Latest reports from Halsbury Towers, the hallowed UK home of LexisNexis, suggest that the company is about to embark upon yet another reorganisation of the management of its legal software businesses.

The story so far is that... immediately prior to the Axxia acquisition, there was a plan (devised by Kate Holden) to combine the Visualfiles and Interaction businesses into some kind of software + consultancy division. Then along came the Axxia deal and Kate Holden's new global domination plan, with Axxia and Visualfiles providing the core of a global law firms strategy and Interaction back out on its own. Then Holden (Kate) left and Axxia and Visualfiles became the UK arm of the LexisNexis Practice & Productivity Management division, with other geographical regions having their own products in their respective P&PM divisions. Now, there are rumblings of appointing a new software supremo responsible for the Axxia + Visualfiles + Interaction businesses on a UK (or even possibly EMEA-wide) basis.

We hear that Tim Cheadles, currently the general manager of LexisNexis Practice & Productivity, is the front-runner for this poison chalice prime appointment. There again, in two years' time (if they haven't been bought by Bloomberg or Google by then) LexisNexis will probably do a HotDocs and sell the whole software business off to someone else.