The vogue for several years in the major commercial legal publishing houses has been to offer data through "global platforms" that give the customer a single point of access to all of their proprietary and licensed content. A global platform enables the publisher to "leverage" its proprietary content from one country by selling it in another. In addition to expanding the scope of the product offering, a global platform offers an opportunity for online revenue growth by transactional and subscription sales of international content in the various domestic markets.
It all sounds like a great idea, especially in the boardrooms where executives are looking for "innovative ideas" that will generate double digit growth and enhance shareholder value, but also with customers looking for easy access to international content.
The Canadian market for international content
The starting point with any product idea should be the customer. In the case of international legal content, assessing the worth of such an idea is made more complicated by customer feedback. In the case of access to online information, everyone you ask about access to international content will say that they want or need access to more and more legal information.
The real question to ask is what, if anything, is the customer is prepared to pay for the additional content.
Existing sales patterns
In the Canadian market, there is a significant amount of hard data available to commercial publishers regarding both the nature of the content and the price which Canadian legal researchers are prepared to pay for international legal information. U.K. publishers have sold British and Commonwealth publications in Canada for more than a century. Our first legal publications came from the United Kingdom. U.S. publishers have been around for a few decades, as have the major French publishers.
The first point to note about sales patterns is that "international content" is purchased in Canada primarily for use in the domestic market. Purchases are made based upon the utility of the content as it relates to the practice of law in Canada. Very few customers want or need to know the law of another jurisdiction for its own sake. For that reason, usage has largely been restricted to caselaw, a handful of legal subjects such as intellectual property and securities law, and major sets of forms and precedents.
The second point worth mentioning is that usage is declining. With the development of Canadian jurisprudence and the growth of a large body of Canadian legal literature, the demand for international content has fallen year by year. The ready availability of that content online may provide a temporary spurt of interest in international content but it will not make it any more relevant than it was before. In that context, one has to wonder whether the investment in global platforms was really worth it in light of the explosion of free services, the fast pace of technological change, and the hard information available about demand for international content.
Impact of global platforms displacing domestic platforms
The initial response to the idea of a global platform was very positive. The assumption was that Canadian businesses would have access to superior technology and ready access to expertise that would ensure market leadership for Canadian legal content in the Canadian market if product development was left in the hands of experts from abroad.
Experience, however, has shown that the benefits of global platforms were overrated. The complexity of the task of integrating Canadian content was greater than was expected and the time to market slow. Product specifications had to reflect the needs of more than one jurisdiction and direct contact between foreign based software developers and Canadian customers was limited. Uniquely Canadian requirements such as dual language screens and the blending of the English and French language were never really understood.
For the major commercial legal publishing houses, the result has been the loss of flexibility and the relatively long development time required for new product initiatives. Product enhancements now wait in a global queue. Many product initiatives need to be developed for more than one market in order to be economically viable. Added to these factors is almost certainly a reluctance to invest in light of the economic downturn.
Innovation in the Canadian market
There is a silver lining. At the same time as the time and effort was being spent by the large publishers in creating and building global platforms, truly innovative ideas were being developed in the Canadian market from the smaller players such as Maritime Law Book (Raw Judgments), Canada Law Book (Best Case), Irwin Law (E-Book Platform) and CANLII/LexUM(New Legislation Information System). The new products they have launched in recent months can all be expected to have a significant impact on the market for legal information in Canada.
While useful to customers, the time and effort spent in creating global platforms for legal information may prove to have less utility than the made-in-Canada solutions for legal researchers mentioned above. In the not too distant future, a level playing field may be restored and the market no longer dominated by two or three big players. Not a bad outcome after all is said and done.
