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?

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