Tony Harriss is the Non Executive Director for Law Business Research. Formerly Non-Executive Director of Globe Business Media Group. Established in 1996, Globe is a business-to-business content and connections company, specializing in the legal and intellectual property markets worldwide. It produces market-leading information, data, networking, software, and marketing services for lawyers, C-suite executives, and HR professionals, and their organizations, globally.


 The author would like to thank Alex Morrall, a long-time peer in the legal media industry, and Carolyn Boyle, Globe’s editorial services director, for their invaluable input.

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The Evolution of Legal Publishing: Who Will Survive?

What does the future hold for the legal market and the legal publishing sector?

Will a Korean client 3D-print a chip holding all U.S. case law to plug directly into her neural pathway in a William Gibson-esque 2030?

Will a technology giant such as Google have applied artificial intelligence to merger control regulations worldwide, enabling companies to bypass both law firms and legal publishers?

Perhaps cohorts of micro-bloggers will replace the legal publishing behemoths by delivering niche content to defined audiences funded as law firm marketing exercises, or by micro-revenue streams from Taboola and Google ads?

The sharing economy may take hold, establishing one or many legal wikis that leave publishers disintermediated.

Will lawyers be automated out of existence? Or will it all still just be about getting the right content to the right people at the right time?

Technology — Friend or Foe?

With the application of technology, the publishing industry as a whole is undergoing its biggest revolution since Gutenberg. At the same time, technology, process engineering, and commercial pressures are changing the legal services market beyond recognition. Sitting at the nexus of these two industries, legal publishing has changed dramatically in the last decade and the pace of that change is only set to increase.

Legal publishing is just one trade vertical. Lessons learned in other sectors, such as medical or tax, will be transferred. Major technological developments in another area, when applied to law, may be more powerful than anything yet developed in the legal space.

Legal publishers used to sell textbooks or standard forms in loose-leaf volumes; now users complete online forms about transactions that generate a full suite of documents instantly, while algorithms compare documents in order to look for unusual language. Like many of their mainstream counterparts, legal publishers are reinventing themselves as media technology businesses.

A number of start-ups are challenging the existing models of both law firms and publishers. One of their key philosophies is that knowledge is a commodity, and that it is the management of knowledge — and in particular, the application of technology to it — that creates powerful digital products. As the big data explosion continues at an incredible pace, data scientists look set to be in huge demand at publishers as they present improved ways to analyze, visualize, and curate this endless stream of information.

The bountiful supply of (free) basic legal information and know-how is changing not only how lawyers consume information, but also what they consume.

Perhaps the biggest threat to some publishers comes from technologies that can process vast quantities of information and apply advanced technology to analyze and curate it. CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, is a good example of the kind of initiative that will drive change in the legal technology marketplace. As they put it: “What happens when you combine legal code and computer code?”[1] One business to have emerged from the stable is Ravel Law,[2] which illustrates how tech-powered disruptors can challenge the publishing incumbents. Seeing that cases themselves are just a commodity, Ravel applies analytics and visualizations to the connections between cases, facilitating a more intelligent approach to legal research. 

User Experience

Customers experience powerful and evolving user interfaces every day. They shop online, read the news on a tablet, watch TED Talks, connect with others on LinkedIn, and use countless apps to solve small problems. All of these services combine a customizable experience with some degree of automatic tailoring. Customers are also experiencing the benefits of collaboration through wikis, forums, and listservs; Wikipedia seemed to replace the Encyclopedia Britannica as the default general knowledge bank almost overnight. Publishers will seek to leverage the potential of crowdsourcing opinions and information.

Users bring expectations from those experiences with them to legal publishing. Legal publishers will thus need to provide interactive, granular, and tailored experiences.

The effects of diversified distribution and content are also making themselves felt in the legal sector. Law firms large and small have seized on digital content marketing as the best way to promote themselves to clients and prospects. Blogging platforms, along with content discovery and enrichment tools, are enabling them to publish quickly and effectively on niche topics. Thus far, reliance on word of mouth and social media to grow audiences is limiting their reach, and they are still turning to publishers to tap their intended audience.

The larger publishers with more content and datasets of primary sources will respond with further attempts to become the place to do legal research, slicing and dicing, repurposing, and tailoring their content to meet the needs of as many niche audiences as possible.

But technology is a double-edged sword for publishing companies, representing as much threat as opportunity. The combination of more focused search and abundant free resources online means that, for many lawyers, Google is their starting point for research.

One of the best examples of a publishing model being blindsided by changes in the digital world is Martindale-Hubbell.

Factors Driving Change

·       Rapid change in the legal market. 

·       Continuing globalization of business and regulation. 

·       Big data explosion. 

·       Artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

·       Customer expectations driven by digital experiences. 

·        Increased and potential competition from outside the sector. 

Changes in the Legal Market

As discussed elsewhere in this book, the role of the lawyer is inexorably moving toward that of a business advisor, and further away from document processing and painstaking legal research. Likewise, the type of information and training that lawyers require will change. Law firms are under pressure to charge fees that reflect the value added and avoid reinventing the wheel.

As the disaggregation or unbundling of legal processes, long predicted by Professor Richard Susskind, becomes a reality, publishers are seeing clear opportunities to become integrated in that workflow and provide content at the point of need. Exactly how high up the value chain they sit will depend in large part on how successful they are in applying technology to their content.

