One of the most stimulating and pleasing roles I have, is to be involved with very small numbers of students on Kingston University’s Publishing Masters’ degree, as a supervisor of dissertations and on the advisory board for the course. There are a number of such courses in the UK, including those at City University and University College, both in London, where I have informal links to academics running the courses. I speak to them frequently about their developments.

Over the past several years, such courses have grown, drawing in students from around the world in order for them to achieve publishing qualifications of an academic character. Their numbers and popularity would certainly suggest a need that is being satisfied. Industry support and sponsorship, an important and pleasing one being the establishment at UCL of the David Tebbutt Scholarship, indicate that both students and publishing businesses are receiving value.

Generally the UK courses lead to the awarding of Masters’ degrees but the focus differs somewhat from one to another. Some lean more towards the link between publishing and creative writing, others towards the practicalities and understanding of the business and financial aspects of the publishing industry. Some deal more than others with the relevant legal issues and some, perhaps to justify their academic aspirations, spend time on the history and culture of publishing.

Personally, I've never been particularly seduced by the history of books and publishing, nor seen it especially as a topic for academic study. To that extent, it's hard to put myself in the mindset of a bibliophile whose interests of those kinds encourage them to study publishing. Admittedly, much the same can be said about my ignorance of and indifference to the wizardry of evolving technology being developed to deliver content. As with cars, I like choosing, owning and driving them but couldn't care less what goes on under the bonnet. I think that the historical aspects, as well as the story of the technical evolution ones might appeal greatly to some but not others.

I am led to believe that, not in huge numbers but visibly so, legal and professional publishers welcome incoming staff with publishing qualifications and that people with legal and similar backgrounds are studying on publishing courses in order to advance or create their careers in those branches of the industry.

In my own case, a necessary educational background in order to do my first job in legal publishing was in having a reasonable law degree. Like many such courses, mine introduced me to the main sources, institutions and personnel of the legal system and used a variety of exercises to develop relevant skills. It taught how to develop case analysis skills through practical exercises, demonstrating an understanding of the techniques of precedent, as well as how to read statutes and understand judicial approaches to statutory interpretation. I learned how to use a law library and gained effective research skills with the ability to access primary and secondary sources and value their relative authority. With these fundamentals, one was well equipped to tackle the initial requirements of a legal editor role, with further on-the-job and structured training to help grow into a specialist publisher.

Where the balance lies is open to debate but I wonder if, to some extent, we confuse education with training and mix them up in unhelpful ways. To me at least, when thinking about the achievement of a post-graduate degree, it’s difficult to put the mechanics of the publishing trade in the same category as philosophy, politics, economics or even law. One such category appears to me to have the purpose of educating and learning how to learn, while the other is about how to get and hold down a job. It may well be, however, that the position, as it seems to have evolved, results in or is caused by a diminution in the amount of structured training being provided by publishing employers themselves, having outsourced the effort and cost to potential employees, who, as with internships, pay to be trained for the jobs to which they might aspire. In my view, the excellent Publishing Training Centre in London and other similar institutions are the sorts of places where employer-funded and industry-oriented training can be provided, complementing academic education that is required as a basis for work and life. We see much about the extent to which, actually or allegedly, the major professional publishers appear to be investing less on in-depth knowledge, skills and training and the potential impact on their reputations and the quality of their output.

Another concern I have is that the M.A. (or perhaps even MBA) route for the provision of job training, to a greater extent than they provide opportunity for academic study, is that these are expensive routes to finding careers and are there primarily for the children of the richer and more privileged. While I await the voices of protest at a statement that is clearly generalist, it might be that for those with access to large sums of money and with time on their hands, a year of job preparation, possible abroad, is a pleasant use of both.

As with most things, the answer lies somewhere between the extremes and a recognition that more learning, education and training, whatever the circumstances, should be seen as a good thing, as we know the opposite to be simply wrong. Having recently attended a training day to support the process of student supervision, I was reminded strongly that the real virtue of study, whether for training or more pure education, is to prepare for life skills, for which the discipline of the structured thesis is unchallengeable. If work is the practice and publishing training is the mid-level theory, such as it exists, then the mix has to be positive.

The news of PLC being acquired by Thomson Reuters might, I hope, be encouraging for those who believe that appropriate and well-trained staff members are critical for success in professional publishing. This is an area in which particularly PLC appears to have placed emphasis and now we are seeing management changes, including the removal of a number of people. It remains to be seen, with a new boss and senior people, many from the PLC side, if they will introduce all the benefits of the innovative business, while not being over-zealous in ignoring or diminishing the familiar publishing model. Conversely, others take different views on the management of quality and of editorial resources.

The recent news of PLC being acquired by Thomson Reuters is a most significant indicator of change and direction, certainly inasmuch as it affects the state of play competitively in the UK.

Finally Thomson Reuters, in its Sweet and Maxwell and Westlaw UK guises, has woken up to a world that combines a deep commitment to electronic delivery of primary and secondary content, with related workflow in the form of guidance and documentation driven by clever software. This, alongside the timely new launch of Westlaw UK Insight, seems to me to take the UK business, in one leap, to a new and higher level. It appears to have been a long time in coming, Sweet and Maxwell having looked relatively sleepy for almost a quarter of a century. However, I believe that the new developments indicate a new beginning. That said, there are those who would predict, though, that a business like Thomson Reuters may be of a character that will destroy the innovative spirit of PLC in order to make it fit with the parent company. I hope that is not the case. One might imagine that the new combination, inspired by PLC’s proud and undoubtedly justifiable boasts about product and service quality, will see potential for competitive growth built upon that and it’s capacity for innovation, combined with Thomson Reuters legacy UK and international content.

Lexis Nexis UK also seems to be in an exciting period of change, having launched LexisPSL, with its ability, for deeper research, to link to cases, legislation and commentary in LexisLibrary and its timing might be just right, according to their own research and PR.

With these two competitors at this present stage of their evolution, it feels like an important time, perhaps as in the late 1980s, when the looseleaf era had reached its peak and most of the information gathering had been done in optimistic anticipation of an electronic age to come. This was, sadly, in my view, prior to some of the disappointment at the following period brought, in terms of profitability, growth and unmet expectation. It would be pleasing to imagine that the era of poor customer service in some instances and, despite some examples of great innovation, many areas of conservatism, that reflects fear of change, market ignorance and protection of historic profits are over.

A question, or perhaps a downside, might be about whether or not this puts the two market leaders so far ahead of their UK competitors that the latter have become barely visible and irrelevant, with nowhere useful to go. The main one that comes to mind has to be Wolters Kluwer UK, with its two main brands, CCH and Croner. I imagine that revenue there is dropping still and the focus has been only on margin. Perhaps areas such as general management, customer service and market intimacy are relevant factors. When these are in good shape, good things happen. At CCH UK the period 2002-2009 was, I believe, one of modest sales growth and very respectable profit growth that had been preceded by relentless losses and decline. Managing the product and knowing the market had a lot to do with success but these days I see little evidence of competitive product development and innovation. WKUK has appointed the WK Southern Europe CEO, effectively part-time, to head the UK company, which may support a view that it’s being managed for disposal. It would not be surprising at all if the Croner part were a sell-off candidate, perhaps to a local competitor like Peninsula, Alcumus or to current or previous local management.

In my view, CCH UK has little hope of real growth and I think that at some stage it too will be acquired, ideally by Thomson Reuters to give the latter a UK tax/accountancy business. CCH is arguably No.2 in the UK tax market but its decline, while under Wolters Kluwer, appears to me to be inevitable. Another potential acquirer might, of course, be Bloomberg.

In truth, given the relative significance or Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier and not forgetting the potential of Bloomberg, I believe that a good solution would be the acquisition of or merger with Wolters Kluwer, or certainly its legal and regulatory, tax and accounting and financial and compliance components. I don’t think it would go to one new owner. In the UK, Thomson Reuters would hardly be in trouble with the authorities by gaining a tax/accountancy business, whereas Reed Elsevier might be. It’s the reverse in N. America. In my view, real benefits come from a combination of the Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer assets outside N. America, where there is less competition between the two companies, both of which would see Lexis Nexis as the key competitor in those markets. Equally, in Europe, I could see it being split up or maybe combining in the medium term with Editions Francis Lefebvre-Sarrut (Frojal) until the whole entity is acquired by Bloomberg.

Not too long ago, Ian Whittaker at Liberum Capital produced a research report suggesting that Reed Elsevier be broken up or they should sell Lexis Nexis. He saw Bloomberg as a potential buyer for Reed’s business if it wanted to build scale If Bloomberg did want to expand its presence in the law market – which it has given indication that it wants to do – then buying Reed’s assets would be a very quick and effective way of building its presence. Liberum saw price between £1.3bn and £5bn.

Below the three or four major companies, there remains a great deal of opportunity and maybe likelihood of movement. The one that looks most interesting to me is Bloomsbury Professional, which is, in my view, less strong that it should be in law publishing but becoming quite a competitor to CCH in tax. Some time ago, Bloomsbury started to license its content to PLC to back up the latter’s more workflow/journalism/documentation approach. Now, of course, I doubt if PLC will have much need for Bloomsbury as a content provider. So, either they let their agreement with Bloomsbury reach the end of its contract life, which might be a significant blow to the smaller business, or they might just bring them into Thomson Reuters, gaining some nice ex-Lexis-Nexis content, including its impressive Irish and Scottish portfolios.

