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Future: Legal Business Publishing Leaders in Legal Business
Tony Harriss1
Globe Business Media Group
Group Managing Director
The Evolution of Legal Publishing: Who Will Survive?
What does the future hold for the legal market and the legal publishing sector?
Will a Korean client 3D-print a chip holding all U.S. case law to plug directly into her neural pathway in
a William Gibson-esque 2030?
Will a technology giant such as Google have applied artificial intelligence to merger control regulations
worldwide, enabling companies to bypass both law firms and legal publishers?
Perhaps cohorts of micro-bloggers will replace the legal publishing behemoths by delivering niche content
to defined audiences funded as law firm marketing exercises, or by micro-revenue streams from Taboola and
Google ads?
The sharing economy may take hold, establishing one or many legal wikis that leave publishers
disintermediated.
Will lawyers be automated out of existence? Or will it all still just be about getting the right content to the
right people at the right time?
Technology — Friend or Foe?
With the application of technology, the publishing industry as a whole is undergoing its biggest revolution
since Gutenberg. At the same time, technology, process engineering, and commercial pressures are changing the
legal services market beyond recognition. Sitting at the nexus of these two industries, legal publishing has changed
dramatically in the last decade and the pace of that change is only set to increase.
Legal publishing is just one trade vertical. Lessons learned in other sectors, such as medical or tax, will
be transferred. Major technological developments in another area, when applied to law, may be more powerful
than anything yet developed in the legal space.
Legal publishers used to sell textbooks or standard forms in loose-leaf volumes; now users complete
online forms about transactions that generate a full suite of documents instantly, while algorithms compare
documents in order to look for unusual language. Like many of their mainstream counterparts, legal publishers
are reinventing themselves as media technology businesses.
A number of start-ups are challenging the existing models of both law firms and publishers. One of their
key philosophies is that knowledge is a commodity, and that it is the management of knowledge — and in
particular, the application of technology to it — that creates powerful digital products. As the big data explosion
continues at an incredible pace, data scientists look set to be in huge demand at publishers as they present improved
ways to analyze, visualize, and curate this endless stream of information.
The bountiful supply of (free) basic legal information and know-how is changing not only how lawyers
consume information, but also what they consume.
Perhaps the biggest threat to some publishers comes from technologies that can process vast quantities of
information and apply advanced technology to analyze and curate it.
CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, is a good example of the kind of initiative that will
drive change in the legal technology marketplace. As they put it: “What happens when you combine legal code
1 Tony Harriss is co-founder and Group Managing Director of Globe Business Media Group. Established in 1996, Globe is a business-to-business content
and connections company, specializing in the legal and intellectual property markets worldwide. It produces market-leading information, data, networking,
software, and marketing services for lawyers, C-suite executives, and HR professionals, and their organizations, globally.
www.GlobeBMG.com
138
Tony Harriss1
Globe Business Media Group
Group Managing Director
The Evolution of Legal Publishing: Who Will Survive?
What does the future hold for the legal market and the legal publishing sector?
Will a Korean client 3D-print a chip holding all U.S. case law to plug directly into her neural pathway in
a William Gibson-esque 2030?
Will a technology giant such as Google have applied artificial intelligence to merger control regulations
worldwide, enabling companies to bypass both law firms and legal publishers?
Perhaps cohorts of micro-bloggers will replace the legal publishing behemoths by delivering niche content
to defined audiences funded as law firm marketing exercises, or by micro-revenue streams from Taboola and
Google ads?
The sharing economy may take hold, establishing one or many legal wikis that leave publishers
disintermediated.
Will lawyers be automated out of existence? Or will it all still just be about getting the right content to the
right people at the right time?
Technology — Friend or Foe?
With the application of technology, the publishing industry as a whole is undergoing its biggest revolution
since Gutenberg. At the same time, technology, process engineering, and commercial pressures are changing the
legal services market beyond recognition. Sitting at the nexus of these two industries, legal publishing has changed
dramatically in the last decade and the pace of that change is only set to increase.
Legal publishing is just one trade vertical. Lessons learned in other sectors, such as medical or tax, will
be transferred. Major technological developments in another area, when applied to law, may be more powerful
than anything yet developed in the legal space.
Legal publishers used to sell textbooks or standard forms in loose-leaf volumes; now users complete
online forms about transactions that generate a full suite of documents instantly, while algorithms compare
documents in order to look for unusual language. Like many of their mainstream counterparts, legal publishers
are reinventing themselves as media technology businesses.
A number of start-ups are challenging the existing models of both law firms and publishers. One of their
key philosophies is that knowledge is a commodity, and that it is the management of knowledge — and in
particular, the application of technology to it — that creates powerful digital products. As the big data explosion
continues at an incredible pace, data scientists look set to be in huge demand at publishers as they present improved
ways to analyze, visualize, and curate this endless stream of information.
The bountiful supply of (free) basic legal information and know-how is changing not only how lawyers
consume information, but also what they consume.
Perhaps the biggest threat to some publishers comes from technologies that can process vast quantities of
information and apply advanced technology to analyze and curate it.
CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, is a good example of the kind of initiative that will
drive change in the legal technology marketplace. As they put it: “What happens when you combine legal code
1 Tony Harriss is co-founder and Group Managing Director of Globe Business Media Group. Established in 1996, Globe is a business-to-business content
and connections company, specializing in the legal and intellectual property markets worldwide. It produces market-leading information, data, networking,
software, and marketing services for lawyers, C-suite executives, and HR professionals, and their organizations, globally.
www.GlobeBMG.com
138
