each platform in hourly mode was completed.
It’s very unfortunate that the full study isn’t available. Eye raising findings such as these deserve some closer investigation.