If it were a board game of some kind, it would be both easy and fun to play but of course it is not, as real people and careers are at stake. In the responsibility-free fantasy world, one might see other tidying up that might precede the evolution towards a Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Lexis world. Perhaps Bloomsbury Professional would first build on its legal publishing side and acquire Hart Publishing (which has recently entered into a content licensing arrangement with LexisNexis UK) and/or Jordans and/or Globe Law and Business. Maybe one of the big players would persuade business-to-business publisher, Informa to focus on its core strengths and sell Informa Law. Then there is Justis, despite its reliance on others for its content. Another idea might be for the important university presses, OUP and CUP, for put their efforts into scholarly publishing and dispose of their practitioner and professional publishing portfolios.

Like it or not, even apart from the PLC acquisition, consolidation in its various forms seems to be rife at present. This is increasingly evidenced by the recent depressing news of redundancies everywhere. Further change is inevitable.

When recruiting new people into legal and professional publishing, while, obviously, scrupulously complying with and respecting the requirements of the law, both in letter and spirit, it has always been of interest to observe the motivation of applicants.

Among those who present themselves with specific academic or professional backgrounds, such as a law degree, an accountancy or tax qualification or who are legally qualified, occasionally one hears that the reason that they have applied is that things haven’t worked out well in the pursuit of some other career path. Perhaps the professional examination results have not been successful. Perhaps family budgets have not been sufficiently resilient to underpin professional training and the early days of practice. Perhaps the rigours of professional practice are thought to be greater than those of publishing and that the latter will be more adaptable to a work-life balance. Perhaps publishing, wrongly, reminds people of their cherished days in academic life.

It’s hard to feel a warm glow of affection and expectation for these people, particularly if one has targeted professional publishing for one’s own career and is proud to define oneself primarily as a publisher.

I recall a former colleague, now a valued friend, some months after beginning his professional publishing career, looking skywards to ask “have I died and gone to heaven?”, such was the personal pleasure he found deriving from the job. Many years later, he is still doing it and is deservedly perceived as something of a guru of his trade. His early enthusiasm was justified, as he found himself doing challenging and rewarding work, for which he was eminently qualified and in which his contribution was and is huge.

Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary for someone entering professional publishing to be a stereotypical Renaissance man or woman. I have never looked at the publishing industry with excessive emotion and love, particularly of books. I've been much happier collecting and then selling content to professionals who can add value and profit from it. The elements of publishing I like are to do with the business/commercial side and in knowing about specialist types of content and the exploitation of it. Being in areas like law and tax, as with any specialist discipline, I've always enjoyed playing a part in those worlds, so I guess it's about digging deeply into target markets. A published view on these matters that I endorse to a significant extent is by Colin Walsh, in his article, The Snobbery of Publishing.

I don’t see it as a vocation or profession in itself. However, like any other trade, professional publishing is one into which committed people invest their skills to build, in some cases, lifetime careers. The problem is, again, I suppose, as elsewhere, that it’s unusual to see the investment delivering long-term rewards. Not in every case, but with disturbing frequency I hear of the irrational disposal of highly talented and committed employees at senior and junior levels. Issues of short-term cost-cutting to save the bacon of others, to cover up the outcomes of strategic and tactical errors, for reasons of apparent ageism and as an attempt desperately to hang on to profitability as revenue collapses, seem to prevail. It is so predictable to see these events enacted around the end of each financial year, as subsequent year budgets are submitted, with new promises and myths. I shall not forget a serious strategic planning conversation, when a particular finance director’s solution to the problems of the day was to propose another restructure, admitted to be of no value in itself but in order to buy a further year and have a new business plan accepted by the parent company. I know that this is a most common approach.

I find it amusing, in a tragic sort of way, that if a person working in professional publishing has done about 20 years or so in the trade and in gainful employment, they find themselves being referred to by their peers as “a survivor”. To find anyone at a middle or senior level in the office at or near normal retirement age tends to be quite unusual indeed. No doubt there are many reasons for this but as one senior and high-achieving executive said to me, having seen his own successful career suddenly halted, “Last week, apparently, I was smart. I didn’t suddenly get stupid!” While I have no doubt that these are phenomena that increasingly apply in all areas of work and industries, I suspect that some are saner than others. I mentioned this recently, in a consultancy meeting I had with a number of fund managers and investors who were focused on the professional publishing sector, suggesting that such fears and anxieties ought to be a matter of concern for and about the industry. I suppose I should have anticipated the dismissive shrugs, with responses of, “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? They’re probably just bitter and disgruntled”. Of course I had to acknowledge that to some extent this has to be the case.

I think, however, it’s more complicated and worrying than that. In my view there is a real duty to hire people extremely cautiously, slowly and with the application of rigorous financial and other standards but, in consequence, to be equally careful when it comes to bringing careers to a halt or an end. Otherwise we create jobs, not careers and an industry full of uncommitted, nervous, poorly-qualified passers-by, which, in the opinion of some, is the state of legal and professional publishing today.

The era of jobs for life, whether or not it ever really existed, is clearly gone. For my part I would shed no tears as the concept seems, for countless reasons, to be pretty unhealthy. Nevertheless, if, at the outset, the otherwise enthusiastic and talented potential entrant, after rational analysis, sees that it is too dangerous to contemplate a sustainable professional publishing career, the sort of recruitment problems faced by the Catholic Church in Ireland might become the norm. The law demands that employers should act fairly and reasonably in these matters and with good reason for all concerned. One has to recognise and argue in favour of duties on both sides, including those on employees to be diligent, to perform to the best of their abilities and be flexible and capable of change. Furthermore, I support the idea that, with exceptions, it is the purpose of commercial entities to optimise profits and grow. On those assumptions, it would be a shame to think that work which can be as dynamic, rewarding, challenging and pleasurable as professional publishing might be viewed as leading to dead-end careers.

That said, it’s good occasionally to note some pleasant “tart with a heart” gestures from this normally not too generous industry, this time from Lexis Nexis UK. For different reasons, it’s great to see an impressive initiative from the place I learned such basic professional publishing skills as I have, Sweet and Maxwell.

There have been times, as a legal and professional publisher, when I have mused on a life without troublesome and quirky authors who take holidays, have families and sometimes put their professional work before their writing commitments. I speculated as to how it would be in an entirely automated world in which the nature of the problem was entered into one end of the over-sized computer and out the other emerged the single correct answer, as was seen in films of a bygone era. Expressed in books, perhaps each chapter or topic would end with “the answer, therefore, is XYZ”

In reality, of course, I have never wanted this. The personal need for improving salary cheques is unlikely to be satisfied in a world of such simplistic certainty and one in which added value and expertise are key differentiators and a basis for improved pricing for publishers and billing for customers. One encounters the evidence frequently that the market agrees and that customers are not looking for the shallow and corner cutting. Professional advisers are serious people who value intellect, integrity, honesty and depth and they are prepared to pay for it. The evidence seems clear that the market is looking for quality, where perhaps for some time it has been missing. At the same time, I believe that authors, as practising professional advisers themselves, are unlikely to divulge all their secrets, strategies and carefully honed contracts, pleadings and precedents in any submissions to their publishers. Their own fortunes are hardly to be made from writing fees and royalties and a major objective in writing is to build reputations and drive paying clients to their offices, where the real work begins. The publication or service will therefore rarely and intentionally not, offer all the answers.

There is, nevertheless, pressure in the professional publishing industry – perhaps more internal than external – and a trend towards delivering such answers, however impossible, rather than offering the capability to apply professional expertise that distinguishes one adviser from another. We are seeing an emphasis on "tools" and the creation of answer-giving electronic services backed up by thousands of algorithms. Obviously there is great expertise behind them but some are essentially presented as a series of Yes/No processes supported by guidance towards particular documents, checklists, etc. It is perhaps not an entirely unbiased view, given the products they have on offer, with no reference to the underlying research, when Jack Lynch, latterly of Wolters Kluwer writes that lawyers, accountants and others “want ‘how-to’ guidance, decision support, answers and insights that will help them improve outcomes for their clients”.

I would take the view that context has always been a key component of how to do legal publishing in excellent and professional ways and that context is a hallmark of a legacy of more than 200 years of such publishing. The great legal tomes, subsequently delivered electronically and joined by even more sophisticated information services, seem to me to be characterised by their ability to bring together source content, cross-referencing, citation, with added-value expert comment and search tools, the only limitations being those of the technology of their day. Now we have the ability to add plumbing and engineering, expressed in workflow, linkage and search tools. That said, the core strength, I believe, remains in the genius of the writing and underlying expertise, combined with the talent and experience of the publisher in inventing, building and guiding the author’s output.

All the tools and technical innovation are truly wonderful but cases are won by the expertise of lawyers whose cutting edge is derived from the publishers' offerings but much more as well, legal and contextual. The publisher has to be capable of knowing how to deliver the sort of information and workflow tools that allow the professional adviser to improve the quality and effectiveness of advice, the benefits of which should translate directly to billing opportunities. The better professional adviser is the one who knows how and why the goal is achieved, rather than having a mechanistic body of tools to achieve a result. It seems to me that there is little value in providing tools and solutions that allow everyone to offer up the same answers.

