Dewey B Strategic

Closing the Book on The Encyclopaedia Britannica: Humorist AJ Jacobs "Sits Shiva" (on a stack of Encyclopaedia)

2012-03-15T01:22:00.000-04:00

EB First Edition from Wikipedia Commons

A story in the New York Times today, Britannica is Reduced to a Click" reported that The Encyclopaedia Britannica, one of the "grand dames" of the library reference shelf was going completely digital. After 244 years the publisher would stop printing the 129 pound, 32 volume set. The print EB was a victim of both technology and Wikipedia, the "crowd sourced" upstart which boasts 4 million English language articles.

The EB was no doubt, my trusted ally in completing dozens of long forgotten homework projects, but it was also the source of my first encounter with the fallibility of reference books. In the mid 1960's I went to a friend's house to witness the unpacking of the family's personal set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. I selected the volume containing the only topic about which I considered myself a true expert... "The Beatles." I found the right page and to my horror confronted a reference to the "Fab Four" as The Beetles! This no doubt explains my continuing professional recommendation that researchers perform fact checking, by consulting multiple sources.

My second thought was about A.J. Jacobs the author of the Know it All --- a book about his personal adventures reading all 44 million words in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. AJ was the guest speaker at the 2011 PLL lunch and made the audience of private law librarians roar with laughter at the deep vein of serendipitous discoveries he mined from the 4 pound tomes. I wondered how AJ would have approached reading the digital EB in a "pre-iPad " world. I imagined AJ.... strolling into an IRT subway car with a laptop computer strapped to himself like an accordion or pushing a desktop computer in a shopping cart while strolling down Broadway. So I checked in with AJ tonight and he reported that he was "sitting shiva"... on a stack of encyclopedia. He has also posted a response to the demise of Encyclopedia Britannica in print on the NY Times "Room for Debate" web page. Enjoy!

Class Action Suit Filed Against Lexis and Westlaw for Copyright Infringement

2012-02-22T20:12:00.000-05:00

A class action lawsuit (12 CV 1340) was filed in the Southern District of New York today by Edward White and Kenneth Elan and their respective law firms against West Publishing dba West and Reed Elsevier dba Lexis.I know you are thinking: law review articles, chapters of legal treatises, a book of lawyer jokes,... poetry for lawyers...Wrong. The plaintiffs are claiming copyright in the legal briefs, including things like witness lists and jury instructions which were submitted to courts.

Lexis and Westlaw have been collecting publicly filed briefs and putting them online for years now. The plaintiffs claim that by copying the publicly filed briefs into their databases and making them searchable for a fee, Lexis and Westlaw are infringing their copyrights.

Call me a cynic but aren't a huge chunk of the legal opinions written in this country essentially "derivative works" based on other peoples arguments and analysis? Don't judges (or their clerks) take whole paragraphs from briefs and drop them into opinions? Don't lawyer's draft briefs selecting text from judicial opinions and legal memoranda?

Is the whole system of common law precedent to be pulled from Lexis and Westlaw and put through a textual analysis to see who had the first "original expression" of various issues?

Wait I have a better idea, Lexis and Westlaw can take the plaintiff's briefs and run them through a textual analysis - the kind they use to detect plagiarism in college term papers. It will be interesting to see where the plaintiff's may have derived their briefs from.

Thanks to Patricia Barbone for tipping me off to this filing.

"No Soup For You!" Are Legal Publishers Using A Seinfeld Episode as a Business Strategy?

2012-02-15T03:00:00.004-05:00

Why are legal publishers using the “Seinfeld Soupman strategy” of banishing customers who "opt out" of firmwide contracts rather than maintaining relationships on which to build future good will and market share?

Buy the t-shirt at Gil's Blog.com

Lexis, ThomsonReuters and Wolters Kluwer CCH have been edging toward increasingly desperate measures in at attempt to coerce the continuation of firmwide contracts rather than listening for the new opportunities in the marketplace.

Greg Lambert's 3 Geeks post reported several weeks ago that Westlaw will end "pay as you go" access. TR Ending Legal Pay as You Go. Lexis ended "pay as you go" access several years ago, but had allowed access by credit card until mid 2011. The Lexis "rationale" for shutting down access to Lexis by Credit Card.is "explained" in an hilariously incomprehensible posting on their website. Lexis had also stopped selling the digital Matthew Bender treatise library in order to drive use onto the Lexis platform. Wolter’s Kluwer stopped allowing firms to purchase individual passwords to online products several years ago in order to force everyone into more lucrative, large firmwide contracts.

Take Note Bloomberg BNA
The only major publisher who continued to provide truly customized product selections was BNA, which allowed firms to have a mix of firmwide licenses and limited user licenses for individual products based on the firm’s need. I urge Bloomberg/BNA to allow this type of custom licensing to continue for non-Bloomberg Law subscribers. (Bloomberg Law subscribers will have access to all digital BNA products without needing separate licenses.)

What’s Wrong with Half a Loaf?

Would it be so terrible for the online vendors to rethink the “firmwide” approach to "flat fee" contracts? Can no one think of an innovative middle ground?

Why not acknowledge that the market place had fundamentally changed? Cost recovery for online research is declining and budgets are tightening. As law firms get larger and the array of practice and industry groups expand, selling customized slices of online content will become ever more appealing and may be the only way multiple vendors can continue to coexist in large firms.

Let’s face it, today’s mega firm may have absorbed the equivalent of 6 smaller firms, so why not regain some of that lost market share by selling to a few practice groups or the equivalent of 2 or 3 small firms if the firm doesn't want a firmwide contract?

The Myth of Indispensability

The fact is, that large publishers appear to be taking their own marketing pieces much too seriously. Or at least they want to perpetuate the myth that lawyers can't effectively practice law without their products. There are already a number of mid-sized firms that have moved to “sole source” relationships with either Lexis or Westlaw and reports from the field indicate that they are doing just fine. An increasing number of firms have given up the CCH Tax platform in favor of the less expensive RIA Checkpoint product. Losing direct access to a small subset of content, may be overcome with a little extra research effort or the assistance of the research staff, but the savings have completely offset the inconvenience.

There are lawyers who conjure apocalyptic consequences at the thought of losing their favorite resource. I suspect that this is generational characteristic.

Older lawyers who started out conducting legal research in print treatises and then moved online tend to have a stronger sense of a legal publisher’s brand and the reputation of specific products which I don’t see in the post-Google generation of lawyers.

Can “Tying Arrangements” Be Far Behind?

The trajectory of current practices suggests that legal publishers are inching toward "tying arrangements" in order to maintain revenue and force law firms to keep unwanted content, products or licenses that are not aligned with the firm's needs.

Right now, no major vendor limits the sale of print materials or ebooks to online subscribers, but this strategy may lie along the ’desperation trajectory” that is emerging in the marketplace.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines a "tying arrangement "as “ A seller's agreement to sell one product or service only if the buyer also buys a different product or service; a seller's refusal to sell one product or service unless the buyer also buys a different product or service. • The product or service that the buyer wants to buy is known as the tying product or tying service; the different product or service that the seller insists on selling is known as the tied product or tied service. Tying arrangements may be illegal under the Sherman or Clayton Act if their effect is too anti competitive.”

Law firms need to be able to select their own mix of "best of breed" sources to support their practices, at a cost that is calibrated to their own budgets and the products' perceived value. Any attempt to further restrict law firms choices for content and format is likely to backfire and will certainly not demonstrate the creativity and nimbleness of thought demanded by the new "law firm economics."

Wake Up -- This is an Opportunity and Not the Threat That You Think It Is

Perhaps the day of the “monolithic service provider” --"being all things to all practice groups” is waning. Maybe firms are getting too large and too complex and a more flexible set of assumptions will be the key strategy for legal publishers to survive the upcoming wave of “sole provider wars.”

Digging a moat around your products and pulling up the drawbridge will only further isolate publishers from the marketplace they purport to be serving.

Welcome to Bloomberg Law: No Deals No Discounts No Apology

2012-02-10T08:13:00.004-05:00

Almost a modern day parody of Henry Ford's color palette for the Model T ("You can have any color as long as it's black.") Bloomberg is entering the legal marketplace with monochromatic contract as in, "You can have any contract you want as long as it's Bloomberg's standard contract."

So what's the Upside?

In exchange for a rigid pricing system you get transparent and predictable pricing, no excluded charges, nothing to explain to clients and a product you can launch and leave open on your desktop as a reference portal to be used as needed throughout the day.You also get the Bloomberg track record of contrarian innovation and successful disruption as a late market entrant into the financial services data and news media markets.

And Yet...

There is palpable skepticism in the law library community regarding Bloomberg's pricing claims for Bloomberg Law. After all, hadn't we been promised "flat fee" contracts before? But there was always "a rub" --- new content and or new functionality that became the "cash cow" for driving profits for the Lexis and Westlaw. It seemed that no matter how well you negotiated your contract - within a few months there would be new surprises. Content from a 3rd party vendor or a new function link appeared which triggered unanticipated charges.

The legacy of profitability models used by Lexis and Westlaw continually undermined the promises of price predictability

Can the Cycle of Skepticism Be Broken?

Here is the thought pattern: Flat fee contracts lead to increased use. The increased use was then used against the law firm to justify dramatic price increases during he next contract renewal. It is widely believed that the only way to avoid dramatic price increases is to limit use of the "flat fee" contract - thus severely impairing the value of the "flat fee" contract. Why should we believe that Bloomberg will be different?

For a Clue to the Future Look to Bloomberg's Past

In 1982 Mike Bloomberg developed his first financial terminal with a 10 million dollar severance check from Salomon Brothers.

The first Bloomberg terminal was called Market Master. It was a bond math calculator that sold for $995 for a single license. 30 years and 30,000 functions later a single license increased to $1,655. Bloomberg has had predictable increases of about 6% every two years. Bloomberg says that the price increases are used to improve the workflows, data feed, content and functionality. Today Bloomberg has over 30,000 functions and has poured terabytes of business, legal and government news and financial data into the system and none of it is excluded!

A 2007 Fortune article Bloomberg's Money Machine described Blooomberg's ever growing content:

"Bloomberg just kept adding more stuff," which is like saying the Pilgrims were followed by many more immigrants. From its start in bonds, Bloomberg gradually poured in data and analytics on commodities, equities, foreign securities of all kinds, energy, mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, mutual funds, real estate, hedge funds, foreign exchange. Its oceans of information today include earnings estimates, SEC filings, merger and acquisition facts, legal documents and data on 1.3 million people"

Yes BNA Is Included at No Additional Cost

Bloomberg appears to be staying true to the business model and is including acquisitions both big and small in Bloomberg Law at no additional cost. When they bought Business Week, it was fully integrated. Now Bloomberg is telling subscribers that as soon as all of the BNA material including all newsletters,e.g. the pricey "Daily Report for Executives" and all BNA research platforms such as the Intellectual Property Library are converted, all BNA content -- including content not previously subscribed to will be available at no additional cost to the Bloomberg Law subscribers.

Will the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times Be Next

Rumors of Bloomberg's purchase of the Financial Times have been denied on both sides. Speculation swirls around the competition for access to the Wall Street Journal when the LexisNexis exclusive deal ends in the next 18 to 24 months. . Last week Lex Fenwick, a former Bloomberg CEO became CEO of Dow Jones which owns the Wall Street Journal. One can only assume he and Dan Doctoroff, the current President and CEO of Bloomberg have each other on "speedial."

Against the Grain not Against the Odds

An April 2011 article in Wall Street Technology entitled "Inside Bloomberg" describes Bloomberg's response to the recent recession this way: "when most of the industry was hunkering down, slashing costs and laying off workers Bloomberg did what it often does, it tacked the other way and began the biggest period of growth it has ever seen, in terms of employees and product development." One quarter of Bloomberg's 12,000 employees are considered research and development staff.

This presents a fairly stark contrast to Bloomberg's well established rivals. From Westlaw we have seen layoffs and contractions in client support. From Lexis we have seen repeated delays in the rollout of its new Lexis Advance product. Add to this, the recent rumors that both Westlaw and LexisNexis might be sold by their respective owners ThomsonReuters and Reed Elsevier. If you were a "betting man" where would you put your money?

Bloomberg's Secret Value Strategy.

One of Bloomberg's strategies on the business terminal side has been to erode dependence on other products. In educating their existing terminal customers on even a few more of the 30,000 functions they hope to wean them off other products. This has been called "Bloomberg Value Solutions." The strategy isn't designed to sell you more, but to help you save money.

What would this strategy mean in the legal market?

For the past decade legal information centers have been subscribing to an increasing variety of specialized databases to support finance and securities practices. IP practices require all manner of scientific and technical data. Bloomberg with its deep well of financial data could well pose a value strategy which would eliminate products such as Capital IQ, Mergermarket, Bureau van Dijk, Hoovers. It's $990 Million acquisition of BNA could offer a "value strategy" aimed at CCH and Law 360. Large firms subscribe to hundreds of specialized newsletters, (covering everything from aviation to zoning). If Bloomberg goes shopping or decides to compete in these specialty areas, this could help firms consolidate the roster of stand-alone products with their attendant raft of specialized headaches including: idiosyncratic licensing, variant publishing formats and password management.

Winning The Terminal Wars

A 1998 article in Investment News described Michael Bloomberg's 1981 product launch as entering a "field of "napping giants" when he created a new financial service that bore his name and "changed the standard of the industry."

A 1997 New York Times story "Traders want some Space Too" seemed to be suggesting that Bloomberg's closed data system would be doomed by the emergence of the internet. To make matters worse, Bloomberg was 3rd entrant into a field dominated by Reuters and Telerate/Dow Jones. How wrong they were! Telerate's most recent sales are listed at $664M, while Bloomberg's are estimated to be $7 billion.

Dow Jones and Reuters had hundred year jump on Bloomberg and yet, Bloomberg has thrashed Dow Jones Telerate into insignificance and today Bloomberg rivals Reuters' share of the financial data market.

Can Bloomberg Have Comparable Success in the Legal market?

Since law firms are essentially information businesses, I have spent my career trying to harness and integrate the multidisciplinary resources needed to support the highly competitive and time sensitive information needs of lawyers. The genius of Bloomberg has been to continually integrate new streams of data that inform and transform the core data sets. Bloomberg started with financial data and built its news service to enhance the contextual value and analysis of that data.

One has to assume that Bloomberg will take a similar approach in redefining the legal information industry. As clients are demanding that lawyers not only understand the law but also understand their business challenges and related industry trends, Bloomberg's interweaving of law and business may be the very thing that every partner will want and perhaps need on their desktop n order to thrive as a rainmaker.

Sources:
Bloomberg's Plan for World Domination
Bloomberg company history
Bloomberg by the numbers
At Bloomberg, A modest Strategy to Rule the World.

See Related Blogposts::
Is Lexis the Next Acquisition for Bloomberg
Bloomberg Get's BNA's Intellectual Capital in the Capitol.
Bloomberg Law Takes on the Titans: An Interview With Lou Andriozzi
The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Training

Life After Leverage: New Staffing Trends in Law Firms

2012-01-24T00:35:00.002-05:00

Firms have been deleveraging (reducing the ratio of associates to partners) for the past decade in response to client pressure to reduce costs. Although the economy is recovering, deleveraging is expected to continue to impact law firm staffing for the foreseeable future.

Life After Leverage ALM Legal Intelligence

American Lawyer Legal Intelligence recently released a new report "Life after Leverage: New Models of Law Firm Staffing." The report was based on a survey of Am Law 200 partners, associates and paralegals in November 2011

Key findings outlined in the report include:

1. The deleveraging trend will continue. Partners have been doing more work relative to associates and this is expected to continue over the next 3 years.

2. Firms are likely to have 2 tiers of non-equity partners and 2 tiers of associates. Non-equity partners will be divided into permanent and temporary (with a shot at equity partnership). Associates will also have two tiers permanent or career associates and partner track associates.

3.Paralegals will become more important. As client pressures continue, paralegals who bill at lower rates will take over an increased proportion of associate work.

4. Law Firms and Legal Departments will increase their use of outsourced services. Routine work will go to LPOs. More complex work will be sent to lawyer staffing firms who will provide highly qualified lawyers for more complex project based work.

