LexisNexis Signs Seven-Year Contract, Named Official Publisher of Virginia Code
Deal Will Save Virginia Nearly $2 Million

DAYTON, OH, October 30, 2002 - LexisNexis™, the global leader in legal, news and business information services, announced today an agreement with the Virginia Code Commission making LexisNexis the official publisher of the Code of Virginia for the next seven years and saving Virginia nearly $2 million. The agreement means that legal professionals throughout the state will continue to rely on the authoritative annotated code product they have trusted for years.

Speaker-elect of the General Assembly and chairman of the Code Commission William J. Howell signed the money-saving deal at a time when lawmakers in the Commonwealth are working to plug a budget gap.

"This is a significant savings for Virginia," said Howell. "Over the next biennium, we have eliminated almost a half million dollar expenditure. Over seven years, the savings is about $1.8 million."

An annotated collection of all the laws of the state, the Code of Virginia is published annually under the supervision of the Code Commission and includes new laws and changes to existing laws that are approved by legislators during the annual session of the General Assembly. Through their joint efforts, members of the Code Commission and LexisNexis executives worked to find efficiencies and reduce costs related to publishing the Code of Virginia, which will result in these savings.

“As a Virginia-based publisher with over 600 employees in Charlottesville, we felt it was very important to help alleviate in some way the budget issues confronting Virginia,” said Leigh Trippe, vice president of Government Relations and Contracts for LexisNexis. “For more than 75 years, LexisNexis-affiliated companies, beginning with The Michie Co. in 1925, have worked closely with lawmakers to publish the Code of Virginia. The MICHIE™ brand has become so synonymous with the Code of Virginia that legal professionals often refer to it as the MICHIE code.”

Since 1950, the Code of Virginia has been published by Michie and LexisNexis under the supervision of the Virginia Code Commission. The Michie Co. became affiliated with LexisNexis in 1988 and remains one of legal publishing’s foremost brands.

The Virginia Code Commission, an independent agency of the Virginia General Assembly, is comprised of current and retired members of the House of Delegates and Virginia Senate, retired judges, representatives of the Office of the Attorney General, and the Division of Legislative Services. The Commission supervises the codification of the statutes after each annual session of the General Assembly.

LexisNexis publishes the fully annotated Code of Virginia in 29 hardbound volumes. It is also available online at www.lexisnexis.com. The code and its annotations are updated annually with fully annotated supplements published by July 1.

During the annual re-codification process, LexisNexis attorney-editors with years of experience in Virginia law work in partnership with Code Commission staff to transform Acts of the General Assembly into the Code and apply changes in language and interpretation to both existing and new laws. They also write explanatory notes describing the changes for new and amended sections and edit summaries of cases to help legal professionals better interpret the state’s laws.

Under a pilot program in 2002, the Code Commission established a Web site to allow LexisNexis and other legal publishers to submit questions electronically and to view all the questions and answers. LexisNexis attorney-editors submitted more than 1,100 questions to the Code Commission using the secure Web site. This figure represented 85 percent of all questions that were submitted as a normal part of the publishing process for the Code of Virginia. The questions, for example, help to ensure that no misplaced punctuation or misspelled words slip through the legislative process and change the intent of the legislature.

“LexisNexis has always worked closely with the Code Commission to assure an accurate interpretation of new laws and their effects on existing code. The pilot program highlighted our editorial staff’s exceptional experience and knowledge base. We submitted eight out of every ten questions to the Code Commission, making sure we had the correct information to make the Code as accurate and complete as possible,” Trippe said.

LexisNexis now publishes print code products for 35 U.S. states and territories, as well as the United States Code Service and United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers' Edition from the Charlottesville location.

About LexisNexis

LexisNexis™ is the global leader in comprehensive and authoritative legal, news and business information and tailored applications. Its online services combine searchable access to over 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.

The company offers an extensive range of online and print legal and regulatory information products, tools, customized Web applications and critical filing services that help legal professionals reach confident decisions and comply with the law. In addition to LexisNexis™ at www.lexis.com, the leading Web-based legal research service, LexisNexis includes some of the world's most respected legal publishers such as Martindale-Hubbell, Matthew Bender, Butterworths, Les Editions du Juris-Classeur, Abeledo-Perrot and Orac.