On the eve of the third year...

Today is Wed, Aug. 16. Classes start Monday. The bar is less than a year away now. But onto more important things.

I got my typical semester “welcome back” email from Lexis today telling me of how they are once again diminishing the value of their law student constituent’s “reward points.” This semester, for those of you who take the two or three minutes each day to “win” as many points as you can from these non-publicly traded companies, they have replaced last year’s “fact or fiction” debacle with the “passport” of points system. For elite members, you no longer get a monthly “elite bonus” but rather you can log in and complete all of the passport “boxes” for points and upon completing a certain number of them (five out of the six, if I recall from the email correctly), you will get additional bonus points. Assuming this is on par with Westlaw’s program, you will probably be able to gather around 2000 points or so through the “passport” system. I will not bother to waste my time describing the amount of merchandise you can get with this amount of points, but I think it does add up to about 45 songs from Itunes. Perhaps I will try and complete the entire passport in one sitting and see how long it takes before I am either prevented from doing so or I get bored. That will undoubtedly (although perhaps not) be a future entry for another time.

For those of you who remember the older systems, two years ago Lexis had some sort of random point system where you could amass any number of points simply by clicking on the total research system field. For an idea of how much better this system was (and how unfortunate I was to not have discovered it until the spring semester of my first year), I took a look at my reward history and uncovered the following:

Fall 2004 semester: 1250 points earned in a variety of ways (I am using the word “earned” in the same fashion I would use the word “won”).
Spring 2005 semester: 2200 points earned in a variety of ways
I also bought a Lexis book for 1500 points from my accumulated points, which I eventually sold on Amazon for $12.60 (net).
Fall 2005 semester: 2500 points
Spring 2006 semester: 5000 points (fact or fiction became more valuable as part of a pseudo-Valentine’s Day promotion).
I also bought 10 itunes songs for 750 points. As I found out, this cannot buy you a $9.99 album but it can buy you 10 $0.99 songs.

So it turns out Fact or Fiction wasn't too bad after all. Anyway, not counting the 200 points I received today when I realized that Lexis started up their point earning opportunities again two weeks ago, I have 10000 points. In a cursory inspection of the possible rewards I can receive from Lexis, I found that they got rid of the pool table that cost in excess of 200,000 points, which surprises me. I can’t remember some of the other things I used to dream of being able to get, but I see that I can get a foosball table for about 35,000 points, so that is somewhat in my reach, but at the pace that I set over the past four semesters, I will likely finish with less than 25,000. Based on the two things I received from Lexis, I can infer that these points are worth between $.0084 and $.0134 each. That seems to concur with a website I remember looking at a while back that did a much more in-depth analysis of the point values between Lexis and Westlaw. While I will probably wait until late in the spring to decide what I get based on what I actually accumulate over the next eight or nine months, I am (not really) interested in seeing how it compares in value to the 30 gig ipod I was able to get with my Westlaw points after less than four semesters. I remember valuing that at about $250 or $300 based on seeing it somewhere but will save that retrospective for another day, perhaps when I get my typical semester “welcome back” email from Westlaw. In either case, for you first year law students who have stumbled across this blog and somehow have had time to either read it in class or in an effort to postpone work for a bit longer, my advice is to take the 2 or 3 minutes each day to suckle every point (or penny, if you will) from both Lexis and Westlaw, do whatever promotions your school sponsors as a result, and at some point either during your second or third year, you may be able to get something cool with it. The only drawback is that you probably won't get access until about October so that will cost you the early semester point earning opportunities. With points, friends of mine have bought a grill, a digital camera, itunes songs, and other stuff with their points, so these otherwise worthless points obviously have some value for minimal effort.

*Disclaimer. I am neither a student rep or employee of either Lexis or Westlaw. Just a loyal student customer of both. If I somehow get rewarded with more points from one or both of these companies, that would make my day and I would probably give them more free promotions by announcing my victory through this blog. Maybe.

Tags: lexis, westlaw, westlaw trivia, fact or fiction