5. Performance Measurement for both partners and associates is of increasing importance. Performance will not only measure billable hours, but also business development skills and industry expertise.

6. Laterals Rule. A law firm's reputation has become less important to clients who are now increasingly searching for expertise. The rivalry for partners with expertise is reshaping the marketplace.

Implications for Information Professionals. Librarians and information professionals are not mentioned in this survey. However it is easy to recognize how they could present comparable, if not greater benefits than paralegals in the new leverage models. Librarians have specialized research skills which can be harnessed to improve efficiency of research assignments and projects. As clients focus on the value of expertise, firms should not overlook the value of in house research expertise. Many law librarians hold JD degrees but bill at lower rates than associates. As physical libraries shrink - the proportion of client support work performed by library and research staff will increase. The transformation of libraries will accelerate the transformation of librarians into specialized research experts who are tightly aligned with practice groups* where they will gain visibility and more easily be assigned to "leverage enhancing" projects.

*See: Cindy Adams recent blog post on "embedding" library staff at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog post Out of Sight Out of Mind

Is Lexis the Next Acquisition for Bloomberg?

2012-01-12T00:33:00.006-05:00

Today, Bernstein Research. released a report: Reed Elsevier: Voices Calling for Asset Divestitures Should Grow Louder, and Perhaps Fall on Deaf Ears which includes some significant implications for the legal publishing marketplace. The report recommends that Reed Elsevier divest some units including LexisNexis and suggests by implication that Bloomberg Law is standing by and ready to purchase those assets.

The report also notes that interviews with U.S. law librarians were a key source used in the report.

The report bluntly describes the LexisNexis problems as” intractable.”

These problems include:

1. Reed Elsevier’s lack of investment in core legal content has hurt Lexis’s competitive position.

2. Although the legal industry is slowly recovering from the 2008 downturn, law firms have not fully recovered and Lexis is currently signing renewals at deep discounts.

3. LexisNexis’ recent product innovations have lagged significantly behind those of ThomsonReuters. WestlawNext was released about a year ahead of LexisAdvance.

4. Bloomberg Law has become a real competitor. Acquisition of the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) demonstrated both Bloomberg’s seriousness in claiming a stake in the legal market and the fact that Bloomberg has a lot of cash to do it.

Lexis strategies briefly noted in the report:

1. They plan to charge for future releases of Lexis Advance. This idea will not be cheered by the subscriber base.

2. Taking a more modular approach to new products by targeting specific types of users and practice areas. I see little evidence of this in the large firm market. The report doesn’t explain what it means – but I think I speak for others on the consumer side of the market when I say a modular approach. would be very appealing to many “soon to be ex-customers.” Lexis and other legal publishers need to recognize that it’s time to let customer’s choose the modules of content which they need. The market has shrunk, law firms are focused on cost control and redundant content is an easy target. Hunkering down in the delusion that the "gravy train" of the 90’s is pulling back into the station is likely to backfire and accelerate outright cancellations.

The Report’s Recommendation

Reed Elsevier should stop trying to wish away Bloomberg and consider selling off LexisNexis while it still has some value.

Although Reed Elsevier outperformed the market in 2012, Bernstein report indicates that there will be continued shareholder pressure to dispose of assets. Management may be nearing the point of considering this option.

What the report does not say: Law firms remain focused on cutting expenses and redundant content is rampant in the many "iconic" digital products traditionally subscribed to by large law firms. Law firms are beginning to do the math and recognize that they are paying “a king’s ransom” for the marginal benefits of maintaining access to a small subset of truly unique content offered by each vendor. The retrenchment in the legal industry means that clients are less willing to pay for online research. The decline and perhaps impending abolition of cost recovery means that there will be less tolerance for the support of two major vendors. Oh wait a minute, there are now 3 major vendors: Lexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg. I hear the sound of some large contracts "falling off the table."

Implications for Potential Bloomberg Subscribers. One of the most appealing distinctions of the Bloomberg Law subscription is the “all in” approach. Unlike Lexis and Westlaw contracts which traditionally drove revenue and enhanced cost variability by “excluding” new content and functionality from existing contracts, Bloomberg will take the opposite approach and enhance predictability. They have repeatedly stated that they will include all new content and functionality in existing subscriber agreements at no additional charge. This means that current existing Bloomberg Law subscribers will not have to pay extra to get access to BNA content. By implication in a hypothetical purchase of Lexis, all Lexis would be absorbed in the same way.

Four Imperatives For for 2012: The Legal Information Professional's Perspective

2011-12-21T01:17:00.006-05:00

In today's Strategic Legal Technology, my friend and former colleague Ron Friedmann posted a Open Letter to BigLaw Managing Partners: Four Imperatives for 2012 and Beyond

Here is my reinterpretation of Ron's recommendations for thriving the "new normal" which includes both mandates and opportunities for information professionals ...with some additional insights for Managing Partners.

1. Improve value by working more effectively. Bring in your research experts - early and often.

Consider using librarians as research project managers to control cost and reduce time and manpower invested in complex research projects. While partners bewail the cost and the inefficiencies of associates research skills, most firms have not leveraged the research skills of the research staff as a strategic process management component of their AFA strategy .
As clients demand better value, lawyers need to become more efficient. Librarians and information professionals routinely deliver more value than they are credited for.

2. Diagnose and Improve your Business Operations

Any library Director who has not begun to plan for streamlining and centralization of processes is dangerously behind the curve or "tone deaf" to the drumbeat of the market place. Do not wait to be asked to streamline - by then it may be too late. Law firm partners should also consider how the well honed expertise of research professionals, using highly specialized resources can analyse complex research problems and deliver analytical reports on a range of issues from companies or industries to securities trading histories to dossiers on expert witnesses. These same projects which a librarian can deliver quickly, could take days, if assigned to paralegals or project assistants that lack specialized skills and training.

Research and knowledge staff are also at the forefront of building intranet based "gadgets" and "self service" tools which allow anyone at the firm to quickly retrieve dockets, cases, patents, statutes, in one click without any specialized research training and without incurring client charges. All of these activities contribute to the streamlining of headcount which would have been required in more labor intensive approaches which prevail in the absence of specialized research expertise and guidance.

3. Engage Your Clients

This is my personal favorite on this list. "... to truly engage clients your lawyers need to know their business. Partners must read the news ...about their business and legal problems." Librarians have been out in front of this one too. Information professionals are investigating the next generation of monitoring services Linex, Attensa, Manzama, Ozmosys "Open Alerts" which go well beyond looking for company names in news stories but can can aggregate, generate trending reports, word clouds and other graphical reports for heightening your expertise on a client's "pain points" and opportunities.

4. Adopt Metrics and Formal Governance Mechanisms

For me the "holy grail" of strategic information management would involve having firmwide metrics on information seeking activities undertaken by lawyers and staff in order to analyze opportunities for streamlining workflow and to optimize the matching of research activities with staff skill sets or identifying training or resource needs to improve productivity.

Information professionals should continue to improve the collection and analysis of research staff activities by implementing research "help desk" applications which will not only improve workflow but also provide vital data on staff activities which can be used for developing benchmarks for processes and the measurement of the ever elusive "value" metric. The measurement of resource value can be tackled with the implementation of bar-coding of print resources to measure utilization by lawyers. Although Onelog ,Research Monitor and Lookup Precision have offered many firms substantial benefits in measuring utilization of digital resources within the firm's network, these products will have to be upgraded to address the growing population of "un-tethered" resources, As lawyers migrate to portable libraries and ebooks on I-pads, tablets and smart phones, the current generation of monitoring tools may hit a wall but the need for utilization metrics will not.

"It Takes a Team"

Ron saved the best for last. He concluded his post with a recommendation that law firms drop use of the term "non-lawyer." A phase so pervasive that frankly until this moment I had not noticed the absurdity of defining about half of the average law firm population in terms of what they "are not." Other professional services organizations such as consulting firms are decades ahead of law firms in recognizing the importance of other professionals in building a cohesive client support team. Since the practice of law is an information intensive profession which requires effective research and knowledge management skills, the "new normal" should create new opportunities for information professionals to have enhanced and important new roles on client teams and in modeling innovative value enhancing strategies.

Related Posts: Centralization as a Value Strategy

The Wolters Kluwer/Reed Elsevier Merger That Wasn't: An Insider's History

2011-12-06T23:37:00.001-05:00

Since thirteen or fourteen years is an eternity in the world of business cycles, here is a bit of history for the young 'uns about an earlier merger/purchase. In 1998, at about the time of the Frankfurt Book Fair (early-mid October), Wolters Kluwer and Reed Elsevier announced a merger. This was pretty shocking news to our profession, and tons of ink were spilled on the subject. The merger eventually fell apart. The official story was that competition law considerations, particularly in Europe (Mario Monti was just taking charge of that particular EU bureaucracy, and as any of you who may be Microsoft shareholders know, he was tough tough tough), scuttled the merger. The informal chat was that the finances, especially given the volatility of the respective stock prices, could not be made to work. Your correspondent is unable to say with any authority how much truth there may have been to that.

The major impact that the merger announcement had on the U.S. legal publishing industry is that it sent Times Mirror, owner of Matthew Bender (where I worked at the time), into deliberations. Times Mirror was a publicly-held company largely controlled by the Chandler family, and the thinking went, "Even if this particular merger does not work, there will be others, and we shall sit here with one little legal publishing company, Matthew Bender, facing huge combines, and it will not survive." Thus it was that five months later the entire, and I mean entire, NY-based Matthew Bender workforce gathered in a movie theater on East 34th Street at 3:00 P.M. to hear the announcement that Times Mirror was seeking a buyer for Matthew Bender. We were held in the movie theater (closest to cops-and-robbers, or SEC enforcement, most of us ever got) until the stock market had closed for the day and the announcement had been made to the public.

The following months were a period of uncertainty but not much mystery. A year earlier, Times Mirror and Reed Elsevier had jointly acquired the Shepherd’s citation service from McGraw Hill through a product swap and partnership agreement, and had assigned operational responsibility to, respectively, Matthew Bender and Lexis-Nexis. The “conventional wisdom” had it that Reed Elsevier would be the only suitor for Matthew Bender, which would be folded into Lexis-Nexis. In this case, the conventional wisdom was just right, and it happened as predicted.

In the subsequent decade plus, the pace of consolidation has been frantic, especially compared to that pre-1998 era of tranquility. New providers and platforms are swallowed up as quickly as they show either profit or potential, and even established and very successful (e.g. BNA) entities are not immune. Thus as momentous as the Bender sale to Reed Elsevier was in 1999, it is by today’s measure pretty small potatoes. It also gives those of us who experienced it a new insight on the famous “you think it’s tough now, just wait” sentiment of Aeneas (Aeneid I.203): Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Perhaps someday it will be pleasant to look back even on these times.

Contributed by Guest blogger: Chuck Lowry, legal publishing industry veteran.
Chuck is currently in enterprise sales at Fastcase. The opinions expressed here are those of the author and not his employer.

A Thomson Reuters/Wolters Kluwer Merger: Coming Around Again?

2011-12-05T23:37:00.002-05:00

It's not just the logos that suggest an interesting symmetry!

Today Exane BNP Paribas released an equity research report suggesting that the time may once again, be ripe for a Thomson Reuters/Wolters Kluwer merger. While the US legal publishing units Westlaw and CCH are not the main focus of this speculation, it is clear that the professional publishing units in the US would be ”in play,” in any such combination. The primary driver for Thomson is to reduce it’s exposure to the troubled financial services industry and to generate $450M in cost savings.

Exane BNP Paribas has been speculating on a TR+WK deal for the past 10 years. They retreated from this position in May 2011 based on TR’s announcement that they would dispose of their Healthcare business. TR’s disposal of legal publishing assets in northern European markets also ran counter to such a deal.

Factors Favoring Such a Merger

1. Thomson Reuters Leadership Changes.Exane BNP suggests that TR appears to be “in restructuring
and crisis mode” since they failed to achieve top line growth through some new products including Westlaw Next.. The new CEO Jim Smith with his track record in legal, tax and scientific professional publishing may be better positioned to create new value from asset consolidation than top line growth.

2. Wolters Kluwer May be Ready to be Acquired. Former WK executives suggest that a merger has always been viewed as a good exit strategy if top line growth could not be achieved. CEO and Chairperson Nancy McKinstry has been in the Netherlands for 8 years and has not delivered expected revenue growth.

3. TR’s new IT Platform Designed for Mergers. Since both companies generate over 80% of their revenue from electronic software and services, TR has the infrastructure to allow both companies to consolidate and reduce their IT costs. Apparently TR’s new IT platform was specifically designed to be able to integrate content from acquired companies. I have also heard this comment from insiders at TR. (I whole heartedly agree that at least in the US, WK's technical infrastructure as demonstrated by their "new " Intelliconnect platform would benefit from an IT overhaul). Both companies have been trying to go global and have expanded their sale forces in some new and similar markets. The proposed merger would allow them to reduce duplicative effort in expanding their global footprint.

4. TR’s Balance sheet is Ready. TR's balance sheet has absorbed the Reuters acquisition and the company now has the financial capacity to launch such an acquisition over the next 12 months.

Insights From the Report:

Mergers are a Value Drivers in Professional Publishing. OK we all knew that. Cost savings can be derived by combining IT, marketing as sales costs. The report cited several successful mergers in the past 5 years which lead to cost benefits, Reed Elsevier-Choicepoint, Wolters Kluwer-LexisNexis German, Wiley-Blackwell. Recent cost savings have resulted in 15% savings from the target cost base. We are all waiting to see how the Bloomberg/BNA merger fares - but we may never know since Bloomberg is a private company. But given the firm's pedigree in the financial arena - we will stipulate that they were aware of these benefits and will some day let us know how financially successful the merger was.

Minimum Regulatory Hurdles. In North America, the merged ThomsonReuters-WolterKluwer would have a dominant market position of about 60% share. The tax segment would be particularly vulnerable to regulator scrutiny. The report suggests that at worst 13% of WK’s revenue’s would need to be disposed of.

Enter Bloomberg. The report also suggests that Bloomberg might be standing in the wings to take any divested WK assets since Bloomberg, as we know, is increasing their portfolio of legal, tax and regulatory content.While the newly acquired BNA has some significant editorial content in the tax area, including the Tax Management Portfolios and the Daily Tax Report, they don't have anything comparable to the fully integrated federal and state tax libraries which are the core of the CCH Tax products.

The Thomson Family Track Record. Since the 1930’s the Thomson Family has track record of making opportunistic asset shifts away from troubled markets into more promising segments. In this case, they would be shifting away from financial services and into growing segments of the knowledge economy. Wolters Kluwer would expand Thomson’s global markets.

Post Script
Lexis: The company that was not there. As a veteran observer of decades-long legal publishing rivalries, the most striking "take away" from this report was the absence of name LexisNexis from the discussion. In law library community, there has long been speculation that CCH might be acquired by Reed Elsevier to strengthen and globalize it’s legal and regulatory products. But the Exane PNP report doesn’t even acknowledge LexisNexis as a contender if Wolters Kluwer is "in play." Bloomberg Law, a relative new comer to legal and regulatory publishing and “upstart extraordinare” waltzes into the discussion and drops comfortably in the back up position (for now). One has to wonder if there isn’t a coded message when you play with Bloomberg Law's new marketing slogan and Westlaw's newest product name: “Bloomberg First, WestlawNext.”

The Worst Legal Publishing Merger - Can the Virtuous Circle be Un-broken?

2011-10-21T00:00:00.007-04:00

Years ago I was introduced to the concept of the Virtuous Circle at a meeting with Brian Hall, the first post-Merger CEO of ThomsonWest. In Hall's presentation, "The Virtuous Circle" was all about what I would call the "karma of client relations." Treating your customers fairly will create loyal customers who will spend ever more money and help you to develop better products which deliver ever more value to your customers who will then pay more money.....

The Virtuous Circle in Legal Publishing

According to the Legal Information Buyers Guide and Reference Manual, between 1995 (the year before the Thomson acquisition) and 2008 West's print prices increased 232%. During that same period Lexis/Matthew Bender print prices increased a mere 70%.

The unprecedented and inexplicable print price increases were the overwhelming factor cited in defining the Thomson-West merger as the "worst legal publishing merger." It is hard to understand how anyone at West could "square" the post-merger print pricing strategy with Hall's vision of the Virtuous Circle.