Perhaps the home for a body of tools, to a greater extent than commentary and source materials, is in compliance and regulatory markets, that include those qualified professionals who work as in-house counsel and the like. Admirable professional publishing businesses such as PLC seem to understand this well and tailor their information and guidance services in those directions. I’m aware that other such services are in development. For professional advice markets where the fee-earner and client relationship and the ability to sustain and increase justifiable billing are key, individual expertise appears to me to be the critical factor.

In commercial and financial terms, from the point of view of sustaining profitable publishing businesses, even in these sophisticated times, publishers, wrongly in my view, are still inclined to sell their wares on features rather than benefits, allowing customers to measure weight rather than value to the firm. Legal publishing’s historical high margins have been largely based on customers’ willingness to pay for added value, where they see the benefits in terms of additional profit. However, increasingly law publishers are offering lower value services that help achieve back-office savings rather than revenue growth. This appears to me to be simply less attractive.

Just as we know that any mechanised system that purports to give expert answers will almost always be constrained by its inability to address the strange and unusual aspects of a case which only an expert can accommodate and exploit, equally it would be wrong to dismiss them. As in so many scenarios, there is no one correct answer and I would not wish to be on the side of the Luddites who oppose all innovation. I certainly would not be deluded into looking backwards to some non-existent and idealised world when things were supposedly better but rather would hope for sanity and common sense in dealing with the present and future. I would be concerned, however, if the balance were to shift too much in favour of answers over expertise.

Perhaps LexisNexis UK have addressed all the relevant issues with their most interesting service, LexisPSL aimed at professional support lawyers, and they have indeed found the ideal balance between two potential extremes. Its ability to link from that service to deeper content looks appealing. It will be fascinating to see how well the market supports the innovation. It may be the case that, like PLC, they see potential markets on the periphery of mainstream fee-earners, hence the visible focus on PSLs and the types and sizes of firms that employ them. Their efforts certainly appear to have PLC a little agitated. The impact of these developments are predictably well analysed by David Worlock, who elsewhere challenges the idea, in a B2B context, that content quality on its own is of critical importance

Meanwhile, CCH’s acquisition of BSI Media appears to indicate a residual interest in content- based publishing businesses. It is interesting to note that the acquisition of the company, which is based in the UK, is by CCH’s US operation.

I’m always surprised when people or businesses delude themselves into thinking they can be the best at everything, that they can excel at whatever they do and don’t need help from others, even if others are the experts. Perhaps it’s part of the “believe in yourself” culture that focuses exclusively on self rather than on teamwork or, more likely on greed, the idea being that profits can never be shared. More generously, maybe, in part, it’s because of human nature, fear and the practical experience that it’s difficult to make money when having to share the pot among too many beneficiaries. Furthermore, experience shows that it is not uncommon for such agreements to go wrong when one party realises that the other is actually profiting from the contract.

With global turnover of over $30bn just from the top handful of corporations in the professional information market, albeit from the totality of their endeavours rather than just professional publishing, I suspect they are not inclined to be lectured to on such matters and would expect due acclaim for their size, scale and ingenuity. Yet, there are few who praise them unconditionally, not least their shareholders in some cases, for their legal and professional publishing work and their ability to grow in these markets is limited. On that score, the advice continues to be that Reed Elsevier should sell Lexis Nexis, articulated again recently by Ian Whittaker of Liberum Capital in a detailed research report. I wonder to what extent, if any, a problem is that it is increasingly difficult to know what they stand for, what they are good at and whether or not the idea of a “one stop shop” is credible?

Still, it is probably the case that if you have the scale and brand power of Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, Bloomberg or even Wolters Kluwer, you can achieve almost anything and have the theoretical capability to approach every opportunity or problem by using the entire arsenal of weaponry that is conceivable. Also, where minor failures and disappointments occur, they can be lost in the totality of the piece. Moreover, the market leaders tend to be in control of the vocabulary of the landscape, constantly redefining and describing it to match and justify the past directions they have taken. It’s somewhat akin to the idea of history being written by the victors. In contrast, though, the Liberum report says of Lexis Nexis:

There are few top-line or cost synergies between the various assets. Ex-legal publishing and Risk Solutions, where the latter uses legal publishing’s infrastructure and which drove many of the cost savings from the Choicepoint and Seisint acquisitions, it is hard to think of any natural synergies (either top line or bottom line) between the various assets.

Whether or not, however, the best people to write software, provide litigation support, give advice, assess risk, etc., are publishers and their colleagues, or vice versa, might be debateable. In any case the theory is that if one doesn’t have the skills one can bring them in or find them somehow. The issue, however, might be as to how customers perceive the effect of such brand extension.

In truth, the question of the benefits of collaboration, partnership and joint-ventures, is probably more appropriately discussed in relation to the smaller entities; those with limited resources but more grand growth ambitions. Personally, and on many occasions, I have found myself talking to publishing businesses that allow, literally, years to pass, during which time they do not tackle new challenges and develop new initiatives. So often the reasons are not the good ones, such as assessing markets and risk and making positive or negative decisions as a result but rather simply that they don’t know how to do it and are not inclined to share the honours with someone else to achieve the outcomes. One sees such people simply not knowing how to evolve, not being capable of understanding processes and technical elements and being hostile to change. This is particularly the case in fear-inducing territory for people with publishing, particularly editorial backgrounds, where it is thought better occasionally to watch stagnation and decline than find innovative ways to entice existing and new customers. That in this day and age, we need still have meaningful and necessary debate on such antiquity as loose-leaf publishing is testimony to conservatism and fear.

What tends to happen to these sorts of professional and other publishing businesses is that they fear but accept their limitations and sell out to their larger actual or aspiring competitors who relegate them and their people who remain to editorial content process work, putting the development and management activity in the hands of others. One might envisage a not too distant future in which professional publishing is not a business in its own right but a departmental function within larger media entities that simply wish to maintain relationships with and profits from certain market sectors, such as lawyers, accountants and tax advisers. In this way, the necessary partnerships and cross-functional activities are achieved but within individual large corporations, at a cost to the independent ones and, in certain respects, at a loss to customers.

Therefore, it is uplifting to read of those examples, at all levels of professional information publishing, where partnerships and joint ventures, ideally but not necessarily of equal parties, are established in order to achieve outcomes that either would have been less able to do independently. One thinks of the holders and managers of valuable added-value content, collaborating with solutions-oriented businesses, software providers, managers of social or business community networks and the like, where different skills, strengths and approaches can be effectively employed. Similarly, relationships between publishers and professional and trade bodies can achieve better outcomes, one with business, commercial and technical skills, the other with access to and trusted relationships with markets.

When I commenced my career as a professional publisher and in the time that followed, I wanted to be in and had an educational background that favoured information publishing, not software and business systems, logistics, customer service, facilities management and suchlike. Still, one has to recognise that these and other functions create the totality of the piece and they need to be tackled in order to thrive. Given a choice, I’d much prefer to have someone else do these things than tackle them myself. There should not be an option, though, to do nothing. Furthermore and not least, different activities, depending on the extent of their added-value, tend to produce different levels of profitability so better to be further up the chain.

I noted recently, for example, that Lexis Nexis had, like many other publishers have done, reached agreement with OverDrive to create customized an eBook lending and management service offering electronic books for lawyers. Likewise, Wolters Kluwer’s work with OFS and XCM Solutions are, I would imagine, all good arrangements. They make sense to me, as clearly each of the respective parties has great but complementary skills. It would be good to see more of this, particularly among smaller, more interesting professional publishers. Even more significantly and intriguing, with news that Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer Law & Business will join forces to offer select Wolters Kluwer current awareness content on Thomson Reuters Westlaw online legal research platforms and of the sale of a minority stake in Lexis Nexis SA, perhaps this is further confirmation that even they can’t do everything without some (perhaps marriage) partners.

It’s not hard to find those who argue that the end is nigh for legal and professional information publishing. The security and strength of “need to know” and “have to have” information appears to have diminished, with content seeming to be down to “prince” or an even more lowly status in the monarchical hierarchy. Those who argue in those directions do so effectively, showing how the Internet, changing profitability and competitive models and the shift in favour of workflow solutions render the publishing component no longer core. Informed commentators see the current fortunes of the main professional publishers, currently achieving 3% growth p.a. as being on a downward and unacceptable slide, the view being expressed frequently and in many ways that the game is up for those who have done well in the past. Some of the recent legal publishing initiatives and partnerships as well as expansion, through further acquisition, into new geographical markets notwithstanding, they suggest that the current owners of these companies have decided that legal publishing isn't the business they want to be in or that they have lost faith in or their ability to create the prospect of legal information as a source of growth. The opinion expressed is that they are likely to be seeking a means of easing out of legal publishing sector altogether.

