Disruptors – no-one is safe
Jinfo Blog

9th December 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Lawyers are more technology savvy than their fusty stereotype might suggest, according to new research. But as legal information providers scramble to capitalise on this trend, there’s plenty of evidence hinting at more disruption to come. More than three quarters of respondents to the survey said that they favoured online or digital resources to traditional paper-based law libraries, and nearly nine in ten retrieved information daily from sources other than email, such as smart phones or e-books (http://digbig.com/5bdbqn). Some of the most striking findings concerned the extent to which lawyers were utilising mobile technology – in stark contrast to the views of information managers in the recent FreePint survey Mobile or Deskbound? that mobile content is ‘nice to have’ rather than ‘need to have’ (http://web.freepint.com/go/about/press/61284). Are Lawyers Early Adopters? was commissioned from legal research company Jures by LexisNexis – hardly surprisingly really when you think how hard LexisNexis is working to persuade lawyers to adopt its technology-based workflow solutions (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29615 http://www.vivavip.com/go/e30389 or http://www.vivavip.com/go/e31143 for some examples). Indeed, LexisNexis has just proudly announced that it carried off more of this year’s Law Technology News Awards than any other provider of technology for legal professionals (http://digbig.com/5bdbqp). It’s also been busy consolidating its position through strategic acquisitions and disposals. It’s recently acquired State Net, which enhances its United States state legislative content with monitoring and analytical solutions (http://digbig.com/5bdbqq) while flogging off two more traditional content repositories – the Congressional Information Service and University Publications of America – to ProQuest (http://digbig.com/5bdbqr). But others too are keen to exploit the increasing quantities of legislative and regulatory content being made available under open government initiatives. Launched formally earlier this year, Bloomberg Law is competing aggressively not on functionality but on price (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29972 for background). Bloomberg Law offers more limited fare than its rivals, but its chairman Lou Andreozzi (a defector from LexisNexis) told the Financial Times that he expected many firms to prefer its flat monthly fee to the ‘expensive and unpredictable’ charges of its competitors. The FT also observed that Bloomberg Law formed part a drive to diversify beyond the banks and investment groups that made up the core customers for the established Bloomberg terminal (http://digbig.com/5bdbqs). It’s a wise move. Bloomberg’s core financial information business is likely to come under increasing pressure from Thomson Reuters’ recently launched Eikon financial information product (see Penny Crossland’s LiveWire posting at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e30645 for background). Legal information providers have been feeling the pinch unprecedentedly of late, and there’s no sign of any let up when an aggressively disruptive player like Bloomberg enters the field. But with Bloomberg too being challenged in its own core territory, it looks as if even more interesting times are on the way – for producers and purchasers.

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