Qualities of the bad legal publishing mergers:

Dramatic price increases (West, Aspen, Dialog)
Failure to integrate the products (CCH – both aspen & Loislaw)
Eliminating pay as you go option / change in pricing structure (GSI, Losilaw)
Loss of customer focus
Loss of client loyalty
Decline in quality
Loss of competition (West)
Destruction of a great product (GSI)
Decline in usability (GSI)
Strict focus on profits

Is the Thomson West Merger Also a Metaphor for Something Else?

There was an under current of "longing for things past" in the comments submitted by readers. Criticisms of the Thomson-West deal decried the changing culture of the legal publishing industry and emergence of new market forces. Loss of old and familiar brands, endless growth and globalization, decreased focus on personal relationships, increased emphasis on profits.... Sound familiar? These comments describe not only changes in the legal publishing industry but also echo the changes we have experienced in the law firms where many of us work.

West Publishing as a Fading Landmark. West’s history also represents a significant chapter in the evolution of American law. West was a uniquely American company which developed a taxonomy and classification system for weaving together the complex tapestry that is American caselaw. The West Brothers were "American originals." As the Wright Brothers were unschooled in engineering, but conquered flight. the West Brothers were not lawyers but enterprising stationery salesmen who virtually invented a uniquely American process of legal research.

The history of West Publishing which used the now somewhat ironic slogan – “Forever Associated with the Practice of Law” is all but obliterated from the Thomson Reuters’ company timeline. There are only 3 major events noted : 1872, the founding of West Publishing; 1996, the acquisition by Thomson and 2010 the release of WestlawNext. There is no narrative reflecting the deep impact West had on the development of American legal research analysis and practice.

You will on the other hand learn riveting trivia: In 1851 Paul Julius Reuter arrived in London from Aachen Germany where he developed a news business “leveraging” the a fleet of 200 carrier pigeons as part of it’s information dissemination platform. He soon began integrating the emerging telegraph technology and coined the motto “follow the cable” which has presumably now been updated to "follow the money."

It is noted that the use of emerging technology “helped Reuter establish an enviable reputation for speed accuracy, integrity and impartiality.”

Gee sounds like it could have described West Publishing to me, but there isn’t a hint of what West represented to the legal profession in America to be found in the Thomson Reuters timeline. A more enthusiastic history of the company was published by a small Minnesota newspaper… Westlaw Rises to Legal Publishing Fame by Selling Free Information

Thomson West Marked The End of Competition. Really?
The Thomson West deal, has not prevented new entrants to the market. Innovative new products keep emerging: Law 360, Intelligize, Mergermarket, and Fastcase demonstrate that there is still a healthy environment for competition. Who would have expected a major new player Bloomberg Law to break into a head to head competition with Lexis and Westlaw in this mature online research market? See also, Greg Lambert's 3 Geeks and a Law blog Could Thomson Reuters be in Trouble? and consider if we may see a divesiture of West by ThomsonReuters and the possible market impact.

Would the Old West Have Thrived in the 21st Century?
I suspect not. In the early 1990's a very senior West executive commented to me that he didn't think that lawyers would ever want to have personal computers at home. This struck me as strangely disconnected from emerging trends. Young lawyers had carried laptops to class, law firms were experimenting with flexible work schedules, and then there was the ever present pressure of the billable hour. I give the West executives credit - they understood that the economics of their industry was changing, they would need capital infusion to improve their infrastructure to remain competitive. Had West not been purchased by Thomson we might have seen the company targeted by a Godon Gekko and sold off in parts. Innovation is expensive. A walk around the exhibit hall this summer at AALL revealed how few legal publishers were up to the task of developing eBooks, only the "big players" Lexis and Westlaw had taken on the eBook challenge.

As a "rising tide raises all boats," we were the indirect beneficiaries of the advances in legal research technology which drive the marketplace of innovation. Advanced technologies hold the promise of continuing to offer efficiencies for the practice and business of law. Information professionals will continue to play an important role in introducing and managing these innovations. Mergers are painful affairs, products have a life cycle and sometimes they die. The legal information marketplace will continue to be shaped by the polar forces of "information that wants to be free" and technological innovation that comes at a cost.

Related Posts: Votes Are In Learn Why Lexis Acquisition of Shepard's Voted Best Legal Publishing Merger. ; Vote Now for the Best and Worst Legal Publishing Merger

The Votes Are In, Learn Why: Lexis Acquistion of Shepard's Voted Best Legal Publishing Merger

2011-10-14T01:46:00.004-04:00

Qualities of the best legal publishing mergers: Making 1 + 1 = 3

Back in September I posted a survey asking readers to vote for the best and worst mergers in the legal publishing industry. This was not a scientific survey nor did I have a way to guarantee against participation by employees of vendors themselves. Nonetheless, a series of interesting themes emerged in the commentaries which were contributed by many voters. Since the recent announcement of the Bloomberg-BNA merger, the law librarian community has been awash with speculation on how this merger will play out and whether in 5 years they will cast votes for Bloomberg-BNA in the "best" or "worst" column.

Top Characteristics of Good Mergers

Developed a meaningful integration of products from both companies which enhanced the quality of the data, usability and efficiencies delivered to the researchers.
Resulted in better products than could have been developed by either company without the merger.
Enhanced the technology of the acquired product.
Improved customer service.
Provided access to content which researchers would not otherwise have access to because of pricing or complexity of native platform. (Dialog)
Kept a valuable but small niche product alive. (Loislaw)
Resulting electronic product is so clearly superior to the print version that there is virtually no resistance to eliminating redundant print product. (Blogger"s note : Contrast the ease of converting lawyers from print Shepard's to Shepard's Online with conversion of CCH print users to CCH online This conversion still incomplete almost 20 years after the release of first CCH online product).
Eliminated a publisher that was difficult to deal with, (Bad customer service, bad billing and updating practices, steep price increases).
Infusion of capital resulted in greater innovation.
Greater innovation increased competition which brought better products to the legal marketplace.

Not the Best, Only the “Least Worst”

There was a repeating theme in the comments section which suggested that a significant subset of the law librarian community regards all mergers as “bad.” Many respondents voted for the “best” merger with the begrudging comment that their vote was only for “the least worst,” the least disruptive, most harmless or had the least impact.

The Winner is: Lexis Acquisition of Shepard's

Requires a Fact Check from the Wayback Machine An overwhelming number of voters indicated that they selected Shepard's because this resulted in the conversion of Shepard's to an electronic format. Well actually… McGraw Hill had digitized the citators and produced Shepard's on CD-ROM . The CD-ROMs were then updated by a accessing a dial-up bulletin board called "Shepnet. " This was before the World Wide Web! Shepard's Releases The First Shepard's Citation on CD-ROM.

Maybe Also The Weirdest Merger Technically McGraw Hill traded Shepard's to the Times Mirror Company in exchange for educational publications. Separately, Times Mirror, and Reed Elsevier, owner of the Lexis-Nexis then formed a 50-50 joint venture to own and operate Shepard's.

Lexis Acquisition of Shepard's was Good for Westlaw One of the more surprising observations which was echoed in several responses. The Lexis integration of Shepard's content into the caselaw research process triggered a cycle of intense competition and product improvement. It drove West to create the Keycite product which some respondents considered to be superior to Shepard's on Lexis.

Comments on Why Shepard's Won

Shepard's citators in print were so cumbersome to use, so difficult to read and interpret in print that they were completely transformed by digitization and their utility enhanced when integrated with Lexis caselaw.
Easy to convert users from print to electronic
Made a core legal research function quicker more efficient
Competition forced West create a better product
Triggered a cycle of competition and improvement for both market leaders, Lexis and Westlaw which caused the customers to win in the long run.
Improved the usability of content on Lexis by integrating citations.

 In Second Place: A Megamerger - The Thomson Acquisition of West

Given the vast differences of scope of the Lexis acquisition of a single function product like Shepard's and the Thomson-West merger, which was a game changing colossus, the two transactions are not really suitable comparisons.

Benefits of Thomson West Merger:

Cash infusion resulted in greater innovation
Merger created a clear market leader
Successfully integrated a diverse array of legal, business, news, primary and secondary sources into a single Westlaw platform which enhanced lawyer productivity
Created a global platform for legal research
Thomson continued acquiring content from smaller publishers which may have preserved products which would not otherwise have survived in the long run.

The most controvertial aspects of the Thomson West merger arose from the print publishing side of the merger. Stay tuned for: Part Two: The Worst of Legal Publishing Mergers, coming next week.
____________________________________________________________________________
Join the conversation: Friday, October 14, 2011 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM EDT

Episode 23: Merger Mania: A Discussion of Law Publisher Consolidation – Past and Present

Is There A Law Firm Merger in Your Future? The Odds Are Increasing....Are You Ready?

2011-10-06T01:12:00.008-04:00

According to an Altman and Weil survey released this week, Law Firm Mergers Surge in 2011, law firm mergers for the first 9 months of 2011 exceeded the number of mergers for the same period in 2010 by 78%.
There is no shortage of additional sources to support this trend. Keynote Speakers at the two recent PLL Summits in 2010 and 2011, Jim Jones of Hildebrandt Institute and Peter Zeughauser of Zeughauser Group, outlined the key economic and strategic forces which will continue to drive law firm mergers. Several year's ago an executive from American Lawyer Media told me that they planned to expand ALM coverage of mid-sized law firm financials in order to help law firms identify candidate firms for merger or acquisition. A recent American Lawyer story, Empire Builders quoted a senior partner from Allen & Overy as stating that "There is a very distinct correlation between multi-jurisdictional work and profitability." While this statement was made in the global context, there are parallel multi-jurisdictional and economic issues driving clients to firms with a multi-jurisdictional footprint within the US as well as abroad. Perhaps more ominously the article suggests that firms who have been safely ensconced in the financial centers of New York and London will face serious challenges if according to the Chief Executive Ted Burke of Freshfields,"this turned out to be the Chinese century or the BRIC century."

It could happen to you. Are you Ready?

During the first months following the merger, firm management will be focused on integrating accounting and IT systems. Other departments including the library and research services are generally not fast-tracked for integration. However, delaying the selection of a departmental leader and strategy for integrating library resources and services overlooks substantial cost and risks to the firm.

A Note about Co-Leadership

It is not uncommon for firm leadership to defer departmental leadership decisions and to simply make all departmental leaders "Co-Director's" for an indefinite period. This is generally a lose-lose proposition because effectively, no one is in charge, the staff is confused, important decisions are subject to endless debate, critical time is lost making progress on issues critical to lawyer support, cost control and risk management. In the worst of all possible outcomes, co-leaders are "rewarded" for their endurance by being demoted and replaced with an outsider who is given the full authority for decision making that was not given to the legacy leaders.

Have the Courage to Re Apply For Your Job
Frankly the department and the firm would be better off allowing leaders to compete for the leadership positions by having each legacy Director submit a strategic plan for the department and let the best strategy win.

Key Areas of Cost and Risk

Online Research Contracts Contracts with vendors such as Lexis and Westlaw may contain escalation clauses which could substantially increase firm costs. Do not allow the vendor to simply combine the cost of the two contracts and send you a consolidated bill. Renegotiate the contact and seek to leverage economies of scale. You should be able to get a better deal post merger if you conduct and effective analysis of historic usage in both firms.
Software Applications Identify administrative software applications such as Integrated Library Systems, Client validation software and web monitoring software. Determine if products are fully deployed and if these products and licenses are scalable to fit the needs of the combined organization.
Cost Recovery Each firm may have a different approach to cost recovery and a single approach needs to be adopted and rates recalibrated to account for the additional costs or discounts reflected in a post merger contract.
Electronic Resources and Licenses Inventory and compare all electronic licenses. This exercise can be a real "eye opener" which illustrates how effective or ineffective your negotiation skills are. Creating a combined inventory listing the cost and the scope ( firm wide or limited access) could illustrate vastly different terms for a single product. Since some vendors restrict sharing of content outside of a licensed office, you need to move quickly to renegotiate licenses which cover post merger workflow needs. See previous post Centralized Licensing as a Risk Management Strategy
Research and Cross Training Law firm mergers are often driven by a desire to broaden the range of practice areas offered by the firm. Inventory the skill sets and expertise of research staff and provide opportunities for them to cross train their new colleagues in specialized resources and research techniques.
Centralization of Research and Administrative Services One of the most significant ways to demonstrate strategic leadership is to reduce redundant workflow by centralizing work in a single location. See previous post: Centralization as a Value Strategy
One City - Multiple Offices It is not uncommon for merger's to result multiple offices in one city that will need to be integrated and consolidated.The cost of print collections may be reduced when offices are combined. If both firms have a fixed fee:Library Maintenance Agreement - the benefits of weeding may be delayed until the contacts end or are renegotiated.

Stay Focused on the Highest and Best Outcome

Recognize that "post merger" you have a new employer and a chance to start again. The success of the merger and firm should be your primary focus. Maintaining a positive attitude toward the merger and demonstrating collegial respect for your new colleagues is critical to maintaining the morale of your department and bolstering your profile as a true leader in the new firm.

Centralization as a Value Strategy

eBooks: Why are Publishers Pouring Digital Content into 19th Century Wineskins?

2011-09-28T02:18:00.011-04:00

I was at first excited by the prospect of eBooks for law firms. Next year could we be handing new associates an i-Pad loaded with a custom practice library? Could eBooks liberate law firms from the significant cost of housing, maintaining and updating print resources? Could eBooks liberate librarians from managing the substantial overhead of staff time for processing, the cost of filers for updating and the real estate footprint demanded by print resources. Could we be freed to spend even more time engaged in value added client support activities?

Deskbooks are a Go. Right now the only type of publication I see as ready for the eBook distribution model are the annual, statutory code books that we commonly refer to as deskbooks. These are perfect candidates. They are meant to portable and "personalizable." Since I work in a firm with over 1,000 lawyers, the prospect of eliminating the annual processing and distribution of thousands of volumes of deskbooks makes me do a "happy dance."

Treatises Not So Much. The more I talk to publishers about the model for "circulating" multi-volume treatises, the more I am disheartened at the predominance of print based paradigms. Public libraries have developed methods for circulating eBooks that are modeled on existing print circulation models and in that context, traditional circulation models may make sense.

Law Firms Need A Different Model - Law Books and Lawyers are Different

Law firms are not public libraries. We are purchasing corporate access to content, we need a model that permits the unfettered access to appropriate units of content on an "as needed" basis.
Treatises are not monographs - they are complex organisms that change over time.
Lawyers need information not "volumes."
Lawyers require updating by "push " not "pull " (We learned this lesson with electronic newsletters, lawyers didn't go a website to get the current issue of an electronic newsletter - it had to be delivered! Yet right now legal publishers seem to believe that lawyer behavior has changed. They appear to believe that lawyers want to engage in unnecessary administrative tasks which interrupt their billable time.The current proposed models also suggest that librarians want to chase down lawyers and their Ipads when it it time to update a treatise or that lawyers will willingly spend time reloading treatise updates to their Ipads. Didn't we cross the automatic update bridge decades ago? Why regress to a less efficient workflow now?)

The Madness of Circulating an eBook Treatise

If I hear one more publisher suggest that I would want to ask lawyers to "check-out an eBook" as if it were a physical object, I will run from the room screaming. Sadly when I ask why they came up with this circulation model -- I am told -- this is the model that librarians are requesting! Is this really true? Has there been a complete failure of the imagination? Must we hamstring ourselves and our lawyers to manage digital content in the same way we would manage a physical object? Can we call a time-out before we get too far down this road?

There are a number of reasons this is a ridiculous model but let me start with one of the most obvious.

Does a lawyer really want to download a volume of a treatise? I think Not!

Let's think about it. A "volume" is not a meaningful unit of intellectual information. A volume represents the number of pages which can be put into a 4 inch wide binder. This 4 inch container doesn't necessarily represent a coherent unit of information that is of interest to a lawyer. The most meaningful unit of information is more likely to be a "chapter" and yet no one is thinking about allowing lawyers to download these more meaningful subsections of legal treatises.

