“Our company’s legal information service, lexis.com, was introduced on Sept. 9, 1997, the first to serve lawyers via the Internet. Today, with a record 2,003,563 searches, we have virtually completed our migration to the Web. Our customers have been eager to make this migration with us, as an incredible 90 percent of them find their information solutions via the family of Web products we have launched in that time period,” said Lou Andreozzi, president and chief executive officer of North American Legal Markets.

“At the dawn of the personal computer in the workplace, February 7, 1990, LexisNexis racked up a record 100,000 searches in one day. With the web growing dramatically in November 1999, LexisNexis experienced a record of one million searches. It took only two years to double volume again,” Andreozzi said.

Customers’ eagerness to embrace LexisNexis Web services and technologies contributed overall to growth in LexisNexis Group 2001 revenues. Releasing 2001 financials today, LexisNexis parent Reed Elsevier, said the division contributed $384.5 million in adjusted operating profit last year, a 9 percent increase over 2000.

Bill Pardue, president & CEO, Corporate and Federal Markets, joined Andreozzi in acknowledging the milestone in an announcement to employees. “This search record is a tremendous achievement and strong testament to the top-quality products and delivery systems provided by LexisNexis. Our unmatched authoritative content coupled with our expert online technology has encouraged our customers to continue migrating to our Web products to access the best solutions and services LexisNexis offers.”

Allan McLaughlin, senior vice president and chief technology officer, praised the talents of LexisNexis technologists, who ensure access to and use of the authoritative LexisNexis store of content brings the greatest value to professional users. “Our people have been unrelenting in their efforts to obtain ever-greater performance from and improvement in the LexisNexis service. Their constant mission is to find better ways to customize and deliver our products and services to customer desktops promptly and reliably.”

The famed LexisNexis search and retrieval engine was developed in 1973 in a little less than 200 days by a handful of software engineers. Their work, with refinements, continues to drive the LexisNexis commercial enterprise today.

LexisNexis is a finalist in the 2002 Codie Awards in five categories, including the prestigious Corporate Achievement Award. Hosted since 1985 by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), the Codie Awards recognize the software and information industry's finest products and services and honor excellence for corporate achievement and philanthropic efforts.

About LexisNexis

LexisNexis Group is a leading global provider of information to legal, corporate, government and academic markets, and publishes legal, tax, regulatory and other information. Operating units include authoritative legal publishers such as Martindale-Hubbell, Matthew Bender, the Butterworths companies in Europe, Asia-Pacific, North America and Africa, Les Editions du Juris-Classeur in France; Abeledo-Perrot in Argentina; Orac in Austria and other leading companies around the world, all members of Reed Elsevier plc [NYSE: ENL; NYSE: RUK]. The LexisNexis™ services combine searchable access to over three billion documents from thousands of sources with leading edge systems and tools for managing this content. LexisNexis delivers a high quality resource with which to build legal research and knowledge-management solutions for the entire enterprise, answering questions and solving problems. For more information, please visit www.lexisnexis.com.