Thomson Reuters / West has screwed up yet another acquisition, this time, O’Connors. Throughout the commentary there are hyperlinks to rules, cases, other books. While it’s expected that such links to non-owned resources would/should cost extra, references to even the rules themselves (contained in the Appendix) do not function as makes sense. For example, a reference to rule 269b ought to merely take you directly to the rule located in the Appendix; it does not. Instead, it takes you online to link to a West resource that you must subscribe to (more money). Why would this be since the rules themselves are located within the O’Connors book?! This is nothing more than a money grab. The claimed benefit of ProView is the ability to access and search a software version of the O’Connors book. Clearly, it does not do that and is a misrepresentation of the offering. It is instead a lure to get users to subscribe to other West resources are more cost. I might as well use the physical version that doesn’t “link” either. The only value to the ProView version of O’Connor’s is that it adds no more space and weight than you iphone, ipad, or computer.
DEVELOPER RESPONSE IS FALSE. While you can navigate via the table of contents to sections of the commentary, clicking on any TRCP or TRE reference is linked ONLY to online access and NOT to the Proview Appendices for these rules. To make matters worse, while the hard copy book has all rules in the Appendices, the mobile app does not and the only way to access each rule with the appendix is to go to the beginning of the rules in the appendix via the Table of Contents, then manually scroll through each page one by one. Try accessing Rule 192 this way, it takes forever! It makes use of reference to the rules worthless.
Bottom line, Westlaw (Thomson Reuters) is terrible company that scams its subscribers into these O'Connors Proview subscriptions by not providing any examples or trial period. Why not? Because they know no one will subscribe to it bc of its poor functionality.
Westlaw continues to bill me for this garbage and has made no attempts to resolve these problems. I will tell every lawyer I know how terrible ThomsonReutersProView is. It will be my goal to prevent any others from making the same mistake, unless and until Westlaw resolves these problems, and puts a decent customer experience over their own greed.
Finally, in their Response to this review, they provide a link for further communication - haha, it does not work! Westlaw Developers are clueless. Either they don’t try their own product and links or they are part of the problem and the scam. This borders fraud. I’m not a class action attorney, but perhaps a class action should be brought.