Let me illustrate :

Volume 3 of Matthew Bender's Business Crimes

Chapter 23 Bad Faith in Insurance and Other Contracts
Chapter 24 Private RICO Actions
Chapter 25 False Imprisonment
Chapter 26-27 Reserved
Chapter 28 Trademarks and Trademark Infringement

I suppose if I thought long and hard , I could come up with a fact pattern involving, Insurance, RICO, False Imprisonment and Trademarks - but it would be a stretch. My guess is that a lawyer is more likely to be interested in one of these chapters from volume 3 and perhaps one or two other chapters which reside in volumes 1,2 , or 4. For some reason, the reality of lawyer workflow doesn't carry weight in the eBook distribution model. We are developing digital workflows which are enslaved to the limitations of 19th century print publishing. Why?

I have no doubt that the current design and arrangement of legal treatises was viewed as a magnificent leap forward to a 19th century lawyer. I can't help but recall my one visit to the old Matthew Bender offices in New York 20 years ago. It was a delightfully Victorian environment, I expected to encounter Bartleby the Scrivener with a quill pen and high collar around every corner.

But Folks we are now in the 21st Century -- isn't it time to break the 19th century paradigms that constrain our thinking .

Déjà Vu CD-ROMS: Sometimes the Customer is Wrong!

When cd-roms were introduced in the early 1990's, I will never forget a meeting that Ron Friedmann and I had with a representative of CCH.

When they created the digital version of the Standard Federal Tax Reporter, instead of integrating the updates into the primary search database, they segregated the updates into an "electronic pocket part." Instead of introducing a smarter product that would always deliver up-to-date results, they kept the "new" information segregated and required lawyers to engage in a two step research process.They missed the opportunity to use technology to improve lawyer efficiency. I don't recall if we laughed or gasped, but we were both appalled. When we asked why they wouldn't just integrate the updates into the main search, the response was - "our customers wanted it that way." Well sometimes your customers are wrong!

Think Outside the Volume. Unless both publishers and librarians can stop looking in the "rear view mirror," we will all loose the opportunity to develop an eBook model for law firms which enhances both access to information and workflow efficiencies. I fear that -- at least in the law firm environment,-- eBooks may be destined to become the "8-track tape" of the 21st century.

Vote Now For the Best and Worst Legal Publishing Mergers

2011-09-09T02:51:00.004-04:00

The legal publishing industry has been in a state of continuous consolidation for the past 30 years. Here is your chance to vote on the best and the worst legal product acquisitions and company mergers.

Click HERE to vote for the best and the worst legal publishing mergers. Voting will close on Sept. 23rd.

Defining Success or Failure? The recent announcement of Bloomberg's proposed acquisition of BNA has caused me to reflect back on the many mergers, takeovers and consolidations which I have witnessed during my career. The success or failure of these mergers and acquisitions are ultimately assessed by a variety of factors including whether the product is improved or is impaired, whether the culture and "good will" of the publisher and it's representatives are enhanced or diminished or whether the product is positively enhanced through transformative reengineering or obliterated by neglect or misguided re-design.

The Yin and the Yang of Mergers. Although the biggest downside of these mergers from the consumer perspective has been widely recognized as diminished competition which leads to higher prices, it is now apparent that both technology and shifting law firm economics are likely to have winnowed the field of smaller legal publishers over time. The obvious conclusion is that recent decades of mergers may have in the end saved some really good products from oblivion.

The Big Picture. For your edification I am including an interesting graphic prepared by Sarah Glasssmeyer which illustrates the consolidation of legal publishing.

This is not a scientific survey - but I still think the results will be informative. I selected a sampling of legal publishing mergers and acquisitions and focused on those that had transformative potential for the companies and products involved. I invite you to vote for the best and the worst mergers and acquisitions and provide a comment of why it was good or bad. I will summarize and report the findings in a follow-up post.

Bloomberg Gets BNA's Intellectual Capital in the Capitol!

2011-08-26T16:34:00.018-04:00

The synergy Between Bloomberg and BNA

Both are non-public companies.
Both rooted in journalism
Both “Made in America”

A slight digression: The recent decades of consolidation in the legal publishing industry has resulted in the wholesale expatriation of control of American’s primary legal research content. (Lexis, born in Ohio is owned by Anglo-Dutch company, Reed Elsevier; West Publishing, born in Minnesota was bought by the Canadian, Thomson Corporation and CCH, born in Illinois, is owned by Dutch, Wolters Kluwer). What surprised me more than the mergers themselves, is the absence of outrage or even a lively discussion about the "expatriation of American law." So I am saying it now. Finally a merger where the control of two American born engines of legal research are staying onshore!

It Looks Like a Win - Win to Me

In short, Bloomberg needs BNA’s content and BNA needs Bloomberg’s technology, innovative spirit and "deep pockets."

Bloomberg has only existed for 30 years and yet it is growing a media empire while the established icons of journalism are dead or dying. So will that same combination of determination, innovation and calculated risk allow them to succeed in the legal market? It is not an insignificant factor that Bloomberg is a private company which is free to experiment and innovate in ways which are reminiscent of a Silicon Valley start up.

Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Government Expansion

Bloomberg’s acquisition of BNA makes sense for two separate market initiatives. Bloomberg Law had developed a solid product for primary law and dockets. Bloomberg has recently completed a re-audit and validation of their citator which will enhance it’s competitive standing, but it still lacked the secondary source treatises and commentary that lawyers rely on to flesh out their analysis of an issue.

Several years ago Bloomberg Law seemed to be indicating that they planned to develop newsletters to compete with BNA. While the newsletters that they were producing were popular with lawyers they simply didn’t replicate the depth of the BNA bench. In recent years BNA had also expanded it's digital platform beyond newsletters and built out a number of resource centers. In a happy symmetry - while Bloomberg had been focused on building out practice areas with the tightest alignment to business (securities, corporate, finance, bankruptcy, Intellectual Property and litigation), BNA had been building resource centers for Employee Benefits, Labor, Intellectual Property, Environmental, Health and Professional Ethics. With the exception of IP, BNA brings a collection of digital libraries which Bloomberg had not yet begun to develop on BLaw.

Bloomberg had been tight lipped on product acquisitions but their executives and field staff were always listening for leads in the marketplace. The likely candidates for secondary materials included BNA, CCH, Law360, ALM’s Law Journal Press and Practical Law Company.

But the acquisition of BNA makes the most sense in light of the launch of the "other" Bloomberg product. With much less fanfare, Bloomberg has recently entered the government and regulatory space dominated by Congressional Quarterly by launching Bloomberg Government. Just as Bloomberg Law integrates law with Bloomberg’s robust cache of business data, Bloomberg has built a platform which integrates business analytics with legislation and regulation. The breadth of intellectual capital from BNA’s legislative and regulatory “brain trust” can serve both Bloomberg products quite well.

BNA Needed to Reposition (C-Span vs. People Magazine)

BNA has remained the “A Student” at the front of the class handing in sober and thorough “A+" assignments every day. But were they positioned to appeal to the "Google generation?"

BNA was facing growing challenge from smaller niche publishers especially Law360 which has taken a “lighter” approach to monitoring legal developments and moving aggressively to poach BNA's market share. Law360 tends to provide shorter "snapshots" of legal issues and perhaps talking a page from the American Lawyer, gives more attention to the personalities of the law. Each issue of a Law360 publication displays a prominent index to law firms mentioned (and what law firm doesn’t like publishers to act as its marketing arm?) They also offer regular profiles and Q & A s with leading lawyers. Perhaps the focus on the personalities in the law explains its growth in a fairly mature market, and one which was largely "owned" by BNA.

Was BNA Too Good at What it did to Survive?

Several years ago I was fortunate enough to have one of BNA’s top editors accept a lunch invitation to meet with my library staff and provide an overview of BNA’s editorial process. It was one of those events that forever changed my view of a publisher. In this case, it cemented my respect for BNA as not just another newsletter purveyor with fungible content which could easily be cranked out by a rival collector of regulatory documents. The range and depth of the BNA’s editorial team was astonishing. BNA has more reporters on Capitol Hill than the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal combined. While a daily newspaper might assign a reporter to follow a proposed tax law for a current congress, BNA’s tax reporters would have been following the tax legislation for decades and could provide a perspective not only on the current proposal but on the history of similar proposals through prior congresses.

Reading vs Power browsing

A provocative discussion on the web’s impact on our brains can be found in the chapter entitled “The Juggler’s Brain” in Nicholas Carr's, The Shallows, which provides an ominous clue about BNA's dilemma. Our brains have become adapted for browsing rather than reading. Studies indicate that a "power browser" spends fewer than 30 seconds "reading" a web page. (So if you are still reading this post, "congratulations," you are still a reader!)

BNA is good, perhaps too good. BNA requires deep reading. If the younger generation of lawyers have developed "browsing brains" rather than "reading brains," BNA was likely to encounter an erosion in readership unless the company could make a radical reassessment of it's platform, editorial and delivery models. Bloomberg’s infrastructure, innovative technologies and ability to offer BNA an " outsider's perspective" may just help them make that transition.

BNA’s Intellectual Capital in the Capitol

The long term success of the BNA/Bloomberg deal may lie in Bloomberg’s ability to retain the BNA “brain trust.” Since BNA is an employee owned company, the acquisition may mean that the intellectual capital which has distinguished BNA from it’s rivals could make a hasty, bolt for the door.

Competition Is Good

Competition and innovation are good for the legal information marketplace. I hope this is a successful merger for all parties (including their customers).

Related Dewey B Story: Bloomberg Law Takes on the Titans: An interview with Lou Andreozzi, Chairman of Bloomberg Law

Both Sides Now: Advice on Redesigning Law Firm and In-House Strategy from Jim Jones and the Corporate Executive Board

2011-08-05T03:31:00.007-04:00

Jim Jones’s (Hildebrandt Institute) PLL Summit presentation “State of the Legal Market 2011” outlined a series of factors which combined with the financial downturn created the “perfect storm” of disruption in the legal marketplace. The Corporate Executive Board issued a report to member General Counsel that was recently reported in the press giving the “In House” perspective.

The factors outlined below are forcing firms to rethink their strategies in the “post crisis world.”

Increased access to Information about law firms. Blame it all on Steve Brill. He tapped into the thirst among lawyers to read about themselves and their competitors. He threw open the floodgates which exposed competitive law firm data to the world. There is now a cottage industry of competitors in the US and abroad creating ranking lists, exposing profits per partner, measuring associate satisfaction, prestige, diversity and pro bono commitments. This wealth of data has armed clients with competitive information and leverage in negotiating with competing law firms.
The drive towards commoditization. Contrary to popular opinion, the quality of work product goes up as firms move from totally custom “bespoke” solutions for clients through the standardized, systematized, packaged, commoditized continuum.
The growth of enabling technologies. Firms have been able to develop self service subscriptions for clients such as Linklaters Blue flag online services for compliance, Allen & Overy Online transactional document services. and commercial products from Practical Law Company which provides lawyers with checklists and templates for drafting.
Emergence of New Service Providers. Legal Process Outsourcing companies, compete with law firm directly because, clients can chose to use them for certain projects rather than a law firm. But law firms can also take on large projects without having to invest in hiring long term staff. Projects like ediscovery and document review are now routinely outsourced through the hiring of temporary attorney or by hiring a PLO company such as Pangea3 and Integreon.
Law firm profitability in the boom years was driven by the ability of firms to raise their rates 6-8% each year Client pushback was inevitable. The economic downturn made continuous price increases unsustainable.
Changed basis of competition. Following the 2008 crash, the supply of lawyers exceeded the demand. Organic growth requires stealing market share from other firms.
Clients begin to demand lower costs, alternative fee arrangements and higher efficiency. Firms begin to work implement workflows.
Positioning Strategies. Firms are forced to develop more sophisticated strategies for positioning the firm’s practices, implementing technologies and processes to improve delivery and change the talent model to emphasize training and development/

The Corporate Executive Board recently released a report “Five Forces that will Change Legal.” As reported in Corporate Counsel “Five Forces that Will Change Legal.. The report was based on interviews with 100 Corporate Counsel and highlights 5 factors that will impact corporate legal departments.

• Regulatory Issues will converge and the regulation of issues will fragment across international, national and local jurisdictions.

• Increased focus of global regulatory compliance. Issues such as data privacy, anti-trust, executive compensation and corrupt practices are gaining importance globally, but there is no harmonization between local, national and foreign regulations, making it difficult for companies to have standard global policies and practices.

• Information Grows Exponentially. Ediscovery requests are getting bigger as more and more data is collected within corporation. This will change how corporations manage their internal data.

• Competing Demands for Corporate Transparency and consumer privacy will collide. Data security infrastructure will have to accommodate the competing of national and local regulations regarding privacy.

• Corporate Legal Department Center of Gravity will shift. As corporations become more global they will need to manage their risks locally which may require legal departments to decentralize.

• Changing Legal Services Market Competition, GC’s will; chose among firms and LPO’s competing for the same work.

The Conclusion is that like law firms, legal departments will have to rethink staffing and talent management strategies, and embrace changes in their approaches to process and technological infrastructure to enhance efficiency.

Implication for the library and knowledge managers

• Increased importance of our Competitive Intelligence capabilities to support strategies

• Increased importance of regulatory monitoring will mandate the development of knowledge resources to aggregate, distill or analyze comparable regulations arising form local and national authorities.

• Escalate migration from Knowledge Management tools to Knowledge Process Improvement that delivers real efficiencies to clients. Shift focus from knowledge harvesting technologies and “search” to implement knowledge regimes which integrate knowledge tools into best practice workflows.

"The Know it All" at the Library Convention, Esquire's A.J. Jacobs, Makes Us Howl--- Makes Us Think!

2011-08-01T00:24:00.005-04:00

So what is the connection between a popular culture humorist and the law library community? Answer: 18,000 pages of legal treatises. and perhaps a million footnotes.

Esquire's Senior Editor, A. J. Jacobs came to the Annual Private Law Libraries lunch meeting last Sunday in Philadelphia and served up his unique mix of insights about several issues at the heart of our daily lives: knowledge, truth, outsourcing and the law... except not quite in the way you might expect.　

A. J. Jacobs is the author or The Know it all: One Man's Humble Quest to become the Smartest Person in the World. and A Year of Living Biblically.

I had the honor of introducing A.J. Jacobs as the guest speaker. There is of course a story, which I used to convince the Board that this unlikely choice, was the perfect choice.

It all started several years ago, in a fall associate research class where I try to impart my "rules of research" to each incoming class of eager, young lawyers. My "Rule 11" is "consult an expert by identifying and reading a leading treatise on your subject..." I always amplify this rule with a first hand account of my experiences at Shea & Gould in the late 1980’s where I encountered obsessed law firm partner, legal scholar and serial prankster Arnold S. Jacobs.

It would be an understatement to say that Arnold S. Jacobs was a library supporter. He was in fact a library user of Olympic magnitude. I learned to understand and respect the process of treatise writing when Jacobs came to the library seeking research assistance while updating his 5 volume Litigation and Practice Under Rule 10b5.　

It was an exercise that extended for months. He was always monitoring and reading every new case on rule 10b5. But as part of the editorial process he would read and “cite-check” every case cited in the treatise and then read every case citing to the original 10b5 case, ad infinitum.

I should have been suspicious the day he asked me to research the criteria for getting into the Guinness Book of World Records. Jacobs wanted to find out if writing a law review article with the largest number of footnotes would qualify for a Guinness record. He didn’t meet the Guinness criteria but he did manage to get his first footnote record into something called the "Harper’s Index." He held the record for an article with 1,247 footnotes, but lost the title briefly to Professor who wrote an article with 1,611 footnotes. Then Jacobs "upped the ante" by publishing An Analysis of Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 32 N.Y. L. Sch. L. Rev. 209(1987). This weighed in at 4,824 footnotes. And no one has broken that record in the past 25 years.

Back to the training class. When I took a break after describing Jacobs’s thorough research process, I was approached by a young associate. She said she had just read a book that she was sure was written by the son of my rule 10b5 obsessed partner – and "it was the funniest book she had ever read." I got a copy of the The Know it All and I howled. I gave copies to my managers and they howled.

