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?

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.

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

Here’s a nifty little piece from Harvard Business Publishing’s The Big Shift: Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows.  It paints a broad picture of a world in which ownership of stocks of knowledge are becoming relatively less valuable than participation in flows of new, tacit knowledge.  This is true for individuals and companies.

Now transfer the idea to information markets such as legal publishing. Value in the traditional legal publishing world was based on stores of retrospective information – collections of primary law documents such as court decision and statutes; secondary work such as treatises and encyclopedias; journals; practice guides.  To be sure, there’s always been a “flow” component to legal publishing – Shepard’s and other citator products tell us when the validity of a legal source has changed, for example, and the ubiquitous loose-leaf service was the print world’s way of trying to keep up with the flow of new information – but the value publishers provided was the in the archives of information, knowledge, and analysis that publishers produced and that lawyers incorporated into their practices.

Today, all the newest information tools for lawyers are all about the flow – not so much about how I search and retrieve what’s needed from existing stocks of knowledge, but how I position myself to not miss the new knowledge contained in the rapid flow of ideas around me.  Blogs, RSS, Twitter, are all about positioning myself in the stream of information I care about in order to not miss anything. Today’s wider array of workflow tools available to legal, tax and compliance professionals are all about dropping exactly the right piece of up-to-date information into my hands just as I need it – pulling it out of the flow.  The value is increasingly tied to the timing and the currency of the knowledge, not just its availability or even quality.

In many parts of the information industries we are moving from a search-and-retrieve model to a publish-and-subscribe model.  Note that search-and-retrieve works well when the value is in “stocks” of knowledge, but that publish-and-subscribe makes more sense when the pace of change means the greater value lies in just knowing what’s changing.  Note, too, that publish-and-subscribe means the information consumer is both consumer and contributor.  As this piece notes,

We can’t participate effectively in flows of knowledge–at least not for long–without contributing knowledge of our own. This occurs because participants in these knowledge flows don’t want free riding “takers”; they want to develop relationships with people and institutions that can contribute knowledge of their own. This is a huge hurdle for most executives who were trained to guard their knowledge carefully. Yet if they remain “takers” they will find themselves rapidly marginalized. Knowledge flows tend to concentrate among participants who are sharing with, and learning from, each other.

Twitter offers a perfect example of this; its value increases exponentially when networks of people use it to not just share information but to solicit and provide expertise, and to leverage that sharing across a network. The loose collection of products, platforms and tools we call social media are a response to this increasing tendency of knowledge workers to value the flow of information and tacit knowledge relative to stocks of knowledge. Information products that capture and allow participation in those knowledge flows have become more valuable than archival information products.

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?