Not surprisingly, I both hope and believe that this is not the case and that we should avoid the risk of confusing delivery media, i.e. the inevitable shift away from paper and print, with the business of supplying complex, structured source and added-value content, increasingly together with documentation, workflow tools, software and other processes. As far as the content component is concerned, I think that an obsession with the medium is pointless, whereas questions of optimum quality, context, suitability and relevance change only by degree. Naturally, nothing remains the same as it was and the ways in which practitioners, students, compliance people and others want to receive and use information evolves constantly. However, it is the job of the expert publisher to understand, drive and respond to change. More likely is the shift in the balance of power as among the giants that presently dominate the global markets and the reduction of existing influences of the current market leaders, in favour of newer entrants, large and small.

I struggle to imagine a scenario, certainly in the foreseeable future, when the need for professional advisers will no longer exist. If I am correct, what will continue to distinguish the excellent from the mediocre or worse, will be the brilliance of the former, which is gained and maintained, in large part from the expert content that they are able to acquire and exploit. To that extent, the information provider, almost literally, offers the practitioner a most valuable license to advise and invoice clients. Obviously, the sources of such content and the suppliers of it are entirely capable of changing, as has always been the case but the need for it remains. Therefore, it matters not who supplies it and how, so long as it is capable of being supplied. The issue then becomes one of fairly simple arithmetic, as to who wants to provide content and how to continue to do so at some level of profitability. If they cannot do it profitably, then I would question their competence in a market where quality, engagement and commitment are generously rewarded by supportive users.

However naïve the view, I don’t see professional information publishing going the way of other industry sectors that rise and terminally fall on technology changes or, worse, fashion. It’s does not have to be like video rental stores, where the consumer desire for entertainment was seen as subordinate to the delivery medium. People continue to want to be entertained but the store became irrelevant. With professional information, who knows how it will be consumed in the future and who cares, so long as professional advice is required by paying clients.

It appears to be the case that needs are indeed expressed in changing ways. Whereas in the past, the professional publisher profited from its ability exclusively to provide detailed analysis of the law and other sources, increasingly there is a need for packaged solutions and processes, where answers are sought without the detail of the “whys” and “hows”. However, one might see this as more of an opportunity than a problem as markets have broadened to embrace both the small number of experts and a wide range of compliance officers of one kind and another.

It seems to me to be entirely legitimate for commercial publishers to want to optimise their profits for the short and long term and that it is appropriate for them to manage technology, content, pricing formulae and customer relations in ways that deliver their corporate objectives. If they get the balance among the conflicting priorities wrong, chances are that their customers will not tolerate them and their futures will be determined. I see no problem in publishers seeking to take out cost, as part of the electronic evolution process, without necessarily passing this back entirely to customers who are paying for the perceived value of the content rather than the weight of the paper. At the same time, competitive pressures ought to be such that greed and excess are measurable and therefore punished.

Rather than a time of gloom and negativity, the picture for those who serve legal and professional information markets should be bright, with ever more opportunities and services that are reasonably defined as “publishing” coming into the mix. The focus on workflow allows the publisher to understand every part of the customer’s processes and tasks and, with a knowledge of those aspects which depend on information and low, medium and high level expertise, to intervene at every possible point to aid the customer. Often I have spoken to people who serve professional advisers with services such as process software and documentation, document management, help-lines and consultancy services, who do not see themselves as being in publishing or as part of the same mix as their more obvious publishing colleagues. I do see this as a mistake, when they all have in common the same customer base and. often, the same customers’ clients in their long sights.

So, maybe it is the case that some large publishing company owners want out, if they think they can secure greater profits elsewhere but that is fine. I have no doubt that there are many others who are more than ready and able to take their places and to thrive. A few individual publishing people might appear somewhat brain dead but legal publishing is not and will survive them happily.

It’s easy and sometimes entertaining to note the negative or bizarre aspects of the major international law publishers but ultimately it is more interesting to identify areas of achievement. Far from the only one, but one such example is the work and evolution of what is now Bloomsbury Professional, based in the UK but increasingly recognisable around the world.

For me at least, it’s hard not to admire the business and the people involved in it, though I have to admit to a bias, though not an interest, in its favour. I consider a number of the people in the business to be friends and/or former colleagues and some of them I have selected, employed and promoted in other places, in recognition of their obvious worth. I’m proud to note that I have never seen any intelligent reason to remove any of them from their posts as to do so would clearly have been detrimental to the businesses for which they worked. It is pleasing to see Bloomsbury Professional as the current home for such a collection of talent and commitment.

Bloomsbury Professional is a relatively new law and tax publisher, until recently known as Tottel Publishing. This itself was not so long ago a phoenix from the ashes of a larger body of publishing assets thought at the time to be surplus to requirement at Lexis Nexis UK and sold to forward-looking senior managers who established the new business. Tottel grew and flourished for a few years until it was time for a trade sale, when Bloomsbury Publishing saw the benefits of investing in professional, academic and subscription-based markets.

One suspects that the investment decision was not a foregone conclusion as it had not been the first time that Bloomsbury had sought to enter the market. Indeed, Chancery Law Publishing had been set up in 1990 with its financial backing. Chancery Law did not flourish, despite the acknowledged quality of much of its output and in 1992 it was sold to Wiley. Nor did it achieve success there, its assets finally being sold on. No doubt it is a tribute to the Tottel management and staff that Bloomsbury was able to perceive sufficient difference to envisage that the new acquisition would not go the same way as the earlier investment. Nor, I’m sure, would the parent company believe that it had or has any wizard’s wand to wave over its children to guarantee success.

Hardly great wisdom is needed to understand, to some extent at least, why Bloomsbury Professional looks like a great publishing business. After all, it got off to a racing start with some astonishing assets from Lexis Nexis, among them an especially strong tax portfolio which, subsequently evolved, is making a huge competitive impression in the market. In fact, they have recently dislodged CCH as the chosen supplier of one of the key tax books, as a member benefit, to all the members of the UK’s Association of Taxation Technicians. Additionally, there are many distinguished ex-Lexis Nexis titles such as, randomly selected, Mediators on Mediation: leading mediator perspectives on the practice of commercial mediation, edited by Chris Newmark and Anthony Monaghan, Mediator Skills and Techniques: Triangle of Influence by Laurence Boulle and Miryana Nesic, Fransman’s British Nationality Law and Clinical Negligence by Charles Lewis. In truth, the list is extremely long and embraces, additionally, key Irish and Scottish titles. I believe that plans are now afoot to bring to fruition the results of its strategic planning for ebooks.

As an observer of Bloomsbury Professional and its competitors, one does not see or need to see genius in operation. Indeed they quite modestly refer to themselves as “a traditional, but cutting-edge publisher of high quality books and information services for lawyers, accountants and business professionals”. Rather, it is easier to identify intelligence, sound judgement, consistency, commitment and commercial attitude as critical features. Every new decision does not have to be explosive in character but instead indicative of an understanding of and empathy with markets, both following and directing market evolution.

In fact, of their recently launched online tax law service, www.bloomsburytax.com, I commented in an article, “What makes the new service worth noting is not rocket science technology or really cutting-edge functionality but price and simplicity, combined with an unashamed resemblance to the book idiom in its presentation – a smart move, it might be suggested, in an e-book era”. It was of the service in question that a most distinguished Canadian lawyer commented to me, upon learning about it “this is like an early Christmas present”. For their efforts, they were nominated for the prizes of Ingram Digital Publishing Award and Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year in the Independent Publishers Guild Independent Publishing Awards 2012, with Hart Publishing being similarly and deservedly recognised.

Modesty is refreshing to me in an era of grand boasts usually followed by never admitted failure. This extends to ways of doing business, such as accepting that one cannot do everything well by oneself and sometimes there is a need for partnership and joint ventures to achieve best results. Indeed, very early in its existence, Tottel was happy to partner with CCH UK in electronic content licensing, in order to achieve outcomes that would have been difficult alone. That arrangement has since some to an end. Now, however, in a dynamic arrangement, they partner with another legal publishing entrepreneur, Practical Law Company, to provide content online to PLC customers.

Another partnership, this time in relation to UK and International accounting and auditing content, has recently been established with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the PWC arrangement having previously been with CCH UK. No doubt, the desire and ability to make such deals will help establish Bloomsbury Professional more strongly, additionally in the accounting publishing market, as well as in law and tax. To achieve visibility and effectiveness at these levels would, I am certain, be difficult without a particular and open attitude of mind.

Rewards come with effort and it is not surprising that in 2011 Bloomsbury Professional won the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians’ Supplier of the Year Award. It seems that the methodology and good service, perhaps in a sea of mediocrity, pays off. Of course, it’s not for me to know and if I did to discuss here the extent to which this transfers to profits but I like to think that that is the case. What I do see, when I meet my Bloomsbury Professional friends, is a group of ambitious but happy and contented enthusiasts who believe they are winning.

For some of the other major information providers, certainly those in the UK and, I would hope, excluding Bloomberg Law/BNA, I think they should watch and learn from the likes of Bloomsbury Professional, PLC and Justis Publishing. There are certainly areas in which they could improve and do better but the younger innovators are taking the prizes and becoming positioned in the number 2 or 3 slots in particular market segments, though perhaps becoming simply candidates for acquisition and emasculation, as one might hope will not be the case in relation to the acquisition in the USA of Law360.

