The ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 recently held a hearing on whether ethics rules need to be adjusted to accommodate new technologies and ways of delivering legal information and services: Your ABA: February 2010 | Clients prefer Web-based legal options, find non-lawyer vendors fill the bill.

At the hearing, Richard Granat of DirectLaw estimated that various new self-help sites have drained $75 million out of lawyers’ practices annually.

This is not the only industry to be impacted by the tendency of today’s information consumers to want to find information and, to the extent possible, execute transactions of various kinds entirely online.  The business of serving that growing self-help market is a threat to the legal services industry and an opportunity for legal publishers – and for new entrants to the legal information industry.

Bob Ambrogi has a nice preview of the new Fastcase iPhone App that will be available soon.

He focuses on the functionality of the app, but not to be overlooked is the price plan: free.  As in, search the full Fastcase database and access its content for free.  And the app itself is free, too.  On the heels of the availability of Google Scholar’s collection of free US case law, it looks like we have entered an era in which nobody will be able to charge money simply for access to primary legal documents. Fastcase, as a provider of case law whose price point was, shall we say, closer to free than other legal research providers, is arguably more threatened than either Westlaw or Lexis by Google’s push into the field. With this move, Fastcase is showing that it’s not out to play defense in the mobile space. (On Google’s move, see Winners, Losers, and Other Implications of Case Law on Google Scholar).

The full Web version of Fastcase, with its additional tools and bells and whistles, will continue to be a fee-based service.  In effect, Fastcase is content to use the iPhone app as a marketing tool for to the full-featured and full-priced Web version.  West’s and Lexis’ mobile apps to date include Black’s Law Dictionary at $49.99, and Lexis’ Get Cases and Sheparize app requires a paid subscription to use. Fastcase is attempting to seize some high ground on the mobile space by offering more for less.

This move could cause the activity around mobile content apps for lawyers to heat up a bit.

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?

As part of the ongoing ABA Legal Rebels series, Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp provides a nice Preview of The 2011 Legal Landscape.  It’s a good piece that focuses on the unsustainability of the way junior associates are currently leveraged in BigLaw firms.  Lippe compares a theoretical million-dollar bill for legal services today, and the same bill, chopped down to $800,000, in 2011, and offers an explanation of where the missing $200K went.

Where will those dollars go? Four places.

• Clients will just flat out spend less, drive harder bargains and get more for their money
• Some work will go to outsourcers, whether onshore or off
• More work will go to contract lawyers or proto-associates not on any kind of partnership track
• Some associate time will get replaced by technology

In a piece for Outsell’s Insights service, Associates: In the Legal Industry’s Crosshairs (pw protected), I noted that many of the the economic and structural troubles in the industry can be traced to the system of over-leveraged and under-skilled associates.

Legal information providers, when thinking about Lippe’s theoretical 20% smaller law firm bill, have to be wondering how they will fare in 2011 and beyond as well. The party is over, less money is coming in, and there will be severe pressure on research budgets; less money coming in for firms will translate into less money available for publishers.  One way out is to focus on Lippe’s four places above, particularly the last one.  As I put it in the Insights piece,

Legal publishers and information providers looking for a better mousetrap in this market might start by asking how they help law firms (and in-house legal departments) use technology, collaboration, and/or new business models to deliver routine legal work more cheaply, and with better quality, than the typically inexperienced and inefficient first-year associate.

The challenge for legal information providers (or anyone else who wants to make a buck in this environment) is to get inside what associates do all day, pick it apart into its component pieces, and find a way to provide the same service some other way.

The work of making legislation and other legal materials more accessible is going on all over the world.

The latest version of the Swedish service lagen.nu now includes commentaries written by law students and practicing lawyers, all with the intent of making the text of the law more comprehensible to laypeople.  If by any chance you can can read Swedish, see the announcement by the man behind the service, Staffan Malmgren, at his blog: Lansering av nya lagen.nu plz RT! I’m looking for a good English-language description of the project.

The service reminds me of OregonLaws.org, which also was put together by a law student/programmer in his spare time; both are attempts to use new technology and Web 2.0 techniques to make legislation more accessible than existing commercial products – on the cheap.

According to Above the Law, the new Bloomberg Law service will be officially launched  by the end of the month at a party in the New York offices of Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

The timing of this introduction is extremely interesting. Large law firms, a major target for the offering, are hurting.  They’ve cut costs and lawyers and are looking at their information services budgets very closely.  That economic environment could be a two-edged sword for Bloomberg; either buyers will gratefully embrace an offering that presents a competitive alternative to their major contracts with West and LexisNexis (and the resulting price pressure and service concessions that often accompany intense competition), or they will view Bloomberg Law as a slick but expensive nice-to-have, and will hesitate to add yet another service to their portfolio of information services in a time of cutbacks. We expect that Bloomberg will aggressively price the offering and try to take a significant share of the market rather than settle for being a niche player.

Bloomberg began offering BLAW on Bloomberg terminals in 2004, and ever since then the service has operated in somewhat of a stealth mode, with little known about its next-stage development. Bloomberg officials have rarely made public statements about its development, and most of the written commentary about it has come without the cooperation of Bloomberg itself.  That sense of secrecy and stealth is somehow part of the Bloomberg brand and mystique, but it only goes so far in a legal market where information buyers demand concrete answers about a service’s capabilities and limitations.

However, recent enthusiastic comments about the new platform, the apparent seriousness with which Bloomberg Law has tackled timeliness, comprehensiveness, integration of non-legal materials, and the gee-whiz factor of an apparantly innovative approach to research workflow all suggest that Bloomberg Law will soon move from the vaporware stage to becoming a meaningful contender for a significant share of the legal information market.

ATL also has a link to a PDF of a Bloomberg Law brochure.

[this post an excerpt from Bloomberg Law Comes Along At a Critical Time from Outsell's Insights service (password protected).]

You’ve probably seen the announcement of Federal Register availability in XML.  I think this will be a tipping point in open access for regulatory information, and it will lead to a lot of new applications for gummint data.  Carl Malamud provides some Questions and Answers! About the Federal Register at O’Reilly Radar.

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