Law - the turmoil continues
Jinfo Blog

27th July 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

'Not quite ready yet' seems to have been the verdict when Bloomberg Law first made its appearance early this year. Well now it clearly is, and it's just the largest of a whole series of disruptions in a legal information market that one commentator describes as 'revolution, not evolution'. The commentator was Carol Ebbinghouse, writing recently in Information Today (http://digbig.com/5bcbty). Like VIP's Michele Bate (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27998), she too drew on earlier suggestions by legal journalist Robert Ambrogi that Bloomberg's new offering was like 'a luxury yacht only partially constructed'. Now it's viewed as a serious competitor to Westlaw and LexisNexis - and this in a year when both those long established competitors have been innovating furiously (see for example http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28192 or http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29818). As Ashby Jones comments in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog (http://digbig.com/5bcbwa), Bloomberg challenges the other big players on two fronts: weaving its existing news, company and financial data into its legal offering, and an all-you-can-eat price of $450 per seat per month (see http://digbig.com/5bcbwb for product description). But at a time when legal information is seeing an unprecedented decline in revenue (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29615), the potential for disruption goes far deeper than this. Take for example the range of mobile applications for legal research and news profiled by the University of California Los Angeles's Hugh & Hazel Darling Law Library (http://digbig.com/5bcbwc). Although they do include the big players, there are plenty of smaller offerings as well as apps from several (American) public sector bodies. And some of them are free. Free too is Thomson Reuters' FindLaw legal information service, just extended from the United States to the United Kingdom. Designed for individuals and businesses, its main purpose is to lead potential clients to lawyers - but it's the free legal information that provides the bait (http://digbig.com/5bcbwd). A couple of years back, a new book called The End of Lawyers? suggested that IT could render conventional legal advice redundant too (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e14453). Now no less a figure than Britain's newish Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, launching a consultation on the modernising of courts in England and Wales (details at http://digbig.com/5bcbwe), has also suggested that technology could eventually replace the 'day in court' (http://digbig.com/5bcbwf). If this were to happen, expect an explosion in access to free legal information of the kind pioneered by FindLaw and some of those mobile apps. So what of the poor lawyers and the legal information professionals who support them? Speaking to the WSJ blogger, LexisNexis new product development head Clemens Ceipek pointed out that 'as cases and statutes become easier for attorneys to find free online, it's the manpower to make sense of material that increasingly differentiates the leaders'. That's true for the vendors - and it's true for information professionals too.

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