Wexis
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Wexis is a humorous portmanteau used to refer to the duopoly of academic publishing conglomerates which dominate the U.S. legal information services industry, namely Westlaw and LexisNexis.
Neither of these companies is independent—they are parts of much larger conglomerates which dominate the entire information services sector. Westlaw is owned by The Thomson Corporation, while LexisNexis is a division of Reed Elsevier.
The Federal Trade Commission keeps a cautious eye on both companies to ensure neither violates antitrust law. For example, both of them are usually required to license the pagination in their printed reporters to the other's online database. Otherwise, lawyers in jurisdictions that require citations to all official and unofficial reporters would have to subscribe to both online services to get all the necessary page numbers for citations in their briefs.
As of 2005, Wolters Kluwer is the largest company trying to establish a beachhead against the "Wexis" duopoly; it has taken over offline legal publishers like Aspen Publishing and online legal services like Loislaw. However, Wolters has not yet created a single brand for its online and offline legal offerings, and most importantly, it lacks a cross-referencing feature that can directly compete against Westlaw's KeyCite or Shepard's Citators from LexisNexis.