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Leaders in Legal Business
and computer code?”2 One business to have emerged from the stable is Ravel Law,3 which illustrates how tech-
powered disruptors can challenge the publishing incumbents. Seeing that cases themselves are just a commodity,
Ravel applies analytics and visualizations to the connections between cases, facilitating a more intelligent
approach to legal research.
User Experience
Customers experience powerful and evolving user interfaces every day. They shop online, read the news
on a tablet, watch TED Talks, connect with others on LinkedIn, and use countless apps to solve small problems.
All of these services combine a customizable experience with some degree of automatic tailoring. Customers are
also experiencing the benefits of collaboration through wikis, forums, and listservs; Wikipedia seemed to replace
the Encyclopedia Britannica as the default general knowledge bank almost overnight. Publishers will seek to
leverage the potential of crowdsourcing opinions and information.
Users bring expectations from those experiences with them to legal publishing. Legal publishers will thus
need to provide interactive, granular, and tailored experiences.
The effects of diversified distribution and content are also making themselves felt in the legal sector. Law
firms large and small have seized on digital content marketing as the best way to promote themselves to clients
and prospects. Blogging platforms, along with content discovery and enrichment tools, are enabling them to
publish quickly and effectively on niche topics. Thus far, reliance on word of mouth and social media to grow
audiences is limiting their reach, and they are still turning to publishers to tap their intended audience.
The larger publishers with more content and datasets of primary sources will respond with further attempts
to become the place to do legal research, slicing and dicing, repurposing, and tailoring their content to meet the
needs of as many niche audiences as possible.
But technology is a double-edged sword for publishing companies, representing as much threat as
opportunity. The combination of more focused search and abundant free resources online means that, for many
lawyers, Google is their starting point for research.
One of the best examples of a publishing model being blindsided by changes in the digital world is
Martindale-Hubbell.
Factors Driving Change
Rapid change in the legal market.
Continuing globalization of business and regulation.
Big data explosion.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Customer expectations driven by digital experiences.
Increased and potential competition from outside the sector.
Changes in the Legal Market
As discussed elsewhere in this book, the role of the lawyer is inexorably moving toward that of a business
advisor, and further away from document processing and painstaking legal research. Likewise, the type of
information and training that lawyers require will change. Law firms are under pressure to charge fees that reflect
the value added and avoid reinventing the wheel.
As the disaggregation or unbundling of legal processes, long predicted by Professor Richard Susskind,
becomes a reality, publishers are seeing clear opportunities to become integrated in that workflow and provide
2 CODEX, http://codex.stanford.edu/ (last visited March 14, 2015).
3 RAVEL, https://www.ravellaw.com/ (last visited March 14, 2015).
139
and computer code?”2 One business to have emerged from the stable is Ravel Law,3 which illustrates how tech-
powered disruptors can challenge the publishing incumbents. Seeing that cases themselves are just a commodity,
Ravel applies analytics and visualizations to the connections between cases, facilitating a more intelligent
approach to legal research.
User Experience
Customers experience powerful and evolving user interfaces every day. They shop online, read the news
on a tablet, watch TED Talks, connect with others on LinkedIn, and use countless apps to solve small problems.
All of these services combine a customizable experience with some degree of automatic tailoring. Customers are
also experiencing the benefits of collaboration through wikis, forums, and listservs; Wikipedia seemed to replace
the Encyclopedia Britannica as the default general knowledge bank almost overnight. Publishers will seek to
leverage the potential of crowdsourcing opinions and information.
Users bring expectations from those experiences with them to legal publishing. Legal publishers will thus
need to provide interactive, granular, and tailored experiences.
The effects of diversified distribution and content are also making themselves felt in the legal sector. Law
firms large and small have seized on digital content marketing as the best way to promote themselves to clients
and prospects. Blogging platforms, along with content discovery and enrichment tools, are enabling them to
publish quickly and effectively on niche topics. Thus far, reliance on word of mouth and social media to grow
audiences is limiting their reach, and they are still turning to publishers to tap their intended audience.
The larger publishers with more content and datasets of primary sources will respond with further attempts
to become the place to do legal research, slicing and dicing, repurposing, and tailoring their content to meet the
needs of as many niche audiences as possible.
But technology is a double-edged sword for publishing companies, representing as much threat as
opportunity. The combination of more focused search and abundant free resources online means that, for many
lawyers, Google is their starting point for research.
One of the best examples of a publishing model being blindsided by changes in the digital world is
Martindale-Hubbell.
Factors Driving Change
Rapid change in the legal market.
Continuing globalization of business and regulation.
Big data explosion.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Customer expectations driven by digital experiences.
Increased and potential competition from outside the sector.
Changes in the Legal Market
As discussed elsewhere in this book, the role of the lawyer is inexorably moving toward that of a business
advisor, and further away from document processing and painstaking legal research. Likewise, the type of
information and training that lawyers require will change. Law firms are under pressure to charge fees that reflect
the value added and avoid reinventing the wheel.
As the disaggregation or unbundling of legal processes, long predicted by Professor Richard Susskind,
becomes a reality, publishers are seeing clear opportunities to become integrated in that workflow and provide
2 CODEX, http://codex.stanford.edu/ (last visited March 14, 2015).
3 RAVEL, https://www.ravellaw.com/ (last visited March 14, 2015).
139
