LexisNexis Butterworths Canada Completes Acquisition of Quicklaw
Quicklaw Continues to Add, Enhance Materials

KINGSTON, ONTARIO, Canada, July 16, 2002 - LexisNexis Butterworths Canada and Quicklaw Inc. said today that they have completed the sale of Quicklaw to LexisNexis Butterworths. The merged companies (www.lexisnexis.com/lnquicklaw) create Canada’s leading online legal information service and legal publisher.

Prior to the acquisition, Quicklaw divested its Irwin Law publishing unit to Irwin Law management.

“We are very focused on our customers as we move into this new period of the company’s history,” said Professor Hugh Lawford, Chief Executive Officer of the new company. “We are moving quickly to provide new products and services to Canadian legal professionals as a result of the additional resources this acquisition brings. From the beginning, the intent has been to continue to set a high standard for the Canadian legal market by providing the best quality, the most comprehensive legal information and online services, and superior customer service.”

Over the next few months, Quicklaw will add 100,000 case records to its QUICKCITE™ case citator, upgrading the quality and comprehensiveness of the citator. This upgrade supplements the enhancements Quicklaw made to its U.S. caselaw collection on May 27, at no extra cost to subscribers. Quicklaw added 2 million U.S. court decisions to its existing collection, extended U.S. Supreme Court caselaw coverage to 1790 and acquired decisions from other U.S. courts. Additional online content and enhancements are planned as the year progresses.

“We are using our combined resources to enrich the products and services that allow Canadian legal professionals to make confident decisions from comprehensive and authoritative legal and other types of information,” said Gary Rodrigues, Vice President, Publishing.  “The enhancements underway and planned through the next six months will enrich the customer’s research with additional caselaw, case summaries, citator records and features such as pagination.”

In addition, the company said the LexisNexis Butterworths Canada legal newspaper, The Lawyers Weekly, is now available on Quicklaw.

Quicklaw and LexisNexis Butterworths Canada first announced plans for the acquisition on May 27. The company plans to market a growing array of online products and services under the Quicklaw brand name and leading secondary legal information print products under the LexisNexis Butterworths name.

The Quicklaw service provides Canada’s largest single source of full-text Canadian court, board and tribunal decisions, and the largest collection of Canadian caselaw summaries. LexisNexis Butterworths serves the Canadian legal, accountancy and other professions by publishing timely and accurate legal information in a variety of formats, including textbooks, journals, newsletters, looseleaf services, law reports, newspapers and CD-ROMs. The combined company’s offerings will also include LexisNexis’ leading online and print products from the U.S. and around the world.

The Canadian company, with more than 300 employees, is a member of LexisNexis North American Legal Markets, which is part of LexisNexis Group, the leading global legal information and publishing arm of Reed Elsevier plc with 2001 revenues of $1.9 billion U.S. The Canadian company has offices in 10 Canadian cities and a publishing facility in Markham, Ontario.

LexisNexis™ is the global leader in comprehensive and authoritative legal, news and business information and tailored applications. Its online services combine searchable access to four billion documents from thousands of sources. A member of Reed Elsevier Group plc [NYSE:  ENL; NYSE:  RUK], LexisNexis is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, USA, and does business in 100 countries with 12,000 employees worldwide.