The idea of Good Enough Information is a phenomenon that I and my fellow Outsell analysts have been tracking for several years now. A nice recent piece in Wired explores the concept of Good Enough in fields as diverse as warfare, consumer video, health care, and yes, law.   The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.

Richard Granat of DirectLaw is a legal industry “guru of Good Enough,” and he’s featured in the piece.  His company makes solutions to legal problems cheap and accessible; he’s one of the few companies taking the Good Enough Revolution to the legal services industry.  Like other segments of the information industry obsessed with the high end market, the legal information industry has largely overlooked the legal needs of ordinary people and small companies.  Granat sees a change coming; within five years, small firms will have to adopt an elawyering approach, or they won’t make it.

Firms like DirectLaw will be helping to bring Good Enough to the legal services industry; many traditional legal information companies are too tied to the established big-firm market to see the opportunity or make the changes.

Poor PACER, everyone’s conspiring on a new workaround.  Here’s the latest.

Turning PACER Around, One Document at a Time

Imagine that, a recipe for new legal research that leverages the inherent structure and intelligence already embedded in legal sources.

Good piece from Robb Shecter, the creator of OregonLaws.org: The Recipe for Better Legal Information Services at the VoxPopuLII blog.

Good review of some interesting developments.  “I believe that in the end, the biggest accomplishment of projects like this will be to raise our expectations for electronic legal research services, increase their quality, and lower their cost.”

As Outsell has increased its blogging activities, we decided to do a little shuffling–this post is to help you navigate the new neighborhood. My colleagues and I now have four blogs:

1. Thinking Out Loud: posts from Anthea Stratigos, Outsell’s CEO, about the information industry with an emphasis on marketing,
2. Agile Publishing: posts from Marc Strohlein, Outsell’s Chief Agility Officer, covering a variety of topics surrounding the use of agile approaches to information product creation,
3. Lex Disruptus: posts from David Curle, Outsell’s Director and Lead Analyst, about disruption in the legal information market,
4. Education: posts from our analysts that cover the education market.

We hope you will enjoy any and all of these and that they help you “get inside our heads” as we ruminate about the trials and triumphs of the information industry.