Equally, to avoid self-delusion, it should not be forgotten that Bloomsbury Professional is itself part of a quoted company and the smaller ones are often inclined to mimic the activities of their larger peers. No personal judgment on the views expressed, of course, but I wonder if their thinking is in line with or at a distance from those of the other end of the professional publishing spectrum, http://tomglocer.com/blogs/sample_weblog/archive/2012/02/04/2852.aspx, balanced against http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/business/business-news/reed-chief-engstroms-3m-package-7562508.html. Other informed commentators, however, hold opinions on such matters, http://practicesource.com/house-of-butter/tom-glocer-educates-us-on-marx-and-adam-smith.

I have long believed, certainly before we spoke so much about “communities”, that if a professional publisher is to achieve its best, by all the relevant measures, it has to engage closely, intimately, regularly and consistently with the key member institutes, associations, societies and representative bodies in the market. In its efforts to reach and understand the members, as well as to build trust with them, to circumvent the membership route is unwise and can be a recipe, to some extent at least, for failure. That said, it is not necessarily an easy route for the publisher or the institute and results and levels of frustration on both sides are likely to be variable.

One of the most basic issues to address and accommodate is the fact that, with exceptions, membership bodies and other not-for-profit entities have a quite different – not better or worse – mindset from that of the commercial publisher. Not an exact analogy but from my own experience, my least satisfying and frustrating job was as managing director of National Publishing at the then just privatised Stationery Office (TSO), now part of Deutsche Post DHL. In good faith, I put our intentions into print and, with a focus on the British and Irish law librarians market wrote:

Regular contact with BIALL and its individual members as well as with other organisations and committees will, it is hoped, be a key feature of how business will be done. In this way, needs, wishes and growth initiatives can be discussed in a creative way. There will be a continuous effort to improve customer service – again in consequence of hearing directly what the customers have to say

On working hand-in-hand with publishing partners, primarily government departments, I wrote:

The future is not taken for granted and The Stationery Office is very aware that its long-term survival and success are entirely dependent on performance and customer satisfaction.
(“It’s Spelt with an 'e'”, Robert McKay, The Law Librarian, Vol. 28, No. 3, September 1997, pp. 157-158)

My perception, however, with hindsight, was that it became unclear, certainly to me, who was the customer or client and who were suppliers in that particular instance. Motives surrounding a focus on profit and revenue growth can conflict sometimes with those that target membership benefit, highest levels of customer service and representation. If this happens, there can be frustration where it appears that respective parties simply don’t understand the culture and objectives of the other. I am certain, however, that TSO has gone on to build on its particular strengths in admirable ways.

More recently, in my close involvement with others in the setting up and managing a recently ended 10 year partnership between CCH UK and The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), I was greatly impressed with the agreed notion of “Win: Win: Win” that sought to underpin the relationship. The mantra perceived measurable benefits for the publisher, the institute and the members and, without any special reference to that partnership, I do believe that for either party to pay any less attention to or fail to understand any one of the three is unwise.

The characteristics of the Publisher/Institute arrangement are well understood by those in one or both camps. All the experts and insiders to whom I spoke were keen supporters but were not blind to the difficulties.

Typical of those whose expertise lies in publishing and institutional worlds:

There are always areas of mutual interest but a professional body and commercial organisation will always come at these things from different angles. The way to make a relationship work is to understand how your potential partner sees the world. That way you will begin to understand what they want from you and how you might provide it. 
(Simon Goldie, Head of External Relations, LexisNexis UK)

Those views are endorsed and amplified by others who also have similar experience:

Ownership & raison d’etre

• It seems obvious but Institutes and trade associations exist for one reason only; to serve their membership. Everything is subordinate to that singular purpose. Large or small, rich or poor they are organisations created by a community to serve that community.
• Membership bodies live and die on the quality of their “content” although they would not necessarily recognise the publishing analogy. Their IP is packaged as lobbying, events, training, CPD or as books, CDs, subscription packages and best practice notes.

Content generation

• Inevitably institutes develop a need for publishing skills and recruit the necessary talents either on the payroll, in partnership with commercial publishers or (frequently) a combination of the two.
• The initial purpose is seldom if ever revenue generation and that’s when the fun begins.

Profit v. surplus

• Profit is necessary for the survival of any organisation, institute or professional publisher.
• However, many trade associations avoid the “p” word in favour of surplus. This may be accompanied by a disdain for those whose purpose it is to generate profit.
• No matter how commercial or successful many members are in their day jobs this is not what many want or expect from their involvement with their membership body.
• There are inevitable conflicts when a commercial ethos rubs up against “not for profit” attitude of many institutes.
• Even more interesting is when a product, initially done as a service for members, becomes profitable and the institute is offended that their commercial publisher is now making money!

Corporate governance

• There is nothing quite like the governance processes in the majority of institutes. They are about as far away from the traditional planning and decision making processes of commercial publishers as it is possible to be.
• Decisions are made by committees. Or boards. Or working parties. All groupings of members and all acting in a voluntary capacity. Don’t expect a fast decision!

IP & copyright

• Even more interesting is when commercial publishers package content which has been generated by committees. There are seldom if ever contracts in place and copyright is grey at best.”

(Anne Godfrey, Chief Executive at GTMC Ltd)

Another experienced publisher and Institutional insider offers advice from an Institute to professional publishers

In an era of an increasing complex and global regulatory environment together with the international mobility of talent, professional bodies today are far more complex and sophisticated organisations than in the past. Take time to build trust and understand the bodies ‘motivations’ and business objectives. Also take time to really understand the culture.

Professional bodies are fundamentally about relationships, in terms of its membership networks, regulatory stakeholders and international networks. Understanding and leveraging these ‘touch points’ – how the organisation interacts with its stakeholders – is key in tapping into its market insight, acquiring IP and realising value.

Increasingly professional bodies are investing in their communication channels – both in hard copy (still relevant) and electronically. Certainly in the accountancy market the major professional bodies have developed highly sophisticated and measurable ways of communicating with their memberships. Of particular note is the rise of e-newsletters and Web 2.0 user generated content /technology. Intelligent use of these channels will maximise the opportunity to engage with its membership.

(Jonathan Levy, Head of Strategy & Development at the ICAEW)

Perhaps the subtle differences of opinion, if they exist at all, emerge when one sees these issues from the experience of one side or another.

To me the key issue for professional publishers is to ensure they understand the market, not just in the content they propose to publish but in terms of knowing what the practitioner, actually needs. In the main this comes through speaking with those end users but to an extent the scope and breadth of understanding can come through developing a close working relationship with those who represent the end user, i.e. their professional and other representative bodies. If the professional body is doing its job well, it will have the ear of its members and should be abler to communicate to the publisher the needs of its members. This benefits not only the publishers but its members also.

(Ken McManus, Head of International Services, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland)

There's a curious love-hate relationship that goes on between professional institutes and publishers. Generally, the former have a critical need to communicate their specialism to other stakeholders and generate a broad range of advice and education to their members and students, while making money to support the membership. Many aren't terribly good at commercial, even not-for-profit, exploitation and the complexities of high-quality publishing, not part of their core capabilities and quite often outside the experience base of their managers and elected Council. They do, however, have two key assets – access to a knowledge base (expertise) and a (mostly) interested membership community, which can be invaluable to a publisher looking to build or consolidate a position in a niche specialist sector. So many institutes could and should benefit from working with commercial publishers, and in some cases, vice versa.

The challenge, however, lies in dealing with the cultural differences in the relationship: on the one side, a democratic, not-for-profit managed process – in some cases even operational decisions on products and pricing get referred to a passing Council member – and a commercial publisher driven by market demands and client needs. A successful relationship, I think, requires an open-minded approach from the institute and a patient, educative approach from the publisher – and a market need that is interesting enough for both parties!

(Maurice Cheng, Strategy & Management Consultant • Chief Executive & Marketing Director)

While from a key senior executive in legal publishing, though alluding more to recognition of the importance of institutes than to working in partnership with them:

For a professional publisher to succeed consistently, they must always have mechanisms in place which help collect customers’ feedback. This feedback is incredibly important as it guides new product development and product refinement.

A complementary source of customer insight often overlooked by information providers is the professional institutions that serve specific customer groups (legal, tax, medicine, etc.)

A customer-oriented publisher sets up operating mechanisms also to garner feedback from those key institutions in order better to inform product development and customer interaction. The institutions are quite often repositories of customer trend information that can be used by publishers to serve clients better. The key is to determine a means to collect the information in a continuous way.

(Mark Schlagater, President – Thomson Reuters UK and Ireland Core Legal)

With the business of generating profit from information content and services to professional advisers becoming ever more difficult and competitive, in an era of justifiable cynicism about the value of membership bodies, both sides would do well to heed the words of these and other experts.

There was a time, not too long ago, when some in legal and professional publishing would refer to their sector as offering "a license to print money". The highest quality publishers were renowned for the wonderful reputations of their products and services, their market knowledge and intimacy, their relationships and engagement with their customers and, even though prices were high, compared to other forms of information publishing, they were trusted and supported by their markets. Obviously, customer service was always pretty terrible but that was a quaint characteristic which was recognised and accommodated, partly on grounds that true value was being added in other, perhaps more important ways.

