Missing out on new legal information markets?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Traditional law firms and legal publishers risk missing out on a potentially huge and lucrative self-help legal information market – because they don’t see one – according to a new report from Outsell.  It’s a timely warning – but events are moving so fast that it may be too late for established vendors to even run to catch up.

The warning comes from Outsell analyst David Curle, in a blog posting to accompany his new report on Self-Help Legal Information Services: Business Models and Market Trends.  Existing players pull in about $664 million in revenue at the moment, but Curle reckons there’s a huge latent market as well, and examines some 30 players who offer self-help legal information to individuals and small businesses.

Particularly alarming from the established players’ point of view – whether law firms or information vendors – is Curle’s belief that disruptive technology is seizing the opportunity precisely because the Establishment doesn’t see it.  He cites disruption guru Richard Susskind, who has said in the past that technology-based solutions could render conventional legal advice redundant – and now it looks as if it’s starting to happen.

This isn’t to say that established legal, tax and regulatory information providers don’t continue to innovate furiously in their attempts to become ever more useful to their customers.  In March alone, we’ve seen Wolters Kluwer launch a new copyright blog (scroll down to 10 March release), LexisNexis announce Lexis Advance for Associates as the next tool on its New Lexis technology platform, and Thomson Reuters announce the enhancement of its Onesource WorkFlow Manager, a core component of its global tax workstation.

One reason these competitors are having to run so hard may be the arrival last year of Bloomberg Law.  Bloomberg certainly continues its expansionary efforts in several directions (most recently in its Indian financial services operation) – but its products are certainly no freebies, and there are other factors at work here as well.

One disruptor Curle cites is the rise of free and “pretty good” self-help sites and guides from courts, law libraries and other non-profit entities.  There’s likely to be plenty more of this in the future as governments increasingly release legislative, regulatory and judicial content, originally created at taxpayers’ expense, for others to exploit (see for example LiveWire’s take on this).

Now the British government has gone a stage further, announcing at the start of this year plans for a new Public Data Corporation, where government data will be concentrated for ease of access by developers.  It won’t all necessarily be free, the government warns, but that still doesn’t mean that disruptive newcomers won’t be able to find new self-help markets for it – and undercut the established players at the same time.

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