Wolt. Kluwer acquires Casenotes Publ.; seeks buyer for Kluwer Academic.

Walters Kluwer North America (Chicago, IL) has acquired Casenotes Publishing Co. (Santa Monica, CA), a publisher of study aids f or U.S. law students. No terms of the deal were given.

Casenotes will become a part of Kluwer's Aspen Publishers (New York) division, a producer of legal, business and healthcare information. The acquired company offers multiple product lines targeted to law students, including "Legal Briefs," a product that provides summaries of the cases used in law school casebooks. Established in the early 1970's, the company had 2001 fiscal year revenues of approximately $1.2 million.

Among its products, Aspen offers a line of casebooks used by law schools and law students, as well as a series of supportive legal study aids and a legal citation manual.

Also, after conducting a portfolio review of its International Health & Science (IH&S) unit, Wolters Kluwer has decided to sell its Kluwer Academic Publishers unit to allow IH&S to concentrate on four medical segments, including Pharma, Medical Info, Practitioner Info and Clinical Tools.

Kluwer Academic Publishers (KAP) consists of: Kluwer International Law, the publisher of a variety of resources for the international legal community, including more than 4000 books, journals, looseleaf and electronic products in all areas of practice; Kluwer, the publisher of more than 700 journals and 20,000 books in the life sciences, humanities, physical science, biomedicine and engineering; and, Kluwer Plenum, including units Plenum Publishers, Human Sciences Press and Consultants Bureau.

KAP had 2001 sales of EUR 170 million and has 600 employees. The sale of KAP does not include WK's legal, tax and business publishering units LTB North America and LTB Europe.