Thomson West today announced its acquisition of GSI. Congratulations to Nick Keenan, Phil Brown and the GSI team!
The GSI story is an interesting one. They started up in the early 1990's, leveraging the SECs new (at the time) EDGAR feed. Until that time, Disclosure (acquired by Thomson) had been the primary source of SEC filings. In the early days, Disclosure had a few copy machines at the SEC and would overnight you a copy of a filing for a hefty price. With the "Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval" service ("EDGAR"), the SEC opened up that market for competition.
GSI introduced LivEdgar about the same time that FreeEdgar and EdgarOnline and a few others were launched, not to mention the SEC's free site where you could look up a filing gratis.
While the others seemed to get caught up in the dot.com frenzy, looking to push their content out to the individual investors (who, let's face it, were buying a lot of stocks without reading a business description, no less an EDGAR filing), GSI focused on the legal market.
GSI cleaned the EDGAR content and made it much more accessible. More importantly, they built a delivery platform and portal that focused on the needs of the legal market. Various subscription and pay-per-view options, combined with strong reporting so that law firms could bill their usage back to clients, gave GSI a huge advantage over other sites. Over the years, GSI continued to improve their offering, keeping their focus on the core legal market.
While it must have been tempting to chase other markets who had needs for the filings, GSI's focus on serving the needs of the M&A legal community gave them a core customer base of active users. And now, that focus has paid off, with the Thomson/West acquisition.
Blogger's note: Since full disclosure seems pertinent in a discussion of SEC filings, I note here that Nick Keenan, GSI's technology leader, worked for me on a few development projects in the early 1990's. In addition to being a technical innovator, Nick's insights into foreign affairs and economics always impressed the hell out of me.
Posted by: |