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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 content at the point of need. Exactly how high up the value chain they sit
will depend in large part on how successful they are in applying technology to their content.
One of the best examples of a publisher succeeding by playing a specific role at a key stage
of the legal process workflow is Practical Law.4 It identified major inefficiencies around the
production and maintenance of what is essentially generic content, ranging from current awareness
to standard contract templates.
By the turn of the millennium, U.K. business law firms had streamlined their processes by
employing non-fee earning lawyers to work on their own knowledge management as professional
support lawyers (PSLs). This was one of the early examples of firms breaking down their processes
and identifying areas that could be handled more efficiently. Librarians and PSLs were charged
with providing front-line lawyers with databanks of content that they could use in their practice.
Fee earners were given basic resources to which they could apply their skill and experience to add
value — for example, in negotiating an agreement rather than drafting it from scratch.
What Practical Law saw then was that there was little difference in much of the output of
PSLs among firms. By hiring, replicating, and in some ways improving what these PSLs did, it
was able to produce digital products that became integrated in clients’ workflow in a way that
made them nearly indispensable.
Without the confluence of process reengineering and technological advances, this would
not have been possible.
Publishers like Practical Law, which bring real efficiencies to the table, sit squarely with
the growing band of disruptors that are helping to drive change in the legal market (e.g., new model
law firms such as Axiom Law,5 legal process outsourcers (LPOs), and the plethora of e-discovery
providers).
As the legal market evolves and the players find their places on the value chain, there will
inevitably be competitive tensions between publishers and their largest clients: law firms.
Publishers providing powerful but easy-to-use research platforms or automated suites of contracts
4 PRACTICAL LAW, http://us.practicallaw.com.
5 AXIOM LAW, http://www.axiomlaw.com.
206
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 content at the point of need. Exactly how high up the value chain they sit
will depend in large part on how successful they are in applying technology to their content.
One of the best examples of a publisher succeeding by playing a specific role at a key stage
of the legal process workflow is Practical Law.4 It identified major inefficiencies around the
production and maintenance of what is essentially generic content, ranging from current awareness
to standard contract templates.
By the turn of the millennium, U.K. business law firms had streamlined their processes by
employing non-fee earning lawyers to work on their own knowledge management as professional
support lawyers (PSLs). This was one of the early examples of firms breaking down their processes
and identifying areas that could be handled more efficiently. Librarians and PSLs were charged
with providing front-line lawyers with databanks of content that they could use in their practice.
Fee earners were given basic resources to which they could apply their skill and experience to add
value — for example, in negotiating an agreement rather than drafting it from scratch.
What Practical Law saw then was that there was little difference in much of the output of
PSLs among firms. By hiring, replicating, and in some ways improving what these PSLs did, it
was able to produce digital products that became integrated in clients’ workflow in a way that
made them nearly indispensable.
Without the confluence of process reengineering and technological advances, this would
not have been possible.
Publishers like Practical Law, which bring real efficiencies to the table, sit squarely with
the growing band of disruptors that are helping to drive change in the legal market (e.g., new model
law firms such as Axiom Law,5 legal process outsourcers (LPOs), and the plethora of e-discovery
providers).
As the legal market evolves and the players find their places on the value chain, there will
inevitably be competitive tensions between publishers and their largest clients: law firms.
Publishers providing powerful but easy-to-use research platforms or automated suites of contracts
4 PRACTICAL LAW, http://us.practicallaw.com.
5 AXIOM LAW, http://www.axiomlaw.com.
206
