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The European legal information market: an interview with Judy Vezmar, CEO, LexisNexis Butterworths Tolley.

Article Excerpt
Because our schedules didn't mesh during the Online Information conference and exhibition the first week of December 2002, Judy Vezmar graciously invited me to LexisNexis Butterworths Tolley headquarters in Chancery Lane, located in the heart of London's legal community, following the show. As CEO of LexisNexis Group Europe, Vezmar has responsibility for Europe and Africa. She ushered me into the boardroom, with its impressive bookshelves filled with bound legal tomes and its walls graced by portraits of Butterworths Tolley founding fathers (all male, looking suitably solemn as befitted their status in their legal world). In this environment, Judy Vezmar is a breath of fresh air. She's from the U.S., she's not a lawyer, and she didn't grow up in the information industry. As we began our conversation, she gestured to the paintings and chuckled, "It's said that I'm part of the new landscape of LexisNexis." There's little doubt of that, I realized, as our conversation ranged from markets and media to branding an d training.

MO: Why don't you tell me, to start, a little bit about your background and how you got involved with the online information industry.

JV: It doesn't quite fit the profile that you would expect. My background is all on the business side. I was with Xerox in the States for almost my entire career. I started as a new sales rep out of university, went into marketing, and then I led a couple of major product launches. Essentially, most of my career has been running operations.

In 1998, I was based in Manhattan, organizing Xerox around vertical markets, when the company reorganized. The chairman sent me to London to run P&L across multiple European countries, focusing on the financial services industry. We were developing solutions around document management, which leads to the whole area of knowledge management and understanding how to take digitized words and organize the company's intellectual capital around it.

One day I had this call from a search firm about a position at Reed-Elsevier. And I said, "Why?" They said, "Talk to Crispin Davis and Andy Prozes, and if you still say, 'Why,' we'll understand." We had the most amazing discussion. Andy explained how he had just taken over the International Legal Division, which was very much a loose federation of states around the world; it was individual countries in a very traditional legal publishing area. Then I had a meeting with Crispin and the two of them came back and said, "Well, you are not a lawyer and you are certainly not from a traditional publishing background, but you are perfect for the job." I remember laughing and saying, "OK, where is the fit?" The fit actually...