As a former TR employee, I can empathize. There is immense value in the West Key Number System, editorial headnotes, aggregating everything, and transforming documents into a consistent, uniform representation. Still, it does feel "off" that TR and Lexis have exclusive contracts for digital delivery of codes and case law for so many jurisdictions.
The Zotero lawsuit in Sept. 2008 broke a lot of my faith. I stuck around for a further two years trying to change things as best I could, and even managed to reshape TR's open source software policy, but I couldn't resolve the cognitive dissonance around competent legal practice virtually requiring a subscription to Westlaw and/or Lexis Nexis.
So, I got out. Ended up way happier. You can get out, too. TR has plenty of brilliant folks--engineers, managers, and executives alike--but it's hard to have organization-scale clarity of purpose and execution when you're dealing with 60,000 people.
