Legal Information Provider BNA Goes From Employee-Owned to Mayor-Owned

Today news broke that Bloomberg has designs to acquire BNA, a D.C. area-based legal information services company, for $990 million.

Today news broke that Bloomberg has designs to acquire BNA, a D.C. area-based legal information services company, for $990 million.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

See all of our newsletters

(Keeping up with the Jones’s is expensive when the Jones’s are the Thomson Reuters’s.)

As such, the terminal manufacturers will welcome BNA’s 350ish publications and 600-odd reporters into their fold. BNA specialize in tax and regulatory law, which makes it useful for Bloomberg’s burgeoning BGov and for competing with Reuters’s News & Insight: Legal division, launched in March.

A sad footnote to this is that BNA sounds like it was a really great company:

According to its website, its been wholly employee owned–employees and retirees still own 100% of the company’s stock–since 1947, and has racked up a number of best companies to work for awards from FORTUNE, Working Mother, Washingtonian.

But then, Bloomberg has free trail mix and one of a handful of the escalators the world that turn a curve.

 

Legal Information Provider BNA Goes From Employee-Owned to Mayor-Owned