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.

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.”

This is pretty big news in the world of professional networking for legal professionals.  Legal OnRamp has built a name for itself as a leading example of a networking and collaboration platform for lawyers, but a lot of folks are still wondering where this web 2.0 thing is headed.

This deal adds a big stamp of legitimacy to Legal OnRamp’s efforts (not to mention an influx of cash in the form of an undisclosed investment), and it will also give the corporate lawyers that make up Corporate Executive Board’s General Counsel Roundtable a new collaboration platform.

A big key to this deal with be the extent to which CEB and Legal OnRamp are able to exploit connections with other fuctions that make up CEB’s client base.  Many of those functions are also the internal clients of Legal OnRamp’s current customer base.

See my earlier report, Legal OnRamp: Collaboration and the Future of Legal Content Creation, August 2008, and my colleague Louise Garnett’s look at CEB, Corporate Executive Board: Banking on Best Practices, March 17, 2008.

Richard Susskind, chief chronicler of the ongoing transformation of the legal industry and author of The End of Lawyers?, is taking a part-time three-year appointment as Visiting Professor in Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) (press release).

The OII a department within the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford that focuses on multidisciplinary study of the internet and society.

In my recent Outsell report, Professional Networks and Social Publishing in the Legal, Tax & Regulatory Information Segment, I tried to cast a pretty wide net in my analysis of all the many ways that legal professionals can use professional networks and social media. The report covers not a single type of network or tool, but rather an array of tools that are at the disposal of lawyers today, including the services we know as professional networks (LinkedIn, for example), but also various kinds of knowledge-sharing sites, expert networks, and crowdsourcing services.

In trying to make sense of this all, the report outlines a three-tier model for lawyers’ use of the various services available.  Each of the three tiers meets some but not all of the needs a lawyer might have: for basic networking, for content delivery/marketing, and for service delivery.  Each tier also presents opportunities for legal publishers and information providers to participate in the networking world.

That last point is key; many publishers (not just in law, but other fields) assume they need to own or control a network to benefit from the networked environment. My view is that the way for publishers to work with networks is to make their content more interoperable and portable, and thereby more visible on all the networks available, rather than betting on any single network or platform. Network participants are putting out their own content; if everyone is a publisher, where does that leave publishers who keep their content locked inside old containers and inside walled gardens?

Here’s a new web-based transaction management tool for lawyers, TransactionSpace.

I’ll be taking a closer look at this but Bob Ambrogi has a good overview of how it works. Free for now, for-fee version planned for when it’s out of beta.

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.