Of those days, to my present minor embarrassment, I wrote:

The professional and other advisers who represent the primary customer base need the information in order to operate effectively and profitably. Their characteristics are high socio-economic status, good education, seniority of job function, strong purchasing power and ready accessibility in sales and marketing terms. These elements combine to define the overall attractiveness of professional information publishing for those with the skills to succeed in it.
("Legal and Professional Publishing," contribution to Book Publishing in Britain, J. Whitaker & Sons (1995) and Legal and Professional Publishing, Robert McKay, The Law Librarian, Vol..26, No. 4, December 1995)

Maybe it's inevitable, not least because of the world economy in general but, maybe more significantly, because nothing stays the same, that the tide has turned and the reports are more gloomy, in the form of shrinkage and reduced margins. It is now unsurprising to see Reed Elsevier, owner of LexisNexis, on the defensive, stating a case to the market as to why it will not be broken up and the now interminable speculation about its likely future, latterly involving Bloomberg , while the latest rumours of an impending Thomson Reuters – Wolters Kluwer merger are equally predictable. It's not the case everywhere, as there are stories of growth and optimism in particular quarters. Those publishers who have been in receipt of awards and honours of late, seem to be able to translate this to growth and profit. Being realistic on pricing probably helps too, and maybe Bloomsbury Professional's recently launched online service at UK£195 shows an understanding of market trends and conditions.

One of the key requirements of being successful in any commercial venture, and stating the blindingly obvious, is the ability to find, reach, impress, communicate and trade with customers. Yet, when it comes to the sort of customers with whom professional publishers want to do business, among them librarians, information specialists, academics and practitioners, many of the obvious and arguably simple routes to market don't seem to work well.

Take direct mail, once the basic form of product communication. As one senior executive told me recently, though I don't necessarily believe him, that no marketing person below the age of forty would even think of wasting money in that way. Maybe it makes sense, though. Response rates, even in chasing existing customers for renewal purchases and business in general are pitiful and ever-declining, making expenditure in that direction often not cost-effective. Even lower rates are achieved by email campaigns but at least the minimal cost of mailing large numbers of addresses and coping with flawed data continues to make this an area of activity. Of course, there must be a problem that, with, say a 0.25% response rate, and a need to sell 1000 items or subscriptions, 400,000 names need to be mailed. Then the question must arise as to where in a discrete market is anyone going to find so many prospects. They simply don't exist.

Tele-marketing is often worse. Is there anyone who wishes to be called by a sometimes unpleasant stranger, inevitably at the wrong time of day, to be sold something that is probably not required? The chances of success on cold-calling are extremely low, for all the obvious reasons and where the call is to an existing customer, perhaps to secure a renewal and solicit some new business at the same time, much skill and luck are required to get it just right.

Face-to-face selling, with a trusted sales representative visiting customers has all the right characteristics, combining superb salesmanship with customer care and the personal touch. Among the problems are high cost of retaining the resource, with all the on-costs but also the fact that one individual can only make a limited number of expensive visits a day and has to spend a great deal of down time arranging visits and travelling to clients. Therefore, unless each successful transaction carries substantial value, it has a tendency to add up to not very much. It's only worth having face-to-face contact if the individual rewards are high.

Retail outlets and agencies of one kind and another are another channel increasingly impaired by changing customer habits, loss of margin to the publisher, remoteness from end-user customers and, except in relation to specialist intermediaries, a structural failure and disinclination to deal with subscription-based and electronic products, at least until quite recently.

So what is there? Many of the other marketing tactics employed seem to fall into a category of being seen to be doing something, are often unmeasurable/unmeasured and serve more in terms of creating awareness and driving potential customers to web sites, rather than with the purpose of achieving actual, on-the-spot sales. I understand the values of the likes of Google AdWords and suchlike but wonder how effective it is in professional, rather than consumer markets. Many people value Amazon for its efficiency, professionalism and technical wizardry but it addresses only certain parts of the market and its requirements. Likewise, gurus on conference circuits and, in fairness, many others, extol the virtues of social and business networks, YouTube, Twitter and other forms of viral marketing to get messages out to and indeed build target communities. If awareness and brand identification is the key step towards making sales, as in consumer markets, then all well and good.

However, when I look at professional publishers' web sites, for the most part I don't see evidence that much is changing, except to the extent that their products can be purchased or that the same content is available online. The focus seems to be very much on a reactive approach to customers, to the extent that the website is there, ready and waiting for the point at which the customer wants to consider a purchase, at which time an efficient and professional transaction can be undertaken.

Perhaps it is the case that marketing communication efforts that are intended to lead to sales are just not effective in middle markets where specific activities need to be undertaken to reach customers, as with direct mail to manageable targets, field sales teams, tele-sales and bookshop support. Maybe the only workable focus can be on the largest customers who rightly require and, because of their value, can receive personal, key account management to sustain and grow business from them. Then at the other end of the market, the small practitioners, their needs can be served by a reactive approach, so that, when they need something, they can search until the find it from one source or another, perhaps increasingly via Amazon.

I just have the impression that for many customers in the middle, perhaps the most important segments, not a great deal of effort is or can be spent, effectively, in reaching them and retaining their business. Perhaps this explains some of the difficulties in growing professional publishing businesses.

Sadly, the license to print money may have been shifted from the corporations to a handful of extremely lucky executives who could probably buy their own countries in which to do the printing. The recent news about the departure of Thomson Reuters' chief executive, with his alleged $37.7m share, options and compensation deal, at the same time as the corporation's share price has dropped by 36% over the previous six months or so, might indicate that the business priorities one might expect to see have gone adrift, hence the inclination, possibly, towards merger.

October 21 saw a most interesting and perhaps game-changing development in professional publishing with the launch in the UK of Bloomsbury Professional’s new online tax law service, www.bloomsburytax.com.

What makes the new service worth noting is not rocket science technology or really cutting-edge functionality but price and simplicity, combined with an unashamed resemblance to the book idiom in its presentation – a smart move, it might be suggested, in an e-book era.

The publisher, formerly Tottel Publishing, itself and, by implication, its content having roots and established credibility derived from LexisNexis origins, boasts that the key features of the service are its low price – from as little as GB£195 a year – combined with the assertion that it is the only UK tax law service to be integrated with social networking sites. Bloomsbury Professional believes that the service will be affordable for even the smallest firms. They say that the new tax law service is being launched in response to demand from mid-tier firms for a competitively priced reference service that more accurately reflects the value those firms actually derive from that information.

The core tax service includes 15 highly respected titles, which cover all the main UK taxes. Five add-on modules providing detailed coverage of specialist topics including Employment Tax, Family and Owner-Managed Companies, High Net-Worth Individuals, Property Tax and Trusts and Estates are also available.

The service uses a custom-built platform based on the Lucene search engine. The new platform, which was developed for by iFactory of Boston, Mass.(www.ifactorycom), provides Google-style autocomplete of search terms and delivers lightning-fast results which will significantly enhance the productivity of practitioners using the service.

Bloomsbury’s UK Tax Service will, it is claimed, be the only service in the market which is fully integrated with social networking sites. Subscribers will be able to share access to live documents with their clients and also share documents and search results via Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.

Furthermore, individual users within a firm are also able to build their own personalised collections of frequently used documents and searches.

Martin Casimir publishing director at Bloomsbury Professional comments: “The market is crying out for a competitively-priced tax service."

Steve Savory its online publisher, who in previous roles has been central to the creation of market-leading online services at LexisNexis UK, CCH UK and ABG Professional Information, comments:

Ease of use is critically important in an online product and I’m confident that our customers will find it remarkably easy to get to the information they need. If you know how to use a book, you already know how to browse our site. If you know how to use Google, you already know how to search our site

Steve continues:

We also thought it was important to integrate social networking capabilities directly into the platform. We know it won’t be for everyone, but we also know that many of our customers are already using Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook for marketing and communication. Now that we’ve made it possible to share a reference to technical document through those sites, I’m confident that proactive firms will use that function to take full advantage of the benefits that active social networking brings……If you’re only accessing your current online reference service occasionally – as most smaller firms do – spending several thousand pounds on it is a luxury you really can’t afford. So if you’re a mid-tier or smaller firm fed up at the very high cost of online tax information with pricing structures that are hard to comprehend, you should take a serious look at Bloomsbury. Our service provides a great breadth of content, is transparently priced, and offers unbeatable value-for-money.

It will be fascinating to watch the extent to which Bloomsbury Professional continues to grow and eat into the markets dominated by the major professional information providers and challenging their notions on appropriate pricing for online content. Though recently linked by way of a content licensing deal with the more technically advanced Practical Law Company (PLC). Bloomsbury Professional has no embarrassment in describing itself as “a traditional, but cutting-edge publisher of high quality books and information services for lawyers, accountants and business professionals”. In tough times, with smaller firms having to work ever harder to maintain competitive advantage, the new service might be exactly what they require.

It begs to be asked, increasingly, who is the customer for professional information publishers. No longer can they think simply about students, teachers, practitioners and librarians. Not when there are KM specialists, procurement managers, IT geeks, consultants and financial managers media buyers and, doubtless, countless others who have a role to play in what is chosen to support the information needs of a firm, corporation or institution.