One of the best examples of a publisher succeeding by playing a specific role at a key stage of the legal process workflow is Practical Law.[3] It identified major inefficiencies around the production and maintenance of what is essentially generic content, ranging from current awareness to standard contract templates.

By the turn of the millennium, U.K. business law firms had streamlined their processes by employing non-fee earning lawyers to work on their own knowledge management as professional support lawyers (PSLs). This was one of the early examples of firms breaking down their processes and identifying areas that could be handled more efficiently. Librarians and PSLs were charged with providing front-line lawyers with databanks of content that they could use in their practice. Fee earners were given basic resources to which they could apply their skill and experience to add value — for example, in negotiating an agreement rather than drafting it from scratch.

What Practical Law saw then was that there was little difference in much of the output of PSLs among firms. By hiring, replicating, and in some ways improving what these PSLs did, it was able to produce digital products that became integrated in clients’ workflow in a way that made them nearly indispensable.

Without the confluence of process reengineering and technological advances, this would not have been possible.

Publishers like Practical Law, which bring real efficiencies to the table, sit squarely with the growing band of disruptors that are helping to drive change in the legal market (e.g., new model law firms such as Axiom Law,[4] legal process outsourcers (LPOs), and the plethora of e-discovery providers).

As the legal market evolves and the players find their places on the value chain, there will inevitably be competitive tensions between publishers and their largest clients: law firms. Publishers providing powerful but easy-to-use research platforms or automated suites of contracts will rub up against law firms that have not yet embraced change and are focused on what they can do beyond the commoditized and vanilla. The relationships between publishers and LPOs will be interesting to watch as well. LPOs, while offering efficiencies in many areas over law firms or in-house legal teams, currently offer services to clients in some areas where a publisher would instinctively want to offer a product to a much larger set of clients at a lower rate.

Globalization

The continued globalization of international markets and business is another powerful force that is having a major impact on the legal market. In-house counsel at multinational firms must stay on top of an ever-multiplying set of laws and regulations in a growing number of countries. This increasingly complex and interconnected global regulatory environment has seen law firms forge alliances or open offices across the globe. Often deterred by the multitude of languages that prevent economies of scale, publishers have been slow to follow, covering developments in smaller jurisdictions at a relatively high level. This is something that technology will surely address in the foreseeable future. 

Revenue Models

With the exception of those focused on news and opinion journalism, legal publishers have not been beset by the challenges facing the wider newspaper and magazine industry as it grapples with declining advertising revenues and customers’ reluctance to go behind the paywall in a world where so much information online is free. Newspapers are focusing on high-quality, often long-form journalism to build loyalty with readers and convince them to use their credit cards. This is exactly the kind of content on which legal publishers have focused.

Those with a co-publishing, financed content model generally ensure that their projects are financially underwritten in advance. They may be free to air, require registration, or require a subscription fee from one or more classes of user, but branded content has long flourished in the legal sector and looks set to continue, especially given the importance of content marketing to law firms.

As publishing has moved online, expectations around advertising have changed greatly. No longer can publishers simply quote readership numbers based on a multiple applied print runs. Advertisers are seeking highly targeted opportunities and real-time analytics on usage. Those that fail to deliver will be left behind.

There is increased competition from outside the sector from the likes of LinkedIn and Google, which can target users in the way that previously only a trade publisher could.

Legal directories of one sort or another have long been a mainstay for many publishers. They continue to provide valuable intelligence to readers, and serve as both a marketing tool and a competitive benchmarking tool for firms. They are still driven by advertising; as of yet, no one has moved to fees based on the number or value of the introductions made.

Much of the innovation in this space will come from new market entrants, many of which bring with them “freemium” models. Just as with so many services outside the space, they work toward proof of concept and build user bases by offering a free service before introducing premium features.

Tailored Knowledge

In our lifetimes publishing will always be associated with books, but modern legal publishing is as much about data mining and digital analysis as it is about the printed page. Law libraries may still be filled with rows of weighty reference tomes, but lawyers now practice in the digital space.

The future of legal publishing is about streamlining the workflows of lawyers and law firms, giving them access to the latest legal data and market analyses on an individual basis. This will be delivered through the power of artificial intelligence to collate, curate, and learn, and from using the most authoritative sources. In addition, they will have the ability to create documentation on the fly — the contracts that underpin transactions or agreements needed to react to legal or market changes in real time, and the knowledge and training to do what it is they do. It is about the most efficient delivery of bespoke know-how for every lawyer.

Editors are now digital curators, knowledge professionals, leading teams of coders, and technologists, producing products more complex and more efficient than lawyers can create or supply. This is the value-add that the successful legal publishing industry must create. Merely cataloguing information is now the domain of the search engines; however, books will always be useful things against which to lean your tablet. 

Onward or Downward?

Those publishers with a blend of revenue streams from subscriptions and advertising — as well as, increasingly, software licensing — will have a more secure future. The holy grail of a high annual renewal rate, providing predictable revenues, will give publishers the best opportunities to invest in developing products that capitalize on the changes taking place and the technology available to them. While there is a risk that new technology from outside the legal sector may eat their lunch, the legal publishers of the future that successfully embed themselves in customers’ workflow through the intelligent application of technology to information will play a more valuable role in the legal services market.

One thing is certain in today’s technology-driven, more-with-less era of seemingly limitless free information: Those delivering legal content must demonstrate real, improved outcomes for customers or face extinction.