I linked recently to Ben Thompson’s post ‘The End of Average’, detailing his views on the future of ‘news’. That post was part of a 3 article series by Thompson on “the state of journalism in the internet age”. In a post on LexBlog, Kevin O’Keefe links to the final part of that series, 'Newspapers are Dead; Long Live Journalism'. O’Keefe then applies Thompson’s analysis to the world of legal publishing, coming up with his own hypothesis:

“Insight and commentary on the law (secondary law) will be a small endeavor. A single lawyer or small group of lawyers will blog on a narrow niche they practice in. The tighter the niche the better. Distribution will be free and open. Social publishing via sharing by others across social media will play as big a role as publishing on the blog itself. More general treatises and journals that have served as secondary law will decline in importance.

Monetization for legal blogs will come from the fact that law blogs are free and open. Lawyers will enhance their reputations and build relationships like never before. Becoming a “go to” lawyer by virtue of bogging enables lawyers to realize sizable earnings. There will be no need to monetize legal commentary behind subscription based paywalls of large legal publishers.

Legal news and reporting, with a focus on investigative reporting, will likely be done by smaller streamlined news organizations. LexisNexis’ Law360 and an evolving Law.com will play a roll. You’ll also see original reporting from blogs and legal networks such as LexBlog’s LXBN.”

I think I agree with most of those points. In the wider academic community (particularly scientific journals) there is an increasing drive towards open-access publishing, and it is hard to imagine the legal world not following, sooner or later.

I do however have two problems with O’Keefe’s conclusions.

First, lawyers value authority above all. They are - entirely understandably - scared of being wrong, because the stakes are so often so high. They therefore need to be sure that what they are advising their clients is correct, and if it isn’t, they need to be able to point a finger. That is what law firms pay companies like LexisNexis and Westlaw for - to be right, and if not right, then to be a scapegoat.

Second, O’Keefe appears to be considering only the market for legal commentary and journals. In the UK (and likely very soon in the US), there is a rapidly accelerating demand for practical legal guidance. This type of content - checklists, flowcharts, precedents - is necessarily basic and therefore quite boring to write. Why would any of O’Keefe’s expert, “narrow niche” bloggers want to churn out ‘how-to’ documents unless they were being directly remunerated for doing so? Whilst there is a demand for these basic type documents, legal bloggers won’t feel the customer need because - in O’Keefe’s market vision - they won’t have any ‘customers’.

I think it is highly likely that O’Keefe is right, and that some aspects of legal publishing will become freely available - a change driven by the legal blogging community. Indeed, this is a change that is already well progressed - it is not so long ago that you had to pay to view government legislation, and BAILLI are doing their best to make cases free too. I think it very likely that the market for closed, costly legal journals will shrink, to be replaced by expert bloggers writing as a means to boost business development. I just don’t think that the change will be as cataclysmic as either O’Keefe or Thompson suggest.

Disclaimer:

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a while, and I’ve been struggling to write it because it has a very direct bearing on my actual grown-up job. I was worried that I was part of the industry Kevin talks about, and that therefore my view was a biased one. I’ve thought a lot about it and decided that, as far as I can tell, I’m not being biased at all, and that actually my view is made more well informed by my work, not less.