Nevertheless, decisions need to be made as to what to invent and develop in order to create product and service offerings and, though some will disagree, the focus group, questionnaire and consultancy approaches may not always be appropriate. Sometimes some real knowledge, expertise and intuition have roles to play. Certainly if I were a potential customer, I’d want to believe that the people producing the publications, information services, documents, software and tools were pretty intimate with what professional advisers actually do and need. 

One might wish to assume that a development function within an information publishing business would be responsible for all product development, new and existing, working with all the other key functions, notably sales, marketing, editorial, production and finance. Of course, product development experts need not necessarily be drawn from existing functions within the business, such as editorial, marketing or sales, though equally there is no reason to suggest that such skills cannot be applied to the development function. The need is, however, in my view, for a genuine combination of these backgrounds, overlain with a strong element of technical know-how, experience-based judgment, market involvement, commercial, networking and entrepreneurial flair and financial literacy. To leave out or significantly reduce a focus on any one of these is likely to be to the detriment of the success of the process.

Inasmuch as the present focus is on development for publishing activity, defined in its widest form and including all media, the essential skills and tasks remain quite simple. As another Belfast boy, Van Morrison wrote, referring to his particular medium and market, “The only requirement is, to know what is needed; be best at delivering the product on time.” The difficulty is working how to “know” what’s needed and to coordinate all the elements to deliver on time. Yet, regardless of the delivery medium, information publishing still requires knowledgeable and expert people to write, based on their expertise and research, in order to produce appealing product. It is this author output that lets lawyers and others carry out their own functions effectively and profitably. It makes sense that those who stand between authors and customers should understand them both exceptionally well. Doctors know best about medicine; lawyers know best about law.

The functions can be carried out by generalists and those with development experience in unrelated disciplines but it is suggested that, optimally, it should be with those with real experience of target or closely related markets. Those markets in question, financial, tax, accountancy, regulatory, though each is different from the other, have underlying elements such as the fact that they are driven by changing laws of one kind or another and are professional adviser markets in which qualified people trade on the basis of expertise, professionalism, ethics and trust to gain and retain business. Without accurate information at levels to suit their requirements, be they source, compliance, added-value or strategic planning, they struggle to function competitively, so that the better the publisher can understand, measure and meet the need, the more successful everyone will be.

Research, contacts and experience are key. No-one can know everything but they need to know where to find information and opinions. This comes from countless sources; published research and documentation, structured and less structured research activity, monitoring events and plans, contacts in the market, attendance at and participation in market activities such as those of professional and trade institutes, conferences, exhibitions. Skill, experience and judgment, however, need to be applied. Furthermore, an intimate knowledge of and ability constantly to keep abreast or even anticipate competitor activity is critical. Just returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair, on behalf of Dunedin Academic Press, I’m reminded as to just how significant that is.

One sees the increasing presence of the product development specialist with generic and certainly admirable skills in the processes of product development. Hence the techniques, research procedures, supporting documentation, validation and project management disciplines are likely to be exemplary but a question is whether or not these can be applied effectively and easily from any particular discipline to, for example, law. There is little doubt that having experience of different markets and innovation applied within and to them is likely to achieve benefits in the transfer of skills and ideas but the key is in the knowledgeable application of them to the market in focus.

I wonder if the absence of such an approach is to any extent part of the reason behind the progressive decline in the profit fortunes of some of the professional publishers. This might be to the extent that they don’t always appear to recognise the difference between adding value, though content quality and appropriateness – effectively giving practitioners their licence to practice – and supplying back-office tools to reduce operating costs. The ability to deliver the former is more likely to require the input of the sorts of publishers I have in mind.

There exist those legal and professional publishing businesses that spend the appropriate money and invest in suitable training to ensure that their development specialists are lawyers, tax advisers, accountants or whatever, the purpose of which is to ensure quality, intimacy and relevance. I am not alone in my belief that this is sound investment, valued by customers, for whom issues of trust are paramount. The signs are that, with the recent acquisition by Bloomberg of BNA, the new combination understands the importance of having the right sort of expertise in place and it would be surprising if an innovative and most significant force in professional publishing has not been created. Another that can boast most forcefully and justifiably about their use of their professional support team is Practical Law Company, which seems to be achieving success that is envied by many. Perhaps they know something that others ignore.

Add to this, further recent speculation, again, around the perceived good sense of a break-up of Reed-Elsevier and one might envisage a different, maybe even better, publishing world in times to come.

Just as in all commercial and professional sectors, where adding value to achieve the highest standards of quality and service supports strong pricing and encourages customers to make their buying decisions on potential benefits back to themselves, one would hope that this reasoning is not forgotten in professional information publishing.

PR? What does it mean? I search around and wonder if it’s Public Relations or Press Relations (or rather media relations). But the two, although not unrelated, are not the same and that makes me think if, in that environment, there is more art than science applied; perhaps more faith and belief than evidence. In fairness, those within that trade seek to communicate their purposes and objectives, e.g., at the UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations website, where, usefully and unsurprisingly, they offer a “jargon buster”.

Mostly, whether it’s one interpretation or another doesn’t bother me. The use of PR is often a key function. In certain spheres, notably government, the advertising sector, consumer markets and in relation to the world of investment, to name only a few, influencing opinion and sentiment and protecting reputation, is of huge importance. So whether it’s the communications media or the public who need to be delivered informational or uplifting messages, clearly media and public relations activities work.

What about the world of professional information publishing, whose customers are lawyers, accountants, tax advisers, knowledge management and procurement specialists, academics, corporate officers and suchlike? Are these the sorts of people who are the targets of the PR specialists and for whom, for example, a report on some product-related research by the publisher or an article placed in the press are effective? Much is written about the issues of working with and selling to knowledge workers and I query if the PR approach to them is as effective as in other markets.

I’m not speaking about major international parent corporations, for which it’s important constantly to maintain and raise awareness, to keep investment communities happy and informed and whose job it is to manage share prices and investor confidence. My concern is about unquoted operating companies, often simply brands, serving, mostly, regional or national client-bases. These rarely, in themselves, have direct relationships with the world of investment and their direct financial results are often invisible and consolidated into those of the parent body. Yet it’s interesting to note that many seem to have press offices and officers, engage external PR agencies to work with and for their internal specialists and identify a need to engage in PR activity by one definition or another. I wonder if this really works in measurable and financial terms and indeed if anybody notices or cares, one way or the other? Of course, even for them, there are surprises, such as a few years ago when Sweet and Maxwell were investigated by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office or when LexisNexis Butterworths was under the spotlight in relation to Reed Elsevier, in its way, being involved in the arms trade through its then involvement in the defence exhibitions sector. In such circumstances, obviously it’s time to call the PR people, News Corporation-style, but this must be the exception to the rule.

It’s interesting to look at the web sites of the sorts of professional publishing businesses I have in mind and to note that almost invariably they have press offices and lists of notices that have been issued. They tend to fall into a few categories. One is to promote product sales, sometimes by announcing product or service launches. Another is to present the results of research they have conducted (sometimes undertaken by the PR people) to explain the alleged value of products that address the issues of the research in question. In my view, there is nothing wrong with this if it works but I suspect that attempts to measure the effectiveness of the activity are frustrating and so much of the cost and effort is wasted and meaningless. When, every year, someone insists on putting out a piece on how many pages are required to deliver the latest proposed tax legislation, I wonder what is the objective. When publishers issue articles that rarely get reported in either the consumer press or in the specialist media, and where they do, no direct or indirect benefit accrues, they look as if they are simply going through the motions. The invention of a news story that probably isn’t really news anyway and yet tries to find a place in the media or beyond, looks somewhat self-indulgent. 

Conversely, the use of a PR function to support, for example, a major awards ceremony involving advertisers, sponsors and professional firms is, I would agree, obligatory, as would be the announcement of an innovative strategic alliance. A good example of the latter is the information surrounding the agreement between Bloomsbury Professional and Practical Law Company for content licensing. Nor would I be critical of using PR to push advertising sales, by commissioning editorial content effectively to fill space between advertisements. That all makes sense to me and there is a market for it. At least when I see those efforts that attempt to sell something, boast client testimonials, report an alliance or a deal struck with a significant customer, it’s all part of the marketing mix. There is no doubt that in a world of viral marketing, blogging, Tweeting and networking, innovative steps need to be taken to stand out and be recognised by customers but the notion that one just has to do “stuff” sounds shallow. For my part, I veer towards the “What gets measured, gets managed” school but only some are measurable activities..

I suspect that for professional publishers, having a PR functions is sometimes just one of those have-to-have fashion accessories which then needs to be fed. Hence, those whose careers and livelihoods depend on it have to spend their time convincing their colleagues and themselves that their sometimes generalist journalistic backgrounds are key components in the search for growth and profitability. How they must be relieved when there is an office party, an internal company staff communications meeting or a reception to be organised and to be allocated the related tasks. That must be easier than having to work with, understand the language and work and serve the specific information and related requirements of professional advisers and knowledge management experts.

Maybe I’m wrong and that lawyers, accountants, tax advisers and librarians care about the faux journalistic PR utterances of their preferred professional information providers and if the latter wishes to report whatever they have commissioned by way of research, that’s perfect. After all, only the most cynical would suggest the outcomes of much of such research tends to support the product or service proposition being offered by the provider. It just seems to me to be trivial, in a sea of proper journalism, News Corporation notwithstanding, and a wired world. Perhaps it is indeed the case that customers do go regularly to the publishers’ web sites to check their latest notices and that articles placed in the consumer press really do drive them to subscribe to products and services. I’d like to know.