AJ Jacobs is not only the son of Proskauer partner, Arnold S. Jacobs who has written over 25 books　, but also the grandson of the late Theodore Kheel, the great labor arbitrator, who wrote the classic 10 volume treatise Kheel on Labor Law. I knew the name Kheel from my childhood in NYC, it was a time when union strikes were long and disruptive: teacher’s strikes, subway strikes, newspaper strikes. Mr. Kheel’s name was a staple of the morning radio news reports.

So what’s a young man with such a pedigree to do when graduates from college? AJ became a writer for Entertainment Weekly. But the seed of competitive intellectual ventures had been planted.　　

"Jacobs the Elder" had once attempted to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and had only gotten as far as Borneo....

Knowledge

The Know it All recounts "Jacobs the Younger's" one and half year marathon read of the 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.　Jacobs explained to the audience that the The Know it All grew out of his attempt to finally accomplish a goal which his seriously over-achieving father had not accomplished. This project did take a toll on his eyes and his life. He inserted little known facts into conversations at work and at home. His wife ended up fining him one dollar for every useless fact he inserted into a conversation.　

The book not only fascinated me because of the interesting or outrageous factoids, but also because of his exploration of various "cults of knowledge." Jacobs hunts down, interviews and or joins a wide variety of information obsessed communities: Mensa meetings, puzzler competitions, Jeopardy contestants... However if there is one omission... it is an exploration of one of the many communities of librarians who transform the glut of available data in to meaningful answers for millions of knowledge seekers in public libraries, academic libraries to private special libraries around the globe.

Truth

In the most edgy moment of the day, Jacobs described his attempt to adhere to a "radical honesty" movement. This is recounted in an article entitled, I think you're fat, which says it all!

Outsourcing

My Outsourced Life describes Jacobs’s month-long attempt to outsource his life to Bangalore, India. And of course, Jacobs didn't just stick to the obvious daily routines: responding to emails, making his appointments, paying bills. He tried to outsource, fights with his wife, reading bedtime stories, finding a "Tickle me Elmo" toy.

Reading the full article you will discover that he outsourced a research project! Ok, it wasn’t a legislative and regulatory history, but we still have cause for concern. An assistant in India named "Honey" conducted a research project for Jacobs on the person Esquire had chosen as the "Sexiest Woman Alive."

If you weren't worried about the threat of outsourcing before now, Jacobs assessment may be a wake up call. “When I open Honey's file… There are charts. There are section headers. There is a well-organized breakdown of her pets, measurements, and favorite foods (e.g., swordfish). If all Bangalorians are like Honey, I pity Americans about to graduate college."

The Law

Jacobs explained that the idea for A Year of Living Biblically arose when he and his wife learned they were having their first child. While growing up, his family had been "Jewish in the same way that the Olive Garden is an Italian Restaurant." He wanted to explore his Jewish roots in order to determine if any of this heritage should be passed on to his children.

He read various versions of the Bible and determined that there were over 700 laws. He set out to try to follow all of the laws to see if they improved his life. He stopped shaving completely because he couldn't figure out where the "corners of his beard" were, he wore only clothes of unmixed fibers. He confessed that as a NY journalist he faced special challenges "Not coveting, not gossiping, not lying." Stoning an adulterer proved particularly elusive. One day while walking through New York's Central Park dressed like a Shepherd, he finally confronted a man who confessed to being an adulterer and sprayed him with a handful of pebbles he has been carrying for this unlikely event.

At the end of the year Jacobs said that felt he had been changed by the experience. He was happier. He noted the particular importance of "giving thanks" in all spiritual traditions. The most profound change came from actively engaging in a daily practice giving thanks throughout the day. He learned to be thankful for every small thing that went right in his life. At the end of the year he came to realize that for the 2 or 3 things that had gone wrong each day, a hundred things had gone right.　

Like other members of the audience (who thanked me throughout the day for inviting A.J. to our lunch) I was profoundly moved by his comments. I am thankful to him for the gift of laughter and especially thankful for the powerful reminder to give thanks!

Re-Designing Library Strategy: Advice for Executive Librarians from Jones and Dyson

2011-07-26T12:02:00.007-04:00

Jim Jones, Thomson Reuters VP, law firm consultant, Leader of the Hildebrandt Institute, former Managing Partner at Arnold & Porter and General Counsel at APCO Worldwide, provided a data rich overview of law firm financial and practice trends at the PLL Summit. He concluded his review of legal industry trends with a list of challenges and opportunities for Executive Librarians:

The Implications

Much of his talk centered around the trends to boost firm efficiencies through training, knowledge sharing and "Legal Process Outsourcing." What I find ironic and what I think Jones was implying in his list of "implications" below, was that firm leaders don't fully recognize that Executive Librarians should be the natural leaders or key players in these initiatives. Librarianship itself grew out of a late 19th century efficiency movement and 21st Century Library and Knowledge Executives work at the intersection of substantive knowledge, process improvement and emerging knowledge technologies.

The Challenges

How will the likely changes in law firm management models impact traditional library/information services?
How will the drive for efficiency and cost-effectiveness impact the ways in which legal research is undertaken?
How might librarians/information specialists help in partnering with clients and in supporting “one-to-many” knowledge sharing models?
In an age of “disintermediation,” how can information be rendered more useful and actionable?
What roles might librarians/information specialists play in the management of new firm “products” – e.g., various tools for on-line guidance and services?
What roles might librarians/information specialists play in the development of “just-in-time” training resources?
How might the growing importance of information management impact the roles that executive librarians play in their firms?

Most of us have already begun recognize and to respond to most of these trends. But as new forces continue to emerge in the legal marketplace and as new technologies continue to "disrupt" traditional work flow and practice models, we will, as he said, paraphrasing Alice in Wonderland, "have to keep running just to stay in place."*

*The Queen: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" Through the Looking Glass:

Esther Dyson, in what was the second most controversial comment of her session,(the most controversial comment can't be printed) responded to Jones' presentation by suggesting that if law firms don't recognize how the strategic insights and knowledge competencies of Library Executives are core to the firm's competitive advantage, we should all just go work for Legal Processing Outsourcers who clearly do recognize our talents as core to their business model!

The Cosmonaut at the Library Convention: Esther Dyson Beams Down At PLL Summit

2011-07-20T02:39:00.007-04:00

On Saturday July 23rd in what surely will be one of the most memorable PLL events of my career, I will be moderating a Q&A session with Esther Dyson at the "Change as Action" Summit in Philadelphia. This event is certain to be as stimulating and as surprising as Dyson's wide ranging career (magazine fact checker, journalist, publisher, entrepreneur,venture capitalist, philanthropist and yes trainee cosmonaut).".Her name is routinely prefaced by words such as "visionary," 'Guru," "pundit,"high priestess...' Esther's bio .

Dyson "Addicted to Zero G Force"

If you haven't had a chance to read Dyson's books Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age or Release 2.0 there is still time to peruse a wealth of material by and about Dyson. A Google search nets you 999,999 hits in .10 seconds. Pick a topic, any topic and combine it with "Esther Dyson" and you are sure to find Dyson's spin on your issue. Want to preview Dyson in action? A YouTube search retrieves over 200 video clips.

Below is a sampling of Esther Dyson quotes which I have gathered in preparation for Saturday's conversation with Esther Dyson:
On The Future Of Space Travel: "We Are Only At “The End Of The Beginning”

On Improving Wikipedia: .So, to get the best results, we have people sharpening their ideas against one another rather than simply editing someone's contribution and replacing it with another. We also have a world where the contributors have identities (real or fake, but consistent and persistent) and are accountable for their words. Much like Edge, in fact.

On Internet Search: "The future of search is verbs!"

On Wikileaks WikiLeaks matters for two reasons. The first is that we need a better balance of power between people and power. Information – and specifically the Internet’s power to spread it – is our best defense against bad, unaccountable behavior.

Second, we do want to trust our governments and institutions. The point of openness is to make those in power behave better – and to make us trust them more. Rather than viewing them as enemies, we should know what they are up to, and perhaps have a little more say in what they do.

On the Internet and Political Revolution: As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.

On the Future of Intellectual Property: From a business point of view, intellectual property is dead.

On Failure: Everybody should have a real failure, ideally when they are pretty young, that gives them a sense of confidence.

On Programming Human Perfectibility-
Call it simulated apprenticeship: if your company has a shortage of supportive managers to train employees, they can be modeled in the software. The games and simulation exercises can be designed to train and reward certain kinds of behavior – quick decision-making over too much deliberation, delegation rather than do-it-myself behavior, and so on.
It remains unclear how effective this will be, but I’m betting on it. Experience shapes us as much as our genes (or innate talents) do, and online experience is cheaper and easier to shape. In real life, success could be due to luck, and it might teach us the wrong lessons. In a game, we can make sure that it teaches us the right ones.

On the Groupon Business Model Groupon’s emergence is another step in the Internet’s move toward ever-greater efficiency and transparency. That is good news for the strong players, but not so good for the weak. Consider the airline business....
Increased transparency has made the airline business more “efficient,” but now airplane seats are hard to sell on any basis other than price. In an effort to keep their headline prices low, airlines are tacking on surcharges for baggage, drinks, pillows and other items that once were free.

On Net Neutrality: The biggest problem with the net neutrality debate is that no one knows what they are talking about.

On Net Neutrality Solutions: Legislation isn't gong to solve them. Antitrust enforcement is probably the best solution.

On Internet privacy: Internet privacy is basically a marketing problem.

If you are attending Saturday's Summit, please bring your own quotes and questions to what is sure to be a lively and memorable discussion which is sure to include her views on the future of librarianship, knowledge, legal issues and the legal profession.

Librarian as Hero: The Bard, The Bribe, The Bookseller, the "Cuban Cutie" and the Mystery of the Durham First Folio

2011-07-13T04:05:00.122-04:00

So a man sporting Fendi shades, Gucci shoes and carrying a box of Cuban cigars walks into the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC and pulls a Shakespeare First Folio from a plastic bag and demands to see the librarian.

This is a remarkable "truth is stranger than fiction" tale. The characters and facts are dazzling, amusing and appalling.
But the point of this post is not simply to recount a "ripping yarn." The story illustrates how the specialized skills of librarians led to the recovery of a stolen First Folio which had been missing for 10 years. The Folger Library Staff demonstrated extraordinary results from utilizing the professional expertise, judgment and sleuthing that are the hallmarks of a successful research librarian. The ability of the members of the Folger staff to think on their feet, to meet the unexpected inquiry with dispassion and objectivity, to communicate so effectively with a charlatan that he turned over a stolen treasure, and to develop strategies to delay returning the volume until its true provenance could be established saved a cultural treasure. They applied their extraordinary knowledge of bibliographic research and "CSI -like" forensic skills to solving an international mystery involving the FBI, Scotland Yard and the Constabulary of Durham, England.

Last week the Folger Shakespeare Library hosted a lecture To Catch a Thief: Recovering the Durham First Folio . Steven Galbraith, Curator of Books and Renate Mesmer, Head of Conservation, recounted the remarkable story with brilliant humor using the documentation they had prepared for the FBI and the Durham Constabulary to successfully prosecute Raymond Scott.

First Folios were printed in 1623, 8 years after Shakespeare's death and contained the first collection of Shakespeare's plays. Since no original Shakespeare manuscripts survive, the First Folios were the only source for 18 plays. It that likely that Macbeth and As You Like It would have been unknown today without the printing of the First Folio. Although all the Folios were produced on a printing press, no two copies were identical, due to variations in spelling, misprints, and variations in page trimming. Over the years each acquired additional unique features as they were bound and rebound, gilded or damaged. A specilialized reference work, The Shakespeare First Folio by Anthony James West was consulted by the librarians as the most current census of First Folios which are located around the globe and it identified some of the unique characteristics of the Durham Folio which could be compared with the book that had landed at the Folger.

Prolog

In December 1998 the Durham First Folio disappeared from a glass case in the Durham University Library in Northeastern UK. The estimated value at the time was $3 million pounds.

Act One - The Con Man at the Folger

On June 16th, 2008, Raymond Scott, walked into the Folger Library in Washington DC and asked to see the Librarian because he needed assistance valuing an old book which had come into his possession. Librarian Richard Kuhta was stunned when Scott pulled a book resembling a First Folio from a plastic bag. The volume was missing it's binding, title and final pages. He explained that he had gotten the book from a friend in Cuba who became known through the course of the investigation as the "Cuban Cutie." He claimed to be an wealthy bibliophile, with homes across Europe. He bolstered the Cuba story by handing Kuhta a box of Cuban cigars, the first in a series of increasingly expensive "gifts" to be left on Kutka's desk. Scott pressed Kuhta to confirm the book's value.He even suggested that it was a First Folio although the book was missing it's title page. Kuhta, who was growing ever more suspicious, convinced Scott to leave the book at the Folger so the staff could study the volume more closely. The Folger's Head of Reference, Georgianna Ziegler moved the book to the vault and staff started investigating the book's provenance

Several days later Scott returned and was told that the preliminary assessment indicated that the book was a First Folio, but Kuhta bought more time by saying they needed additional confirmation and didn't return the book to Scott. Scott returned on repeated visits bringing expensive ties, cigars and at one point put $2,500 on Kuhta's desk. Kuhta took the money and immediately enrolled Scott as a member in the "Renaissance Circle" of Folger supporters.

On his last visit to the Library, Scott brought a cake for afternoon tea which he had ordered from the chef at the Mayflower Hotel. The cake bore an inscription "Shakespeare First Folio?" with Shakespeare misspelled!

Stephen Massey a well known, rare book appraiser based in New York was brought in and he identified the volume as the stolen Durham First Folio. Renate Mesmer, the Curator set to work on forensic tests to provide additional evidence that could be used in court to support the identification of the Folio. Her tests included studying the remnants of the book binding which was determined to be of goatskin, like the cover of the stolen folio. Through bibliographic research, she located photocopies of pages of the Durham Folio in England which showed that the stitches in the binding matched the stitching in the damaged folio.Durham Folio Evidence

Kuhta then notified the FBI, the Head of Durham University and Scotland Yard.

Act Two - The Investigation

The Durham Constabulary determined that Raymond Scott was not a a wealthy, international, bon vivant, but an unemployed 51 year old bachelor who lived with his mother in public housing. on Widgon Close. He lived on public assistance and had piled up massive credit card debt. The constables went to the home and found 1,000 books (many later determined to be stolen) and interrogated Scott. The tabloids descended on the sleepy town of Washington Tyne and Ware. Neighbors revealed that Scott drove a series of expensive cars, a Ferrari, a Rolls-Royce, a Lamborghini... Scott revelled in the tabloid attention brought on by the investigation and posed swilling Dom Perignon from jeweled, champagne flutes that he routinely carried around in his briefcase.

He had a criminal history including 17 convictions and had used a variety of exotic aliases.

The Cuban Cutie, Heidi Rios was a 21 year old chorus girl from Havana to whom Scott was engaged. Scott claimed that Rios had introduced him to a former Castro bodyguard turned bibliophile who had "inherited" the mutilated First Folio. Scott had agreed to bring the book to the US for valuation for a share of the expected profits.

Act Three - The Trial

In 2010 Scott went on trial. Librarian, Richrd Kuhta was flown to England and testified for four hours. Scott continued to profess his innocence and demonstrate his talent for the outrageous by, arriving at court in various costumes, or in stretch limos or horse drawn carriages. In the end he was convicted of handling stolen property and removing it from the country but there was insufficient evidence to prove he had been involved in the original theft. He was convicted of the two lesser charges but not theft. The prosecutor had argued that Scott had in fact mutilated the Folio in an attempt to remove the characteristics that would identify it as the Durham First Folio. He was way out of his depth on that one! He clearly underestimated the awesome research skills and expert knowledge of bibliography demonstrated by the Folger librarians. The Judge in sentencing him to 8 years in Her Majesty's Prison in Castington, described Scott's crimes as "cultural vandalism" inflicted on a "quintessentially English treasure."

The Terminal Jig

Scholars tell us that many of Shakespeare's plays ended with a bawdy dance or a "terminal jig" performed by a jester or a comic actor. And so ends this tale...

Scott, apparently never one to pass up an opportunity for self-promotion, decided to write a confessional while in jail and has now inflicted his own version: "Shakespeare & Love" on the reading public. (Amazon link omitted intentionally!).

The BBC Produced a documentary Stealing Shakespeare which recounts the story of theft and recovery of the Durham First Folio.

