The Reinvention of Legal Research: The Future Is Now

Legal research -- once the province of desks, books, and binders -- is now online, data-driven, and real-time. These attributes pose new challenges to old practices and habits, and to old publishing stalwarts such as Westlaw and LexisNexis. Here are a few of the new research and business realities that result from this transformation. The story starts with the application of technology to information and ends with the radical transformation of the legal publishing marketplace.

Data trumps documents. Legal, regulatory, and court documents -- once intrinsically valuable -- increasingly serve as mere information containers. New methods for tagging, extracting, organizing, and presenting information in documents create new possibilities for how quickly we can assemble, analyze, interpret, and disseminate this information.

Information is liquid. We now live in an ocean of information, and are swept along by its riptides and currents. The challenge is to manage our relationship to this information so it serves us our higher purposes. We need ways to filter real-time story-telling and reporting so we can identify narratives that have substance and reject those that are ephemeral, partial, distorted, or trivial.

Information is a commodity. A truism of the Internet Age is that Information wants to be free. Because it has become omnipresent and liquid, information is now an undifferentiated commodity, sluicing from a vale of wellsprings. Value -- what people will pay for -- now derives, not from mere access to this information, but from successful tools and platforms for managing its flow, volume, and direction.

Customers will not pay for research. When online legal research platforms were proprietary, online publishers imposed per-minute and per-use pricing structures. This pricing model facilitated client cost-recovery and allowed publishers to use law firms as information wholesalers. Because information is now a commodity, law firm clients will no longer pay for online legal research. New flat-rate pricing models for online research products reflect this reality.

The large legal publishers are in trouble. If law firms can no longer pass through online research costs to clients, multi-billion dollar legal publishers such as West and Lexis can no longer support pricing models premised on law firm cost recovery. Because West and Lexis cost structures depend on this pricing model, they are beginning to experience painful margin squeezes, compounded by the entry into the legal research marketplace of both nimble, low-cost competitors and new rivals with deep pockets such as Bloomberg.

These are wondrous times in the world of online publishing. Change abounds and the market is reinventing itself in the elusive quest to govern the new quicksilver that we call information.

Comments

[coollibrarian]

Interesting article; mostly interesting since this author's company has been walking in with double-digit price increases for two years running. Wow, what a conflict of interest.

[noapologies]

lawyers will continue to bill, and clients will continue to pay, for online legal research because they are not paying for what it costs the lawyer to maintain a Westlaw or Lexis account. they're paying for the lawyer's research skills in identifying the issue and then finding the authority that supports the client's position on the issue. unless and until clients can develop legal problem solving skills and thinking that is as good or better as their attorney's it will be far more efficient to pay the attorney to conduct the research for them (whether in the "stacks" of the law library or at the keyboard of their office computer).

[PlatonicGuardian]

Lexis and Westlaw already do all of these things. Their respective practice guides (which are online and constantly updated) direct relevant information to practitioners who find these services invaluable and much to the benefit of their clients for managing the "flow, volume, and direction" of the law, thereby reducing the cost of legal research. These databases can also notify users of changes in statutory and case law if the subject matter is flagged by the user, ensuring an attorney's knowledge is up to date.

Where are the examples of business which pose a threat to Lexis and Westlaw? The author's company, perhaps?

[AhnAmuru]

There's nothing wrong with cutting out the middleman - in this instance the Attorney, for mundane matters. Prep. ones own contracts, self - patent or copyright, do your own wills ... etc ...

An Attorney should only be needed in the most complex of matters or litigation.

[larry278]

Some clients will demand the services of an Attorney if they screw up when they represent themselves in so called simple or mundane matters. As the old wise crack goes, "Where's a will-there's a lawyer to challenge it & break (or destroy) the will [or contract, or patent ,or copyright].".