Legal pain – threat or opportunity?
Jinfo Blog

12th December 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Even the traditionally resilient legal sector may finally be feeling the pain, according to a new report commissioned by LexisNexis. Its State of the Legal Industry Survey finds the United States legal profession deeply divided on their industry’s future – but the implications for the information industry may go even further. Most corporate counsel believe law firms are not taking enough action in response to the economic downturn, the report finds; consequently more than half are shifting work in-house and reducing spending on their outside counsel. However over three quarters of private practice attorneys believe their clients are too focused on reducing costs, thereby forcing them to reduce their workforce, lay people off and defer start dates for new staff (http://digbig.com/5bathb – full findings also available). With the situation unlikely to be much different in the United Kingdom, small wonder that legal information professionals here have been getting tough with vendors. As VIP reported last August (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e23124), a report from the broker Execution showed customers anticipating a 12% contraction in budgets, compared with an average 2.4% increase in prices. Something is going to have to give – and Outsell’s 2009 Legal, Tax & Regulatory Market Forecast & Trends Report may drop a hint (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bathd). Growing collaboration in information sharing among professionals is one disruptive force it cites – and another is open access to legal and government information. Events here are moving fast in the UK, where a recent government report – Putting the Front Line First: Smarter Government – includes a commitment to radically open up public information, releasing thousands of datasets and making them free for re-use (http://digbig.com/5bathe). Specialist legal publishers have simply taken this in their stride up to now, but potentially opening up such content to developers may put it in a different league – as Google may also be starting to do in the States. Since mid November, Google Scholar has been offering access to full text legal opinions from major US courts, providing links to citings of particular cases and to related articles (http://digbig.com/5bathf). The move has prompted Shore Content Blogger John Blossom to comment that, although this is ‘far from the full capabilities that a LexisNexis or Thomson West offer to their professional clients’, it could nevertheless threaten their core offerings, largely because – as in the UK development – it exposes a huge body of public documents to applications builders and content services (http://digbig.com/5bathg). LexisNexis’s Mike Walsh believes that, although its survey makes ‘sobering reading’, law firms that are willing to think and act differently could benefit nevertheless. But legal information professionals may be taking the LexisNexis findings in tandem with other recent developments and wondering whether they could strengthen their hand at the negotiating table.

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