Sadly, the missing pages and binding have not been found, but the Durham First Folio is back home at the University of Durham where security has been dramatically improved since 1998.

Bloomberg Law Takes on the Titans: An interview with Lou Andreozzi, Chairman of Bloomberg Law

2011-07-10T23:46:00.002-04:00

I interviewed Lou Andreozzi to learn about the strategy behind the July 5th re-launch of the Bloomberg Law platform. Andreozzi makes the case that Bloomberg’s unique approach to content and pricing will allow it to peel off a significant market share from Lexis and Westlaw who have a 30 year lead on upstart Bloomberg.

Bloomberg Law includes a standard federal and state caselaw archive back to 1789 and 1755, respectively. They developed their own editorial topics and case summaries, as well as, a citator to compete with Keycite and Shepards. They have added dockets, law reviews, news, financial data, regulatory and legislative sources. It offers sophisticated Boolean, natural language and faceted field searching.

Andreozzi claims that Bloomberg has taken a fundamentally different approach than its main competitors. According to Andreozzi Lexis and Westlaw built vast mega-libraries, trying to be “all things to all lawyers.” Andreozzi believes that Bloomberg’s more focused approach will help lawyers avoid information overload and enhance lawyer productivity. Bloomberg has built it’s platform to target a core of business focused practice areas including, Corporate M & A, Securities, Intellectual Property, Bankruptcy and Litigation.(More in development).

Because Bloomberg owns both their legal and their business information they can integrate it in ways that is not possible for competitors who rely on third party data which is only available for as long as it is licensed. Bloomberg doesn’t need to compete for business content, because they already own it!

Andreozzi admitted that the original launch of Bloomberg in 2009 "coincided with the 'perfect storm' of upheaval in the legal marketplace." The year 2009 was most notable for massive layoffs in law firms, shrinking “profits per partner”, the implosion of several Amlaw 100 firms and unprecedented pushback on billing rates and disbursements from clients. According to Andreozzi this was simultaneously “the best and the worst of times for Bloomberg Law to launch”

Bloomberg has taken advantage of two significant trends impacting the law firm market, 1) cost containment and 2) increased competition among law firms to not only develop new business, but to keep even their existing client base.

Bloomberg's New Front Page

Cost containment

Bloomberg is offering a single subscription rate which will include all content that is added to Bloomberg. Andreozzi claims that it will be able to maintain the simplified billing and not impose new costs for “excluded” content, because Bloomberg is owned by Bloomberg, L.P. which is the third largest news provider and has a vast repository of financial analytics. Andreozzi points out that this will immunize Bloomberg from the third party content migrations between Lexis and Westlaw which have bedeviled users of American Lawyer publications and leading newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal in recent years. Bloomberg’s simplified billing stands in sharp contrast to the complex and multi-tiered billing systems which are the legacy of Lexis and Westlaw.
There is a growing consensus in the legal industry that in 5 years law firms may no longer be able to pass along Lexis and Westlaw charges to clients. Adreozzi believes that Bloomberg Law’s more transparent and predictable pricing model could more easily absorbed by firms as overhead since firms will not charged for additional content as it is added to the platform.

Lawyer as Rainmaker Bloomberg’s focus on a core of business related practice areas allows them to leverage the deep “mother load” of business data created and owned by Bloomberg and seamlessly integrate it with practice materials. Bloomberg is the first legal service to code all litigation by industry, enabling a lawyer to easily focus in on caselaw impacting his clients business.

Andreozzi is rightly proud of the ease with which Bloomberg can generate an elegant and up-to-date company analysis which includes: breaking news, a litigation profile with graphs, a list of recent dockets, stock performance and basic company data. Since clients demand more loudly than ever that lawyers much not only know the law but also know their business, Bloomberg appears to have seized the lead in providing a simple way to generate a complex company profile right from the lawyers desktop.

The Future Belongs To…

I can’t make any predictions about the contours of the online legal market place in 5 years. But I do think that Bloomberg Law has gotten some key drivers right including: integrating law and business, simplifying the billing structure, integrating workflow into the research platform. Globalized legal practice will continue to have an impact and all of the major vendors incldung Bloomberg will need to respond to the changes in law firm demographics and financials.

My Favorite Things about Bloomberg Law

Industry Search in caselaw ...brilliant!
Breaking Complaints. Bloomberg focuses on important business cases in important courts that generate leading business litigation. They have gotten the reputation for posting these important dockets ahead of the competition.
Foreign and International Dockets Include UK, Ontario, Canada, Hong Kong, EU, Royal Court of Jersey and the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands.
Dealmaker Provides sample documents to be used as templates or samples of deals which can be used for negotiation.
Shared folders Improve collaboration and workflow allow lawyers to share content with lawyers within their firms.
Practice Centers Aggregates links to case law, major statutes and regulations, treatises, breaking news. custom watchlist, trends in litigation, forms, significant filings, law firm news.
Legwatch and Regwatch - allow you to link directly to the codes and monitor topics of interest.
Multi- media – Bloomberg is already offering blogs, podcasts and videos on their platform. Since Bloomberg is the only legal legal platform affiliated with a TV station can other kinds of media offerings be far behind?

Custom Company Reports

Custom Company Profile from Bloomberg Law

Cost Effective Research Training Part Deux: The past, the present and the solutions.

2011-06-16T02:42:00.000-04:00

Preface: A partner once explained CALR write offs for me this way: “I don’t charge any of my clients for Lexis and Westlaw because I don’t understand the charges, I can't control the charges, I can't explain the charges and I can’t defend the charges."

Background: It wasn’t always this bad. I personally recall the early days of CALR. When Lexis rolled its behemoth Deluxe, terminal (it was about the size of a washing machine) into the Pace Law Library in about 1980, the main menu screen was 90% blank space. Lexis had only 3 files at the time which covered a limited mix of Ohio cases, Ohio statutes and some federal case law. Although you could view the full text an opinion online, you couldn’t print out the full case.

Westlaw decided to compete in this emerging area with a strategy of denial. They opted to protect their print reporter business by limiting their online product to include headnotes only! No full text searching or displaying of opinions. My first and only encounter with an early Westlaw “Headnotes Only” terminal occurred on a visit to the NY State Attorney General’s office Library in the World Trade Center. A library that was also notable for having its furniture built by residents of the New York State prison system. (Talk about cost control!).

By the mid 80s each system had added hundreds of full text libraries covering legal, business, scientific, as well as local, state and federal regulatory materials. Each vendor took a different approach to billing. Westlaw billed primarily based on time and Lexis billed based on transactions.

At this point both Lexis and Westlaw were sufficiently simple and their billing systems so straightforward that it was possible to provide the average associates with a simple set of principles and guidelines that could assure cost effective research.

Both systems were also completely “pay as you go”. The more you used – the more you paid. So there was strong incentive to limit the use of the systems and to strive for cost effectiveness. But that all changed….

The Fixed Fee Contract and the Death of Cost Recovery

By the late 1980’s both services started to offer unlimited access to a custom defined subset of content for a fixed monthly fee. Normally a significant number of databases were “excluded” from the contract and charged at retail rates. Although the vendors were now offering a fixed fee for a large chunk of content, they didn’t simplify the underlying rate structure. So firms were left to fend for themselves in developing a method for apportioning the fixed costs between clients and the firm use while staying compliant with ABA and court rules regarding disbursements. The most common 4 approaches under fixed fee contracts were 1) variable discount, 2) fixed discount, 3) blended rate discount or 4) overhead

Initially most firms chose one first two methods below

1) Clients were charged a variable discount based on the volume of use each month

2) Clients were charged a fixed percentage discount based on an estimate

Both of these methods made cost effective research training almost impossible because they required associates to mentally apply a discount to hundreds of unknown and undisclosed retail price points.

In an effort to clarify the message to client and simplify cost effective training some firm’s took an innovate approach:

3) Blended rates - A few firms have jumped off the bus and developed their own simplified billing systems which offered a predictable hourly and transactional rate for all files. This allowed lawyers to focus on research quality and relevance and not focus on the totally collateral issue of selecting the cheapest of 1 million options.

The blended rate was based on historical usage patterns. The increased predictability of the blended rate could provide a “win –win” for both the firm and its clients. Firms improve their cost recovery and the effective discount offered to clients improves over time as lawyers become more confident in their ability to predict and control costs.

4) Overhead. A small minority of firms treated the entire cost of online research as overhead. Some firms reverted back to cost recovery after a brief experiment. The dire predictions that all use will become overhead have not yet materialized.

But the flat fee contracts created an opening for clients to object to paying for online research at all... Since partners weren’t prepared to explain their firm’s particular algorithms for cost recovery – it was easier to agree to a write off than to argue. Even good faith attempts by firms to make a fair allocation of these fixed cost was lost if the fog of confusion.

And the Winners Are… The Consultants

The growing complexities of Lexis and Westlaw billing combined with the increased “push back” from clients spawned a cottage industry of “contract negotiators” who charge firms a hefty fee based on a promise to reduce the costs of flat fee contracts. Ironically the approach of some consultants actually causes cost recovery to decline which in turn results in a net increased cost to the firms.

Consultants became part of the problem. Since the majority of consultants have never done legal research and couldn’t tell a precedent from a pretzel, they overlook hidden costs of the contracts they recommend. A contract may reduce the monthly commitment of the flat fee contract while increasing the overall cost to the firm. These costs include, the increased time spent on lawyer training, increased write-offs due to the complexity of the contract and the unpredictability of the client costs erodes partners willingness to pass along the charges.

The Future of Cost Recovery

If cost recovery for online research is to survive at all, it will be as the result of a radical shift to simplicity and transparency. It appears that vendors are getting the message. Bloomberg Law entered the online market with a simplified approach to cost recovery including a limited number of price points and offering content and features which trigger no costs at all. Westlaw Next has dramatically fewer price points than the older Westlaw.com platform. Fastcase and Loislaw have been positioned as lower cost sources of primary law which firms treat as overhead and make no attempt at cost recovery.

All indicators suggest that since clients will continue to resist online research charges, firms will hedge against increased overhead by using one or several of the following strategies; cancelling either Lexis or Westlaw and selecting one major provider; exploring lower cost alternatives such as Bloomberg or Fastcase, or expanding or developing a specialized team of lawyer/librarians and research attorneys who conduct research and deliver the results to the associates and partners.

The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Research Training

2011-05-05T20:28:00.006-04:00

An Alternative title to this post might be “Vendor Sourcing: The Digital Edition.” Like the print issues outlined in my post of February 17th, "Vendor Sourcing: Thinking the Unthinkable...", this post will examine how Lexis and Westlaw pricing strategies have shifted substantial administrative burdens onto their law firm customers which not only drive up administrative costs but have a perversely negative impact on the practice of law.

It’s that time of year again. All across the country academic and firm librarians are flocking to “bridge the gap” programs where they engage in their annual “hand wringing ritual” while trying to develop the right formula for preparing associates to perform cost effective online research in the “real world.” Since most law firms have a unique menu of “included” content, unique pricing plans and unique billing policies for the identical content – academic librarians are faced with the impossible challenge of training students for a universe in which there is likely 100% inconsistency in the pricing and billing policies across the firms where they will be summer associates.

Cost Effective Legal Research Training has become the “Bleak House” of every lawyer training program. It is unsustainably complex, groaning under the weight of its unending convolutions and permutations. A "doom loop" of confusion, errors and omissions.

The inspiration for this post occurred while reading the discussion on brain function and "information overload" in Nicholas Carr's bestseller “The Shallows.” The proverbial “light bulb” suddenly lit up in my brain.

I submit for your consideration and debate, the possible truth of the following axioms:

1. Cost effective research training is a hopeless exercise. Think Prometheus - no matter how much you try to develop a set of cost effective rules, there are simply too many price points, too many exceptions to any rule, and too much transience in pricing. New complications will grow back tomorrow. There is no “still point” in this turning world.
2. Cost effective legal research training is counter-productive. Since there are an infinite number of invisible variables and undisclosed price variations, a lawyer attempting to conduct “cost effective” research is distracted from focusing on substantive legal research.
3. Subscribing to the myth of cost effective research training keeps the focus off the true culprits and keeps us from demanding a real solutions.There is probably no other disbursement that confounds and perplexes law firm partners or causes more embarrassment when posted on a client bill than online research charges. Partners blame librarians for providing insufficient research training, librarians blame associates for not absorbing cost effective research parameters, and associates blame their law schools for failing to prepare them to practice in the real world. Let’s all pivot in unison at point at the true culprits: Lexis and Westlaw.

1. Why Cost Effective Online Research Can Not Be Taught

Between them, Lexis and Westlaw have over 100,000 separately priced data files. Each of these 100,000 files has at least 5 different price points associated with it, including: hourly, transactional, cite checking, find and print, document printing, line printing and image printing. Some files have special charges if they generate reports or have an expandable table of contents. Then overlay this toxic brew with the pricing variations generated by “flat rate” contracts which trigger a special discount for some but not all content. This requires an associate to engage in an additional computation to account for a “firm specific” discount off of the undisclosed price points.

Do the Math: We have been expecting associates to be able to predict and control of costs of a system that involves about half a million undisclosed, possible price points.

The Madness Exposed. Handing an associate a Lexis or Westlaw password and asking them to be “cost effective,” is like handing someone a credit card and sending them into a store in which none of the merchandise is priced and then berating them when the bill comes in exceeding your budget. No consumer affairs department would allow a retailer to perpetrate this kind of thing on the public. How is it that almost every law firm in the US has put up with this for the past 3 decades?

2. Why cost effective research training is counter-productive.

The obsession with being “cost effective” distracts the associate from focusing on the real goal -- finding the right answer. Here comes the brain theory. Effective legal research requires deep focus and concentration yet… “the myth of cost effective research” requires an associate to engage half of their attention on a collateral and competing analysis of factors which have nothing to do with the substance of the law. (Am I in hourly or transactional mode? Is this content included or excluded? Should I print or read online? Should I execute a new search or will that cost too much? Have I selected the cheapest file? Is it cheaper to print by the line or print a page or print a document or should I email the results to myself?)

What about getting a good result for a client? Let me cut to the chase. The truly sinister part of the obsession with “cost effective legal research” training is that it subverts and derails the real purpose of online research: getting to the legal precedents and factual data that impact advocacy for the client. Associates who take the “cost effective gospel” to heart are often paralyzed and confused. They prefer to “Google for precedents” or engage in other outlandish inefficiencies to avoid using the premium research tools altogether.

3. Subscribing to the myth of cost effective research training keeps the focus off the true culprits and keeps us from demanding real solutions.

The bottom line: If Lexis and Westlaw really cared about cost effective legal research they would have developed simplified and transparent billing systems.

I have participated in countless librarian panels and advisory groups sponsored by both Lexis and Westlaw over the past 25 years and we have delivered a consistent demand for simplified and transparent billing systems. Instead of responding to this demand, Lexis and Westlaw have stood back and let us expend countless hours on hopeless training initiatives which were doomed from the start.

Lexis and Westlaw have the power but not the will to make their very complex billing systems open and transparent. When you go to select a file they could display the cost, but they do not. When you are online conducting a research session they could run a ticker showing how much you session has cost, but they do not. They could have a limited number of price points, but they do not.

Killing the Golden Goose.

I do not dispute the there is special value in being able to search databases with the breadth and editorial quality provided by Lexis and Westlaw. An executive at Westlaw recently told me that Westlaw now contains over 2 billion documents, (6 billion if you include public records). It is truly awesome to be able to execute a search across thousands of data sources and get a virtually instantaneous result. I still value the precision and control offered by fielded searching, proximity connectors and Boolean Logic which is not available from the “googlzied” search alternatives.

Premium content combined with premium editorial enhancements is something that clients might be willing to pay for if the costs could be calibrated to value delivered. I do not begrudge Lexis and Westlaw a fair return for their investment, but after 30 years the unchecked expansion in complexity, their billing systems have reached an unsustainable tipping point. They have in effect killed the “golden goose” of cost recovery or at least put it on "life support."

One clearly unintended consequence of escalating costs and complexity has been to expand the ranks of partners and clients who currently refuse to pay for something that if rationally priced would be demanded as a justifiable cost delivering both value and efficiency.

