William S. Hein & Co., Inc.

William S. Hein & Co., Inc. is a leading digital publishing company that has been serving the law library community for nearly 90 years. We are a highly respected publisher of original legal publications, a major reprinter of legal classics and out-of-print United States Government Printing Office documents, the world’s largest distributor of legal periodicals, and an online legal research provider serving the law library community worldwide.

We are a thriving, customer service driven provider of legal products and services including HeinOnline, the world’s largest image-based legal research database, which was launched in May 2000 after years of collaborating with the law library community. At its launch, the Law Journal Library was the only library in HeinOnline and contained only 25 law journals. Early institutional subscribers saw the value that online page images brought to the legal research community and encouraged Hein to add content beyond the scope of historical legal periodicals. As a result, Hein expanded its initial goal and HeinOnline now delivers more and more content that is needed by today’s legal researchers. Today, HeinOnline contains nearly 40 library modules and subscribers in more than 150 countries enjoy online access to more than 60 million pages of legal research material that, in many instances, is only available in HeinOnline.

The company continued its successful growth in the 1990s, publishing well-respected titles dealing with U.S. and international treaty research, as well as other valuable collections for the law library community. In 1991, the company debuted its first CD-ROM product, Hein’s U.S. Treaty Index, at the AALS Meeting. The company also expanded into digital imaging, leading the industry in maximizing digital technology to deliver high-quality reprint titles. Hein donated its high-quality images of the Nuremberg Trials to Yale’s Avalon project. By the late 1990s, Bill Hein Jr. realized that in order to continue to be able to provide superior customers service, Hein was in need of a major acquisition. In late 1998, Hein acquired Fred B. Rothman & Co. of Littleton, Colorado. Although Rothman and Hein had been competitors in the law publishing industry for years, this acquisition was beneficial in insuring the continued success of a family-owned law publisher that would deliver a high level of customer service that was quickly disappearing in the industry.

Our true beginnings can be traced back to the early 1920s, when Fred O. Dennis began selling law books and legal forms from his office in Buffalo, NY. At the time, Ohio’s numerous county law libraries were in need of the session laws and other reports from all of the states in the Union. Dennis began to network on a nationwide scale, traveling from law library to law library in order to fill the needs of the Ohio county law libraries. In his travels, Dennis became intimately familiar with the collections of the nation’s law libraries, an intimacy which quickly earned him the respect and trust of law librarians. In 1940, Dennis published Law Library News, the first service of its type, which provided information on new law titles, along with brief descriptions. Very shortly after this, the need arose for supplying out-of-print Government Printing Office (GPO) documents, and Dennis again met the needs of his customers by becoming one of the major reprinters in the nation for out-of-print GPO documents. Other reprint titles soon followed, including the first 25 volumes of Yale Law Journal and many other legal periodicals and legal classics.