Last week I met the head of Bloomberg’s relatively new "Law" initiative,
aimed at putting $1,500/month Bloomberg terminals on the
desks of senior partners and general counsel.
Before I describe what "Bloomberg Law" is about, I invite you
to take
a look at their brand-new offices (between 58th and 59th, Third
and Lex), which are a visual and experiential delight unmatched
since "Star Wars"—with the distinction that these
spaces actually function.
As we all know, Bloomberg is
already The Name Brand in financial intelligence, with over
a quarter of a million subscribers to their core business
and financial market information resources. Bloomberg has
also long since gone
multimedia, with Bloomberg TV and Radio, a suite of magazines
and publishing resources, and, lately, podcasts. So what
does Bloomberg Law offer?:
- a comprehensive set of legal, regulatory, and compliance databases;
- news, both real-time and archival;
- rankings;
- company and biographical information;
- legal research tools; and
- of course, all the rest of Bloomberg’s financial news,
data, and analytic applications.
The head of Bloomberg Law, Constantin Cotzias (a Brit who practiced
at Denton Wilde Sapte and elsewhere) is unapologetic about
the price of the terminals and unabashed about the scope
of Bloomberg Law’s ambitions compared to competitive offerings: "Well,
if you want an Audi, you should buy an Audi, but if you want
to go nought-60 in 3 seconds, you really need a Ferrari,
don’t you?" So what exactly can this Ferrari do
for you?
For the co-chair of Orrick’s New York bankruptcy group, Lorraine
McGowen, it enables her to research
and discover companies
potentially on the brink of financial meltdown, identify
their bondholders and unsecured creditors, and tailor a custom-made
pitch letter drawing from (say) the content of actual loan
agreements retrievable online, as well as more sophisticated
tools such as "relative value" rankings—Bloomberg’s
rating of the operational strength of a firm vis-a-vis its peer
group. In keeping with Bloomberg’s high-quant-quotient roots,
here are some of the tools available to analyze likelihood
of default:
"Specify whether you want to solve for the Altman Z-score,
the Double Prime Z-score or the Hillegeist Z-score. [Prof.
Edward] Altman [of NYU’s Stern School of Business] developed
his original Z-score for manufacturers. The Double Prime
model is more suited to nonmanufacturing companies, while
the Hillegeist formula generates a probability of default
in addition to the Z-score."
Westlaw, this ain’t.
For Brandon Becker, co-chair of the securities regulatory practice
at Wilmer-Hale in Washington, it permits him to analyze trading
patterns in a security tick-by-tick and view breaking company
news surrounding those patterns, as well as to see how other
companies in the same industry were trading simultaneously. Armed
with this information, he obviously has a far clearer view
of whether insider trading is something to be concerned about. (Obviously,
the same tools arm both plaintiffs’ and defense attorneys.)
I intend to stay in close touch with Constantin; for people who
need bleeding-edge tools, I for one would put my money on
Bloomberg without looking back.