When Lexis and Westlaw deliver simplified and rational billing systems we could actually develop cost effective legal research methods and classes that could prepare associates to perform cost effective research while remaining focused on the real goal: delivering the best result to their client.

Stay tuned for: Cost-Effective-Research-Training- Part Deux: The Past, The Present, The Solutions

American Lawyer Media (ALM) VP Responds to "Dewey B" Strategy Questions

2011-04-21T14:41:00.000-04:00

I am posting the letter I received from ALM, Vice President, Sara Diamond in response to the questions posed in April 18th post: The ALM-Lexis Deal: Stop Hyperventilating and Consider Some Action Items

Dear Ms. O’Grady,

ALM has, as you noted, been making a concerted effort to reach out to the library community as we define, refine, and implement our digital strategy. We appreciate the opportunity to address the community regarding our strategy and encourage you and your colleagues to contact us with any questions or concerns in the future. One of the items we’re currently contemplating is how best to stay in constant, regular touch with the needs and opinions of the librarian community. We, like most publishers, need to work on that and have prioritized it as a goal. Any input you have on how best to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

In response to your questions, please note the following:

• ALM certainly has a longer-term goal of creating a robust, integrated platform that will include news, newsletters, treatises, research products, and more. The first foray in this developmental direction was the integration of several core ALM data sets into a common platform for the New York SmartLitigator, a new regionally-focused research product launched last September. Our future plan includes giving librarians and attorneys the choice of accessing our content either from an integrated ALM platform or, as of May 1st, from LexisNexis. Some of the necessary initial steps we’re undergoing as we move toward this goal of integration include moving our regional Smart Litigator, Law Journal Press Online, and Law Journal Newsletters to a common platform, digitizing all content, standardizing content types across divisions and regions, applying common taxonomies to content, and storing all content in a common content repository. We’ll continue to move aggressively to refine and implement our strategy in the months ahead.

• ALM will be upgrading its news platform to provide custom alerts. The first custom alert will occur with the re-launch of the New York Law Journal website later this year. We will include other custom alerts as we update web sites for other publications. This is certainly on our priority list for development given comments we have heard from librarians and attorneys regarding the usefulness of this feature.

• The individual news publications (e.g., New York Law Journal) will retain only a rolling six-month article archive going forward. Archives beyond the six month period will reside on Lexis. That said, the regional SmartLitigator products being developed by ALM will also include full news archives. The first of these regional products, the recently launched New York SmartLitigator, includes an archive of New York Law Journal articles going back eight years. Similar archives will be available in other regional SmartLitigator products going forward, with the New Jersey Smart Litigator and Pennsylvania Smart Litigator launching later this year.

Librarian questions, concerns, and critiques of our policies are always valuable in helping us shape our plans for the future. We thank you for your interest in ALM and appreciate your comments.

Sincerely yours,

Sara Diamond

Group VP, Substantive Law

ALM

The ALM - Lexis Deal: Stop Hyperventilating and Consider A Few Action Items

2011-04-18T22:34:00.003-04:00

We have been through drills like this before and this is no doubt, not the last content swap between Lexis and Westlaw platforms we will face.

While waiting for some word from Lexis on how ALM content will be priced, I began conducting some internal due diligence. These items might be of interest to others.

Action Items

Check your firm's most recent Westlaw contract and review for a "material change" clause or other clauses regarding the removal of content.
Check your firms' most recent Lexis contract for any language addressing content added during the contact period. However – since this is clearly 3rd party content – I see an "exclusion' coming on.
Request a usage report from Westlaw with an analysis of the last 6 or 12 months of ALM usage from

Identify the ALM content being used (it may surprise you)
Identify the users
Look at the value of the useas an overall percentage of all Westlaw use.

The magnitude of the usage or lack thereof will inform upcoming negotiations.

Managing ALM excluded content after it is on Lexis. Peter Charkalis from Onelog reports that Onelog's next upgrade can provide custom warning screens when researchers try to access excluded content from a system such as Lexis or Westlaw. This custom message can direct resarchers to an alternative platform e.g. the LJP treatises or ALM news rather than using the content on Lexis.

Reviewing the ALM usage report triggered a series of questions regarding ALM's digital strategy which I have outlined below in an open letter to ALM. Although we may not have answers immediately - just posing these questions may assist library leaders in assessing the addition of ALM content to their Lexis contracts.

Dear ALM Executives,

Let me first state how much I appreciate your recent efforts to reach out to many "thought leaders" in the library community to discuss a variety of digital strategy issues. I was willing to sit back and wait for ALM's strategy to unfold but the recent sudden switch of ALM content from Westlaw to Lexis compels an airing of the unsettled ALM issues.

ALM currently has at least 3 digital platforms: the online research platform, the ALM media news platform and the Law Journal Press treatise platform. These all seem to function as stand alone platforms and don't integrate with each other..

So here are my questions.

Does ALM plan to have a robust, integrated platform including ALM news sources, newsletters, treatises and research analytics in the foreseeable future so we can direct most of our use to you and not a 3 party?
Why doesn’t ALM at least upgrade their news platform to provide custom alerts? This functionality has been around for decades. There are very few news products around that don't allow custom alerts. Is this being planned? (Don't look now but relative newcomer Law 360 has just released a custom alerts component).
Does ALM plan to load a complete archive of news publications for subscribers to those news sources? If yes when?
Is there any content that will remain exclusively available on Lexis and not available from any ALM platform for the foreseeable future?

For those of us who are responsible for providing our firm's lawyers with the best content while controlling costs and reducing redundant purchasing of content, the absence of a long term ALM strategy creates a special challenge.I assume I can speak for my colleagues when I say we all look forward to learning about ALM's digital strategy.

Fastcase: Legal Research Enters the 4th Dimension or The Little Engine That Could ...

2011-03-30T17:44:00.011-04:00

...Come up with some Interesting New Tools for Legal Research.

Phil Rosenthal and Ed Walters both former associates from Covington & Burling began developing what they refer to as a smarter alternative to Westlaw and Lexis in the late 1990’s. After a modest amount of angel funding and a decade of development, Fastcase now has more than 500,000 paid subscribers, and partnerships with 20 state bar associations (including DC Bar, Virginia State Bar, and Maryland State Bar Association, and dozens of voluntary bar associations). Their iPhone and iPad app was the 2010 AALL New Product of the Year.

Fastcase has gone beyond caselaw and now includes, news, regulations, statutes and forms. But what caught my attention, was two unique features “Forecite” and “Interactive Timelines” which appear to offer completely fresh approaches to legal research analysis. Both features provide new visual cues for assessing research results. The cost of a subscription to Fastcase is several orders of magnitude below the prices charged by Lexis or Westlaw for comparable primary source material.

But don’t let the low price tag fool you. Phil and Ed have developed some remarkably sophisticated new tools for research analysis which may give them an advantage with the younger generation of lawyers who are more graphically oriented and less textually oriented than prior generations. Some larger firms have also decided it is time to reassess the long term sustainability of maintaining two expensive contracts with Lexis and Westlaw. The ongoing recalibrations in the legal marketplace have created an opening for upstarts like Fastcase and Bloomberg Law to “make their case” that they deserve a serious look.

Phil Rosenthal attributes the inspiration for the Fastcase timeline display to his study of physics and the law. Phil started out as a rocket scientist and entered Harvard Law School because he was interested in space policy. Ed Walters jokes that his practice at Covington & Burling focused on beer and softball. But he also admits to spending some of his time globetrotting between Washington and Brussels at the dawn of the Web, counseling software companies how to stay out of legal trouble in a newly Internet-connected world.

According to Ed "In good software design, one size fits none. We’re big into customization – research history, private libraries, settings, preferences, and views of search results."

Forecite: Seeing the results your search terms don’t retrieve.

This new search feature “Forecite” now in beta, retrieves cases that are heavily cited in the search results but which do not match your keyword search criteria or which fall outside your date restrictions. They are basically running a citation analysis on the retrieved cases and identifying cases that you probably want to look at even though they don’t match your search parameters.

The Interactive Timeline: Thinking Outside the List!

For the past 30 years the dominant way to review search results has been “the list” of relevant cases. A list from a traditional legal research vendor can be sorted in a variety of ways, relevance, date, court hierarchy, but these variables must be assessed sequentially, one at a time. There is also a limit on the size of a list that can display on a screen. The Fastcase timeline can display ALL cases in one visual snapshot. All of these results can be resorted, modified and redisplayed on the fly.

Phil articulates the goal this way. “ It is hard to know if you want to read the full text of a case. Traditional search results are only sorted in one way at a time, so it is hard to determine if you need to look at a case and too often important cases are missed. We make it easy to see four pieces of information about each search result, all at the same time. You can find that critical case right away. You can see trends."

The chart below shows the interactive timeline for court opinions on the topic of “campaign finance.” The 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision Buckley v Valeo, 424 US 1, which upheld campaign finance contribution limits stands out as the largest circle, i.e., the most cited case...cited 2,328 times. I performed special sort on the graph below showing the trends in campaign finance litigation by multiple jurisdictions: Supreme Court, Federal Courts and at the state level. Each circle represents a case, and the size of the circle indicates how often that case has been cited. If you hover over the circle you see the name of the case, the citation, a summary and the number of times cited.

The second timeline at the bottom allows you to readjust the time period displayed in the main chart. The results can be continually refined on the fly.

The Interactive Timeline, although plotted as a two-dimensional graph, actually shows four different pieces of information: 1) Decision date; 2) How many times the case has ever been cited; 3) How many times each case in the list has been cited by the other super-relevant cases in the search result (“cited within results”); and 4) Relevance, based on your specific keyword search. You can customize the view and switch out #4 to display the level of court that issued the opinion (U.S. Supreme Court at the top, lower state courts at the bottom.)You also get an overarching context and trend analysis for the history of campaign finance litigation.

Statutes the Next Frontier: Since Fastcase is pulling statutes from free state websites which are not universally reliable or current (even though published on the states official Websites), I don’t see Fastcase as ready for ‘prime time” in statutory research arena. When I asked Phil about this he responded with knowing grin and said “we’re working on it and we have some really new ideas.” This should be interesting… stay tuned.

Fastcase Phil and Ed in a Fast Car!
________________________________________
A digression on the Fastcase Tesla Roadster VIP Event

In what is surely one of the most unusual marketing tie-in’s I have seen, Fastcase hosted an event at the Tesla Motors sale room in downtown DC this week.

I don’t run in the $100K electric roadster circles and I don’t usually get a chance to zoom around downtown DC with my hair blowing in the wind. And I am not even much of a fast car person but I have to admit: this car rocks. What I learned: Testa's carbon fiber body is hard like steel and flexible like plastic. Zero gasoline. It runs 245 miles per charge and it bolts from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds. (And I had the whiplash to prove it).

So what is the Fastcase and Tesla nexus? I don't know but here is my guess:

• Both offer innovative engines (search and automotive)

• Both are entering a mature market place with game changing assumptions (low cost search and no carbon emissions engine)

Maybe we can get Phil and Ed to raffle that Tesla at their AALL booth in Philadelphia this July.

Dun & Bradstreet Releases Free Japan Disaster Business Search Tool

2011-03-28T17:53:00.000-04:00

Japan News Alert from D&B

D&B has released a free search tool that allows individuals to identify companies that are located in the prefectures impacted by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. This information will help organizations begin to assess their exposure to financial and business continuity risk resulting from the earthquake and tsunami as well as unfolding developments at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Station.

D&B has identified roughly 150,000 businesses in the Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate prefectures. Search tool allows searching by company name or D-U-N-S number. and will provide information on which companies are in the impact zone. Click below to access the free search tool. D&B Japan Disaster Business Search Tool

ALM’s February 2011 Economic Confidence Survey: It’s Never Too Soon For Some Good News.

2011-03-25T01:10:00.002-04:00

American Lawyer Media released its early 2011 Economic Confidence Survey and law firm leaders are significantly more confident than they were only 6 months ago.

Cost saving trends between August 2010 and February 2011:

The number of firms intending to move to less expensive vendors is decreasing
More firms will continue to cut business development spending
Layoffs have reduced but pressure to control salaries and bonuses increased.
Pressure to reduce summer associate program spending is easing up.

Biggest economic challenges include:

Cross-selling to existing firm clients
Responding to cost pressure from clients
Pressure to use Alternative Fee Arrangements

Hiring Compared to August 2010 more firms intend to hire attorneys, but staff hiring appears to be stalled. There is no indication that there will be an increase in staff layoffs.

Profits Per Partner: Partner morale regarding profits per partner increased almost 20% from August with almost 68% of respondents expressing optimism about 2011 profits per partner.

Implications: While this is reassuring news, the lessons of the recession should not be forgotton. Since clients are continuing to be economic pressure on billing arrangments, we will need to continue exploring content licensing arrangements which improve the value proposition for both the firm and clients.

Howrey's Demise: When Being Innovative Isn’t Enough

2011-03-22T04:18:00.002-04:00

Sunday's Washington Post offered a thought provoking post-mortem on Howrey’s demise: Why Howrey could not hold it together.

It is hard not to respect Howrey for their continuous pursuit of innovation. (They also pulled off one of those amazing “only in DC” coups by having a Pennsylvania Avenue address even though they were in a building on E St NW.)

Steven Pearlstein’s story suggests that they were either the first or one of the first law firms to pursue a litany of novel strategies:

Branding themselves and creating a slogan: “In court every day”
Aggressively pursuing a “free agency” growth strategy - - poaching laterals at a time when it was “not done” in a “genetleman’s” profession.
Swapping out the traditional summer associate bacchanal and replacing it with a bootcamp (about a decade before the recession hit)
Opening a offsite ediscovery facility in the suburbs of DC
Opening an office for off-shoring ediscovery in India
Abandoning lockstep pay for associates
Initiating an apprenticeship model for associates

Drum roll please:

In a profession of PC users, Howrey remained a committed Macintosh shop through the 1990’s. According to an April 2000 Law Technology News story Howrey lawyers even posed for a Power Macintosh ad in the mid 1990’s.*

* I confess I tried to find the Howrey PowerMac ad but came up short, but I can instead offer to delight and amaze you with a Youtube montage of Macintosh ads from the late 1990’s. The only lawyer I recognized here was Gandhi. But anyone who was a member of their firm's “Y2K Committee” in the late nineties must see the parody mash up of Hal (from the 2001: a Space Odyssey) and the Y2k bug.

Why is Howrey Gone? Of course the economy was a factor, but Pearlstein cites other recent trends in the law firm marketplace including, the conversion of firms from true partnerships with shared personal risk to “no personal risk” LLPs and LLCs. Pearlstein suggests that the “free agency” model which was responsible for Howrey’s growth was also partially responsible for its demise. The combination of the easy bail out and the LLP/ LLC structure of law firms creates a disincentive for partners to make a commitment to invest years in trying to resurrect a troubled law firm.

Whither Partnerships? or Wither Partnerships? Pearlstein concludes by suggesting that law firms will continue to fail unless they recommit to the traditional partnership model and stop focusing on the pursuit of “profits per partner.” I see evidence of a completely different future. I have recently had two separate conversations with former law school colleagues who are now large law firm partners. Two partners, in two different firms, in two different cities echo the same complaint. They as partners can’t find associates willing to stay with them to pull “all nighters” and work weekends. Both partners independently reported that bright young associates from the best schools refuse to put the practice of law ahead of their personal interests. Furthermore the next generation of associates appears to have no interest in making partner at all. So the bigger question may not be how many firms will continue to thrive but will any firm survive as a partnership if there are no associates grabbing for the “golden ring” of partnership?

Howrey is gone but it’s website lives on:

Howrey's New Model: A Two-Year Associate Apprenticeship (June 2009)

Howrey hits India for "low-cost option" (February 2008)

“Howrey bucks trend with merit pay plan” (July 2007)

Centralization as a Value Strategy

2011-03-15T01:28:00.000-04:00

Maximizing the value of library staff activities can be achieved by enhancing the ability of information professionals to be put to their "highest and best use" in support of client related activities. One key strategy for liberating knowledge professionals to support client work is reducing the volume of administrative work which they must perform or oversee.

I continue to be amazed at the number of large law firms that remain largely decentralized. and which mandate a decentralized library system in which each library is accountable to the local office manager and not aligned to a firm wide information strategy for expanding access to resources at the lowest cost. Decentralization can be a consequence of incomplete merger integration, inertia or a failure to assess the true cost and inefficiencies generated by decentralization.

