Robb Shecter, a second-year law student at Lewis & Clark Law School, needed a decent online version of the Oregon Revised Statutes.  So he built one.

The availability of the Oregon statutes for this venture was secured after Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org and Tim Stanley of Justia lobbied the Oregon legislature to stop asserting a copyright in the Oregon Revised Statues, which had prevented third party publishers from creating their own versions of the statues without steep licensing fees.  They presented a number of legal and policy arguments for the change.  Last June, the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee agreed to no longer assert its copyright interest in the statutes.

This is a model of what’s happening in open access to legal and regulatory information online. it’s no longer enough that information be freely available at a government web site; the really interesting innovations come when public bodies release their information in low-level formats that allow third parties to manipulate it into innovative new products.  That a second-year law student can whip together a better version of the state laws than the state itself – in his spare time – says volumes about the possibilities and level of change that open access will bring to primary law publishing.

Flip side of an earlier post (Who is All This Legal Information For?):

Who will provide all this legal information?

Had a talk with Tom Bruce of LII the other day about legal information for non-lawyers.  As it becomes easier for individual contributors to publish legal information directly to non-lawyers, one model we might have in mind is the lawyer-blogger; lawyers helping people navigate through legal issues with plain-language content as a way to build brand and reputation and win new clients. Or we might think of Nolo and its many legal guides for consumers on things like wills and real estate, legal guides by lawyers but targeted to non-lawyers.

But Bruce suggested there might be an entirely new class of legal publisher out there. Wouldn’t a guy who sells industrial safety equipment be a good authority for Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) regulations? Wouldn’t an architect or a contractor make a good publisher of information about the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (ADA) requirements for accessible buildings?

Technology is making more legal information available to non-legal audiences. Most primary legal sources don’t make much sense to consumers or ordinary businesspeople; they require interpretation and context.  In the past, that might have meant going to a lawyer for the interpretation.  But most lawyers don’t make much sense to ordinary people, either.  Watch for legal information consumers to turn to their peers, people who speak their own language, for the information and interpretation. For those legal questions where users are simply trying to bone up on an unfamiliar issue, or arm themselves ahead of an interaction with a lawyer or legal process, there’s a great need for “good enough” legal information.  Both traditional legal publishers and lawyers could miss out on this latent information market because their products are overengineered for it.

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) conducted an economic outlook survey of library directors to see how they were adjusting to the economic climate. More than 60% report they’ve already encountered budget cuts.  Notable actions taken include:

• Print subscriptions: all types of libraries (private, academic, state/court/county) are watching subs and canceling where possible.
• Renegotiating with big publishers, pushing back on long-term agreements.
• Public library cuts lean more heavily on service hours and even climate (”lowered temperature in building”); private library cuts are more about personnel cuts and cutbacks on databases and subscriptions.

These challenges come come a time when viable alternatives such as low-cost online legal research services and better and more sophisticated peer- and collaboratively-created content become available.  Look for more law libraries to get creative as they serve clients on a lower budget, and shift from simply being more economical with existing resources to finding new resources and new ways of providing service altogether.

Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet & American Life Project writes about the “participatory class.” The concept comes out of Pew’s research around changing patterns of political engagement, but also applies to health care, as a new generation of active patients pushes the envelope of how medicine is practiced and medical services consumed.

The legal services industry will see the same kind of impacts as the healthcare industry.  Watch for “participatory clients” to change legal practice just as participatory patients change medicine:

This participatory class is reading blogs, listening to podcasts, updating their social network profile, watching videos, and posting comments. Technology is not an end, but a means to accelerate the pace of discovery, widen social networks, and sharpen the questions someone might ask when they do get to talk to a health professional.

This participatory class won’t have as much impact on the high end of the legal industry that serves large corporations and organizations, but will definitely transform the small and solo firms that serve individuals and small businesses.

There’s a great dialog going on at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute between LII’s Tom Bruce and Dan Dabney of Thomson Reuters that very nicely captures two world views about the law and legal information.

Dabney begins with a historical look at why, especially in the United States, legal information came to be dominated by private publishers.  Reflecting on the recent rise in open legal sources (exemplifed by LII), he also puts forth an almost solipsistic view of the benefits of that openness: it is good because it has made the private publishers better at what they do. Not surprisingly, Dabney puts Thomson Reuters at the top of this food chain:

LII can, and does, make legal information better and more available. The new low-end providers like Loislaw are pushed to provide more because they need to be better than LII. Lexis has been pushed to offer more, because it has to be better than Loislaw. And Westlaw has been pushed to offer more because it has to be better than Lexis.

There you have it: LII and its like are good for the world because they push the private legal publishers of the world to get better and provide more value to their current markets.

Bruce counters that Dabney is missing the whole point of LII and the current wave of openness around legal information.  It’s not about making the high-end services, whose customers are really the legal profession itself, better.  It’s about opening up new audiences and markets for legal information. LII has this entirely different audience in mind:

It is aimed at those whose use of primary legal material is less rigorous because their aim is, perhaps, to get general orientation, or to make sense of the competing advice of professionals and pundits, or to fortify themselves for an initial encounter with a professional who, in their minds, represents a legal system that is scary and incomprehensible.

Bruce mentions WebMD as an analogy; there is a vibrant market for information about the law that demystifies the law, just as WebMD and other consumer services demystify medicine.  It’s all about finding the level of information that’s good enough for this new audience, and structured in a way that’s useful to them, not to the legal profession.

One thing can be said about the commercial legal publishing industry; it has performed very well at serving its core market, particularly large law firms serving large clients with complex and high-risk legal issues.  In doing so, it has done little to crack the nut that LII is working on: what does the legal system mean for the rest of us?

If past patterns of the information industry hold true, then there is an opening for new players to fill this great void; players focused on perfecting their offerings to their current customers sometimes lose sight of new markets that can’t be served in the same way.

Heard at the ABA Techshow a couple of weeks ago: Chatted separately with Larry Port of RocketMatter and Conrad Saam of AVVO about their respective companies.  Both innovating, trying out things new to the legal profession. Asked both of them if the saw a difference in the way younger vs. older lawyers perceive and adapt to their offerings.

Both said no, lots of older attorneys get the new ways – whether its jumping on new ways to deliver software as a service, or adapting to new, open, riskier law firm marketing practices.

Two services based on the Federal Register (the US government’s official publication of all proposed and new administrative regulations) have turned up recently:

• FederalRegister.com is a free service from Citation Technologies as a demonstration of the capabilities of its  CyberRegs service, which tracks changes to environment, public health & safety, and transportation of hazardous materials regulations.
• OpenRegs.com (still in beta) will provide an alternative interface to the Federal Register’s docket database. It will take the FR’s existing XML feed and add a number of new services on top of it, including the ability to track by topic or agency, and to track proposed regulations with closing or opening comment periods.  It will also allow discussion forums, user-submitted links, and other features.

Of the two, the latter shows greatest promise as a tool for turning the raw feed of regulations coming out of Washington into a useful tool for changing the way the public oversees rulemaking – FederalRegister.com is still more of a Web 1.0 offering.

OpenRegs.com is the brainchild of Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He’s also behind StimulusWatch.org, a service that allows people to track and evaluate the spending measures coming under the Obama administration’s stimulus package.

This is all part of the frenzy of open access activity taking place in Washington and elsewhere, mostly led by people and organizations on the outside of government, including groups like the Sunshine Foundation, and Carl Malamud’s public.resource.org.