The Eagan business that was once West Publishing now supplies its parent company with the intellectual firepower to outmaneuver Bloomberg and LexisNexis.

There may be no more concise way to sum up the changed nature or ambitions of the former West Publishing Company than what Roger Martin says: “We are sort of the next generation of Google—without the garbage—for professionals.”

West was the publisher of legal reference and college textbooks that had been around the Twin Cities since 1872, when John and Horatio West began selling legal compendiums and office supplies to lawyers in St. Paul.  It got acquired by Thomson Corporation, a Toronto-based publisher and data-services business, in 1996.  Then Thomson acquired Reuters Group, PLC, the London-based news and financial reporting company, in 2008.  The two became Thomson Reuters Corporation, and what had been West became Thomson Reuters Legal.

Read the full story here:  http://tcbmag.com/Industries/Marketing,-Advertising,-PR-and-Media/Thomson-Reuters-Brain?page=5

 …