My recent post on "What is core?" identified library activities which are aligned with the core law firm business activities. The "non-core" activities provide some guidance on library activities which are candidates for centralization.

Core activities such as legal and business research services directly benefit clients and free information professionals to continue expanding the complexity and sophistication of the services they can provide to clients. When these specialized research activities can be billed to clients, the library staff becomes a profit center and the balance shifts in favor of value.
Conversely many of the non-core administrative activities drive up overhead, headcount and cost by remaining decentralized.

Non core activities which are good candidates for centralization are:

• Acquisitions

• Cataloging

• Serials check in

• Routing

• Bill coding and processing

• document retrieval

• Licensing and contract negotiation

• Integrated library system management and deployment

Enhancement of services and value added activities. Some high value projects would be too difficult to implement locally or if implemented locally would not deliver the value of a centralized system. Examples of these high value projects are:

• Implementation of an Integrated Library System and catalog which contains a complete inventory of the firm's resources.

• Increased access to this complete catalog and inventory increases resource sharing among offices and reduces costs of acquisitions.

• Cooperative collection development will allow offices to develop the specialized collections needed for their local practices while relying on other offices to provide access to non-core resources on an “as needed” basis.

• Implementing a catalog which is a virtual library portal with links to full text resources including all titles from an aggregated resources such as HeinOnline and Lexis and Thomson elibraries, can reduce redundancy in print collections. This type of digital library portal provides lawyers with “just in time” access rather maintaining costly “just in case” print libraries.

Centralization and workflow. Centralization can be used to enhance efficiencies. Among the benefits of centralization are:

• Standardization or workflow and the enforcement of “best practices”

• Simplification of processes

• Reducing redundancy

• Continuous training and workflow improvement

Managing Offshore Teams: Everyone Can Win with the Right Approach

2011-03-03T22:51:00.001-05:00

By Cynthia Sullivan

Note: Guest blogger Cindy Sullivan was previously VP of the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology Library at Fidelity Investments in Boston, Ma. Cindy has more than 25 years experience managing libraries in a global financial services organization, including remote library organizations. Cindy’s particular expertise has been focused on the strategic use of technology to deliver library and knowledge services.
CSullivan Strategic Information Management, LLC

A few years ago, I was asked to go to India to recruit and interview a library manager/researcher. This position would be located in our India office which was growing rapidly at that time. I found that networking with other offshore colleagues, was a help in getting a sense of the caliber of candidates that were joining the company. In terms of qualifying a candidate, I developed a detailed job description and identified a list of qualities that were a priority. This proved to be a worthwhile exercise once I was immersed in the many interviews.

At the end of my mission, I was successful in hiring a bright, highly motivated individual that proved to be an asset to the organization. Seeking to make the offshore staff integral to the onshore team, I found that five ingredients were key to success.

1. Open and frequent communication among the teams

2. A detailed training plan for our offshore recruit that was divided among the onshore team in terms of responsibility

3. Standardized templates for publishing final reports/research

4. A repository that allowed for sharing and collaboration

5. Joint objectives that required the onshore staff to work collaboratively on a project with our offshore recruit

Open and regular communications included a weekly staff meeting that required the onshore team to come in an hour early and the offshore team to stay an hour later. This was essential since it provided a seat at the table and identified all participants as equally important to our organization.

A detailed training plan where responsibility was divided among the onshore staff, ensured that everyone had some skin in the game

The standardized templates allowed us to function as one organization producing uniform results regardless of the location.

The repository was key so that we were sharing the results of projects and achieving re-use of the final product.

The joint objectives provided an opportunity to bond the onshore and offshore team with a common goal.

As a manager, trying to keep the organization in synch and functioning as a single team was a challenge. It required thoughtful planning and constant communication. At the end of the day it was all worthwhile. We each experienced a degree of personal growth and were richer for the experience.

Mobile Apps for Law: Who knew there are over 800 legal apps?

2011-03-02T17:54:00.000-05:00

Mobile Apps for Law is brought to us by former big firm library director Arlene Eis, founder of InfoSources Publishing,

Earlier today I was engaged in a discussion with several of my global colleagues about the hypothetical "lawyer of the future." We all agreed that portable and personalized app libraries will be a feature of this future, but none of us can discern the exact timeline or contours of this transformation. Just as I was musing over the possible threshold for this evolution to reach "critical mass," I received an e-mail invitation to subscribe to the first database directory of legal apps. The product is currently discounted to $25 per password.

Who knew there were already over 800 law related apps out there? MAL is a veritable “Wild West” of legal publishing, featuring a wide array of publishers that I have never heard of. Currently MAL covers apps for 8 types of devices including Blackberries, iPhones, iPads, iPods, Adroid/Droid,PocketPC, Palm, and Ereader. The apps are described as being a utility or a research app but I couldn’t find a way to search these separately. Since we all are concerned with information quality, the addition of hyperlinks to product reviews for some products was extremely helpful, but there need to be more! The reviews which I did read appear to focus on the technical functionality of the app and not information quality issues, such as provenance and timeliness of updates.

Humorous, but none-too-reassuring monikers abound: BigTwit Software (I am not kidding)., PDA Wizard, Law on my Phone, Tech Innovations, to name a few. Waffle Turtle Software raised an eyebrow by appearing to conflate the NY CPL (criminal procedure law) with the NY CPLR (civil procedure law). My personal favorite is from the unlikely publisher Loose-leaf Law Publications which offers the "NYPD Policeman’s Patrol Guide." There are some core primary sources available such as titles from the USC, the CFR and a variety of state code volumes. Costs range from almost $1,000 for a bar review course to free for the American Lawyer app.

Conspicuously absent are the major legal publishers. I located 10 Thomson apps, including Black’s Law Dictionary and WestlawNext for iPads. CCH Mobil and American Lawyer apps were included. I couldn’t find anything from Lexis. However since there was no easy way to search by publisher – I may have missed something from one of the majors.

Searching: lots of options - keyword, Boolean, legal topic, device and jurisdiction.

App Description: Each entry provides detailed information, including: title, publisher, description, subjects, price, devices, version, size, last update date, links to reviews and finally, a link to the app store or URL where you can download the app immediately to your device.

My wish list:

Publisher information: Who are these people? I would like to be able to search by publisher and also get some background on the updating policy for the app as well as the source of the content.
Updating A"last updated" date appears for many but not all apps. No indication of how you would get continuous updates after you purchased the apps. Are you entitled to updates as the law in amended? Do you get updates for a year?
Publisher and app rating system: I would like to see some sort of user rating system to be included like you get on hotel sites… “beds were lumpy, but a great location”.
More reviews from information professionals: It is great to know about the functionality and features are but our risk management mission dictates that we have a better assessment of quality.

Wither app-land?

By analogy, if MAL was providing the roster for a music festival, what you would see is a list of "garage bands" and wonder where the headliners are. So let’s do the math. There are over 800 apps and fewer than 20 are from major legal publishers. That is less than 2% of legal"app market share." We know that won’t last long. The challenge ahead for those of us who manage the acquisition of information resources for large organizations, will be to work with publishers to develop licensing, pricing and updating schemes that allow wide deployment at a reasonable price without compromising quality.

Thanks to Arlene for providing some insight into the current configuration of the legal app landscape.

PS: Arlene - when will you be releasing the "Mobil Apps for Law" App?

Outsourcing, Outrage or Opportunity? What is Core?

2011-02-25T08:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I co-presented the Keynote "debate" at the Ark conference on Best Practices &
Managenent Strategies for Law Firm Libraries and Information Centers. The program was moderated by Marsha Pront, Librarian and Senior Consultant from Integrated Management Services. My debate partner Ron Friedmann who blogs at Prisim Legal and is a VP at outsourcing provider Integreon, pointed out that there has been an upward trend in professional services firms choosing to outsource "non-core" functions. Prior to the conference, I conducted a survey of attendees and asked them to consider which functions or services provided by their library/knowledge center were "core" to the law firm.

The definition: For purposes of the survey we defined a core business activity as one that supports the strategic value of either the product delivered to the firm's clients or is core to the growth and development of the business.

The chart below can be used as an informal benchmark for assessing how the various functions in your organization might be viewed by firm management.

Respondents overwhelmingly viewed research and research related activities as more core to the business of law than most back office activities.This makes complete sense, since research is core to the practice of law. Research Management was rated as core by 100% of the respondents. There are clear exceptions in both research and technical servicers. The only "technical services" function which received a high "core" rating was the acquisitions function. Document retrieval which is a research function, was viewed as "non-core" by about half the respondernts. But many libraries are ahead of the curve here. Many of the functions which were rated as non-core have been completely or partially out-sourced for years. These functions include, loose-leaf filing, shelving, cataloging, document retrieval and subscription management. The important takeaway here is that in the current economic environment, Library and Knowledge Services leaders would be well served to be prepared for a discussion on outsourcing by considering the range of core and non-core services they provide.

Centralized Licensing as a Risk Management Strategy

2011-02-22T13:10:00.002-05:00

In talking to large and midsize law firm colleagues, I am somewhat amazed at the level of decentralization that is supported and sometimes mandated by the larger firm organization.

There are obvious benefits in having local staff available for “high touch” projects and to provide special expertise in supporting practice and jurisdictional research. But the cost control and risk management implications of remaining totally decentralized cannot be ignored.

As law firm mergers increase in frequency and size, and as law firms expand their footprints across the country and around the world, librarians may be the only professionals in the organization focused on the magnitude of the copyright and licensing risks facing a firm if they do not review, combine, resize and renegotiate their licenses to fit the workflow and access needs of the lawyers they support.

Librarians are acutely aware of the $20 million dollar judgment against Legg Mason which arose from a misguided attempt by an administrative department (not the library) to save money by purchasing a single license to a newsletter and then posting it on the organization’s intranet for wider consumption. Lowry's Reports, Inc. v. Legg Mason, Inc., 271 F. Supp 2d 737; retrial denied Lowry's Reports, Inc. v. Legg Mason, Inc. 302 F Supp 2d 455.

As the Internet has expanded and the risks of piracy and misappropriation have grown, publishers have crafted licenses with increasingly restrictive language. By squeezing out all risk to the publisher these un-negotiated licenses almost squeeze out all value to the subscriber.

If a firm has three offices and three separate, geographically restricted licenses, this does not equal a firmwide license. A lawyer in California may not have the right to share digital content with a lawyer in NY who is under a separate license for the same content.

Centralized licensing does trigger the benefits of “economies of scale” for the pricing for most digital resources. A firmwide license can be negotiated to provide one click access via IP recognition at a lower cost. Conversely, the “law of increased overhead” also applies to the de-centralized approach. Not only do you pay more for less access to content, you pay for the additional management and staff time that must be invested in negotiating multiple licenses, managing passwords for individual users, and addressing needs of lawyers who are denied access to resources.

There are also strategies for negotiating limited firmwide licenses. After assessing the needs of a user group, the benefits of a full firmwide license (IP recognition) can be achieved by negotiating for a “simultaneous user license.” This eliminates the risk of password sharing and the overhead of password management, by simply limiting the number of people who can access a resource simultaneously. This works well for specialized resources that have a low volume of use but which are needed in multiple offices.

Products like Onelog, Research Manager and Lookup Precision can also provide a powerful management tool for, restricting unauthorized access while also managing individual passwords and measuring the volume of use of both small and firmwide licenses. Reports from these services can provide important leverage license renewal negotiations.

"Vendor Sourcing" : Thinking the unthinkable as a strategic alternative to outsourcing

2011-02-17T00:51:00.000-05:00

The new economics of the legal industry dictate that Law Library Directors and CKOs must seek strategic alignment with their firms by considering bold new thoughts on how and what we manage. We need to step back and identify the causes and sources of inefficiency within our organizations. Some processes and assumptions are so entrenched that it is sometimes difficult to discern the contours of the problem - let alone the solution.

Let's face it; we have for too long made our administrative processes subservient to the idiosyncrasies of individual publishers. This disparate collection of operational inefficiencies makes our organizations vulnerable to outsourcing. The LPO pitchmen are at the CEO’s door. We need to take the lead in considering all options for maximizing the efficiency of our organizations, including outsourcing. But before we outsource we need to ask more fundamental questions. Rather than paying a third party to take over “the obsolete and the inefficient,” shouldn’t we first consider the option of “vendor sourcing?”

I define “vendor sourcing” as a process by which we shift the cost of vendor generated inefficiencies or the inefficient processes themselves, back to the publishers.

Large vendors routinely articulate the benefits of “partnering” with our firms. I have outlined below several significant “partnership “opportunities which have been largely overlooked. The prospect of “vendor sourcing” might expedite the industry's transition to a more efficient business model for the acquisition and distribution of information resources.

Publishers verbally profess their support for the value of law librarians while simultaneously enmeshing our organizations in a host of unsustainable business methods. I find special irony in noting that one major publisher has acquired an LPO business and is selling process improvement to lawyers while its print publishing operation is guilty generating some of the back office inefficiencies afflicting law firm libraries.

While publishers have made enormous strides in making vast stores of digital content available, we still remain tethered to print publications due to a combination of generational and research style preferences, as well as technical and cost considerations. The administrative overhead generated by acquisitions and management on print resources (space, filing, claiming, invoice coding and processing) cries out for reinvention or elimination.

Let's take a look at a few of the opportunities for “vendor sourcing”:

Loose-leaf filing. Have you looked at what you are paying for the filing of loose-leaf updates and wondered by human beings are still engaged in this activity? What could possibly explain the survival of this costly and mind numbing 19th century process in the 21st Century? Would publishers still be supporting this model if we shifted the cost of the loose-leaf filers back to them? Maybe we should consider calculating the cost of maintaining each title and deduct that amount from the invoice price to be paid. E-books have existed for decades as an experiment and novelty in legal publishing - but only a handful of core legal titles are available for the growing army of Ipad toting lawyers. We are clearly reaching a watershed moment of opportunity for both publishers and law librarians to develop new models for pricing and distribution.

Billing and shipping errors. Several years ago I did a workflow study of my technical processing department. The data showed that one week of staff time was spent each month on resolving billing and ordering issues. What does this statistic suggest about the scale of inefficiency tolerated by publishers in their own organizations? A cost which is no doubt passed on to us as price increases! For years I have wondered by we don’t charge vendors for the cost of the staff time spent resolving, billing, shipping and claiming errors.

Bill processing and coding. Even when there is no error in the bill, the routine process of managing and coding invoices is an enormous undertaking. Law firm practice groups are now organized into financial business units and costs are no longer lumped into a single library budget. Managing and assessing practice group expenditures requires the repeated coding of thousands of invoices with numerous general ledger permutations for each office and practice group. More than a decade ago when a major publisher launched a customer “dashboard” for managing acquisitions and subscriptions, (which I applauded) I suggested that they allow customers to enter our general ledger and practice group codes for each publication in the dashboard so the invoices would arrive “pre-coded.” This would eliminate the repetitive re-coding every time an invoice was received. I am still waiting.

I was initially skeptical of the “flat fee print” LMA contracts which publishers offered to make pricing more predictable. I now believe that their greatest value may lie in elimination of paperwork and staff time spent processing hundreds of invoices. I have now successfully negotiated for two major vendors to provide a pre-coded spreadsheet from which we can upload all billing and general ledger details for our annual subscriptions. I have yet to see this embraced as an industry standard.

Forced bundling of print and digital content. I regard this as one of the most outrageous practices by publishers because it completely disregards the right of the law firm to manage its own resources and work flow. It is also decidedly not “green.” Years ago when a major publisher refused to let the firm cancel a loose-leaf serial publication that was no longer needed, my staff arranged to have the weekly updates shipped to the vendor’s sales rep (who sympathized with our position although his employer did not). Why should my staff have to continually handle and dispose of unnecessary updates? But the more troubling implication was that the vendor was so “fat and happy” they preferred to continue printing and shipping things that were destined for the landfill “at birth.”

The American Association of Law Libraries will be hosting a colloquium with the major legal publishers. Let us hope the discussion goes beyond nibbling around the edges of the old problems and someone actually "moves the cheese" into the 21st Century.

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