Dutch Firm to Buy Loislaw.com

Arkansas’ only Web-based information technology company, Loislaw.com Inc., agreed Tuesday morning to be acquired by Dutch publisher Wolters Kluwer NV. The $95 million transaction is expected to be completed by the spring of 2001, but it is subject to U.S. regulatory clearances.

Loislaw.com, which posted a $3.7 million net loss for the third quarter, is based in Van Buren and has 490 employees, 385 of which work in the Arkansas River Valley. The online legal information provider has projected year-end 2000 sales of $14 million.

The $95 million sale price breaks down to about $4.35 per share. Holders of about 67 percent of shares, including founder and CEO Kyle D. Parker, have agreed to tender their shares.

News of the sale sent shares of Loislaw.com (Nasdaq:LOIS) up 181.25 percent in Tuesday morning trading. Shares reached $4.22 by about 10:30 a.m. The stock closed at $1.50 on Monday.

Parker, who founded the company in 1987 and took it public in October 1999, could not be reached for comment early Tuesday, and other company officials would not comment on how the sale would affect the company’s Arkansas presence.

The proposed sale would make Loislaw.com the fourth public company to leave, sell or begin to pull out of Northwest Arkansas since June 2000.

StaffMark Inc. of Fayetteville, now Edgewater Technology Inc., has divested itself of five divisions and scaled back to being a technology company. The company plans to move its last division out of Fayetteville during the second quarter of 2001.

Aarow Environmental Group Inc. of Rogers moved to Oklahoma City in the summer, and American Freightways Corp. of Harrison entered into a sale agreement Nov. 13 with FedEx Corp. of Memphis. That transaction is expected to be completed in early 2001.

When the Loislaw sale is completed, Loislaw will become a unit of Wolters subsidiary Aspen Publishers in Gaithersburg, Md., a provider of legal, business and health care information.

Loislaw is a national provider of primary and secondary source material for legal research that is delivered on a subscription basis over the Internet. Loislaw provides more than 2,200 databases and citation research services, containing more than 10 million documents covering federal case law, statutory law, administrative law, court rules, and case law for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

As of November 2000, the company boasted more than 20,000 subscribers, most of which are midsized and small law firms, corporate legal departments and judges that depend on the company for current and accurate primary and secondary legal information that is affordable and easy to access. In addition, the company provides Loislawschool.com to faculty and students in 95 percent of law schools accredited by the American Bar Association.

Wolters Kluwer is a multinational information services company that had 1999 Eurodollar sales of more than $3 billion. Wolters has 18,000 employees in Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific. The company’s core activities are legal, tax and business, international health and science, and education.

Wolters executive board member Hugh Yarrington said in a statement that acquiring Loislaw gives Wolters an opportunity to accelerate its overall strategy in delivering comprehensive Internet portals to legal professionals

“We’ll be able to deliver to general and specialized law practices a robust, Web-enabled service that includes critical and timely source materials integrated with exclusive topical treatises and analytical works by the world’s leading legal authorities,” Yarrington said.

The transaction would be funded through internal Wolters resources.