There was widespread celebration in the legal community yesterday as word of Google Scholar’s launch of a substantial collection of US case law spread across the internets.  Now what?

Only time will tell how the availability of this critical body of public content will shake things up in the legal world and in the legal information industry.  But the winners, losers, and implications might not be what everybody thinks:

• The availability of free primary law sources is not going to have its biggest impact on products and services that the legal profession itself uses. That market needs a lot of value-add beyond just access to the law (including advanced finding tools, secondary legal content, and workflow tools), and the existing players are well positioned to continue providing it. Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) and Reed Elsevier (Lexis) are likely more concerned about Bloomberg than Google in their primary legal marketplace. However, open access to legal sources will spur the creation of new markets for legal information among consumers, but even more so among non-lawyer professionals who need to understand a narrow field of that they work with all the time. Expect to see new products and services built on top of the free legal information that will make the law more accessible to those new markets.
• The people who should worry about this news are lawyers. They are about to be “Web-MD’d.” Clients will begin coming to them with reams of print-outs, thinking they know the law, the same way doctors are always hearing from self-diagnosing patients who think they can spot their disease by reading stuff on the Web. New-found access to formerly hidden legal information will do for potential legal clients what WebMD and the Web has done for patients – arm them with information, and build a thirst for more information that’s targeted to them, rather than to the lawyers.  Lawyers, like doctors, will have to redefine their role and authority in a world where everyone thinks they’re an expert.
• Still to come will be the question of how Google will develop the “how cited” and “cited by” features. Already you can see some cases where legal journals and non-legal sources from elsewhere in Google Scholar are linked in. It’s fairly crude right now, but Google or others could develop some really interesting cross-linking between the cases and other published material in and outside of the legal industry. Think of what Google has done with maps, and how many different kinds of information could be linked into court opinions: geographic information; the identities of parties, lawyers, and judges; and external links about the subject matter of a given case. What Google is showing us today is only a sliver of what’s possible.
• While much of a lawyer’s work requires the bells and whistles embedded in the full research offerings by the major research players, there is no doubt that many searches in case law are preliminary “fishing expeditions;” first stabs at identifying a case or a legal principle that applies to a legal issue.  It is pretty clear that many lawyers will begin to conduct that first-stage, low-risk research in free services including Google Scholar.  This has two implications: that there will be continued price pressure on the big providers for search offerings ; but also that there will be increased pressure on the newer, inexpensive players such as Fastcase and Casemaker.  Those players will have to continue to innovate in functionality, user experience, and service in order to maintain their hard-won positions as legitimate alternatives to the big two players.

Jeff Jarvis has a thoughtful post about the future of journalism and the news industry:  The future of news is entrepreneurial.

In it, he argues that the news industry isn’t going away – but that the old media companies and their approach is.

The news industry of the future will consist of smaller and more fragmented players.  Journalists will be more like free agents, and money will be made – but on a smaller scale.  There will also be significant opportunities for companies to to take part in the industry by providing networks and business services to journalist-entrepreneurs.

How well do his arguments apply to the legal information industry?  Will legal publishing become similarly entrepreneurial?  Consider:

• The open access movement is making it cheap and easy to slice and dice public legal content into new products.  Big legacy publishers won’t have an advantage here.
• Where Jarvis talks about journalists, substitute the word lawyer.  Will legacy publishers be challenged by individual entrepreneurial lawyers, each of whom has his or her own printing press with a global reach? Why turn to a publisher for information when the expert is directly accessible?
• Think about the integration of practice and marketing that Web-savvy practitioners are demonstrating.  The same platforms are used for service delivery, reputation enhancement, and business development – just as Jarvis’ vision calls for small information providers integrating new business models with content and technology.
• As technology is injected into the lawyer’s workflow, the value of big one-size-fits-all services diminishes as well.  Just as a fragmented core of entrepreneurial journalists can specialize and provide increasing focus and expertise on their subject matter, so will the packaging of legal information be focused and targeted to specific kinds of litigation and transactions.  Building big technology platforms for a wide range of legal practice areas takes critical mass; building efficient practice tools that do one thing well requires considerably less resources – so here again the technology advantage of the big legal information players may be smaller than it was a decade ago.

Lawyers (like journalists) are building an entrepreneurial information environment that is a threat to the structure of the legal services industry.  Is this entrepreneurship it also a threat to the legal publishing industry?