One of the problems is that, particularly in difficult and serious times, customers want to know that prices that they are being asked to pay for the output of the professional publishers are justified, that optimal product and service quality are paramount and that thereby they are receiving value for money. Another is that traditional channels to market, such as direct mail, tele-marketing and face-to-face selling may no longer be delivering rewards and that newer media, with their benefits, bring new disappointments. Furthermore, there is a risk that where the providers increasingly want to be seen as having capabilities and competencies that are all-embracing and often beyond their core brand strengths, akin to offering ill-defined solutions to unperceived problems, a cliché and metaphor machine may have to be used to give a helping hand.

One wonders if, as belts continue to tighten for professional publishers, with even, e.g., the normally conservative LexisNexis UK staff expressing the mood of the moment with strike plans, the PR function will be seen as a key driver to assist growth, an occasional disaster mitigator or a luxury to retain in better times.

Another thought would be to change the confusing abbreviation from “PR” to “BS”, “Brain Stimulation”, of course! 

I’m hesitant about trying to predict the future and would be aligned with those with those who have written:

Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window

and

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

both by Peter Drucker

or Samuel Goldwyn, providing the title above.

That said, I’m occasionally asked for views on trends and evolution and to squint into the future, while retaining loyalty to the anti-futurists.

Many see technology and social media as critical to the future and generally, I suspect they’re right. Equally, in terms of new and existing product development, a key element of success continues to lie in detailed and structured research and market segmentation to identify and satisfy customer needs, with few openings for enthusiastic amateurs and blind opportunists. I reckon that battles will be won on the basis of deep and constantly revisited understanding of markets and their requirements, delivery of optimum quality and great sensitivity to pricing constraints and opportunities. The success of the major, rather than niche professional publisher will, I think, depend in part on the ability to satisfy total, rather than narrowly defined information needs. Lawyers, for example, don’t just need to know about law. They require information also on a whole range of topics, such as business, social, financial and other statistics and trends, commercial and industry practice, medical, health, educational and environmental developments, local, national, regional and international government policy and plans. This, along with the essential regulatory information, guidance, documentation and tools is obligatory. The opportunity to grow new products, link important bodies of data and add further value is great, subject to an absolute commitment to electronic delivery of information, alongside print. Increasingly, information solutions are by products and services which combine to give the greatest value from the interconnected use of multiple media. As information becomes further commoditised, flourishing businesses will be those that add value throughout the practitioner’s workflow. Successful providers are those who offer integrated content and technology tools that save the practitioner time and generate profit at every stage of the proceedings.

Some eminent and knowledgeable commentators see things differently. Gary Rodrigues writes of global publishers that “they are likely to be seeking a means of easing out of legal publishing sector altogether” while Sean Hocking suggests that “the legal publishers decided that legal publishing wasn't exactly the business they wanted to be in”. In my 

view they’ll follow the money, expressed in potential for market share, top-line growth, increased margin and profit. Indeed, Thomson Reuter, in declaring an intention to divest itself of its healthcare businesses, maintains that its “core franchises” including legal, tax and accounting, intellectual property and financial services, are those where it sees opportunities for growth and profitability. WK’s acquisition of Twinfield confirms its interest on the software needs of its market.

Particularly in legal and tax compliance/regulatory markets, pressure has been put on commercial publishers to innovate and compete or withdraw. One might speculate on the reason why, in the USA, Wolters Kluwer sold its compliance portfolio to Blue Gavel. Might it be that WK and others want to distance themselves from compliance, as opposed to professional markets for publishing, particularly print-based? Perhaps, inasmuch as they might want to deal with these markets, where the customers/end-users are corporate managers and officers, they would prefer to offer them software solutions rather than information/research. No doubt, in compliance markets, the publishing formula has been overtaken by a mix of online official and free content, supported by a drive to process management in the corporate sector and a preference for software-based solutions rather than narrative content. WK’s stated intention to acquire NRAI is, perhaps, an example of this evolution. I think that the opportunity to add value in the compliance/corporate markets holds fewer opportunities than in the professional markets of lawyers, accountants, tax advisers and such. 

The effect of static markets, segmentation within them and publishing to order will put pressure on the big players to veer towards or retain the high-margin top end of the market, where there is greater willingness to pay appropriate prices for high added-value information, with entrepreneurs making or losing fortunes in areas which the market leaders ignore. It’s all good news for smart and eager professional publishers, with such impressive examples as Bloomsbury Professional recently winning an important publishing contract with PricewaterhouseCoopers, it previously having been held by CCH(WK). Ironically, it is acquisition that becomes a key means by which the major, less-nimble players can initially capitalise on innovation, until they lose it as progressively they squeeze out the entrepreneurial spirit for which they paid handsomely. 

I’ve been surprised at procrastination, until relatively recently, by the UK legal publishers, in delivering legal content online or electronically. Still, again in the UK, online delivery isn’t always a default approach and, to some extent, focus is on delivering mainly commoditised source content rather than the whole portfolio. Contrast this with tax and accounting publishing, where it would have been absurd, latterly, not to make all published content available online. Undoubtedly, this has to do with the pace of change in tax and customer characteristics but I think that a significant reason is that the law publishers, with their legacies, have more to lose from abandoning books and print subscriptions and use lack of customer push as an excuse for maintaining the status quo. We still see, in the UK, retention of multi-volume looseleaf services with all their problems, whereas in my view and experience, that medium is dying.

I think that now is a critical period of change, thanks to the iPad, e-book readers, blogging and the growth in interest in Apps and we see legal titles being delivered as e-books. I would assert that the main reasons for reading are to be entertained, informed and taught and the professional publishers can find opportunity in all three purposes. Each create different needs but the more important the need, on a scale down from necessity to leisure, the faster the pace of change from print to electronic. Hence, the needs of the lawyer will be scaled higher than of the holiday novel reader. One needs reference information, in which "lookup" content is often the requirement and this is more effectively done electronically, whereas at the other end, narrative reading for pleasure and perhaps not at a desk, lends itself to print. As to delivery media, the issue is not one of mutual exclusivity. There are many areas of legal publishing wherein the annual book remains attractive, despite the existence of the electronic services. I think that this need and type of usage are most susceptible to migration to e-book delivery. Almost a hybrid between linear reading and look-up reference, the questions of easy access and portability are likely to make e-book versions more attractive than print. It’s not a simple straight-line evolution.

As I see it:

• We are increasingly accustomed to searching for reference and technical content online, the default approach
• Recent innovations, notably e-book readers, tablets and smartphones are transforming how we access information. Their use is more likely to become the logical norm.
• The cost of creating major databases and search technology has reduced dramatically, eroding a barrier to entry, particularly for smaller competitors.
• Smaller competitors selling content in integrated online systems with sophisticated tools will reduce prices and encourage subscriptions from smaller firms. 
• An opportunity exists to convert and deliver the residue of legal print content, notably looseleaf services and monographs, to paid online content
• However nauseating the vocabulary of the “workflow” and “solutioning” directions of the publishers, particularly the international ones, the future has to be about combining added-value content with compliance and source content, documentation, process and compliance software, document management, smart-tools, support services, etc. to advance the publishing model. 
• Particularly working with larger firms, where the need is more likely to be to provide structured and updated source rather than added-value content, it’s critical to ensure that content and supporting technology feeds into and works with existing back office systems to ensure seamless access to it.

There’s a tendency, and I can be more guilty than most, to moan about how awful can be the major international professional information providers. Yet, compared to so many other sectors that affect our private, community and working lives, they’re, in relative terms, harmless and not especially evil. It’s not that they’re the oil polluters, the auto industry, the military-industrial complex, the tobacco industry and the like. Law publishing causes few deaths, helps professional advisers to perform valuable work and is generally on the positive side of the balance between democracy and totalitarianism.

So, for a change, I’d like to sing the praises a little and remind myself why it can be a pleasure, privilege and rewarding to be a part of the professional publishing trade.

Here’s how I see it. You’re an enthusiastic graduate with a background or interest in law. Thankfully, not everybody can or wants to be a practising lawyer, accountant, librarian, academic, public servant or a politician, so, what about professional publishing? What’s not to like about:

• Using background training and interest to earn a living in the media
• Being able to applying research skills and market intimacy to areas of specialist interest
• Being able to work in something that really enthuses you and to which you can bring real value, doing a job in which work and pleasure are indistinguishable
• Knowing the language and ways of thinking of your customers and understanding, anticipating and delivering change and realising the commercial benefits of it
• Being involved in the market and its activities, in learned societies, professional or trade bodies, etc., yet not being so much on the inside that you lose objectivity, flexibility of the potential to think laterally and counter-intuitively
• Getting invited to and participating in key events in the target markets, always in the best places
• Using the skill-set of intelligence, knowledge, competence, enthusiasm, talent and commercial drive, without which, in any case, there is zero chance of success or job satisfaction.
• Understanding that quality is very important, as are authors, even when they’re awful and that working with the good ones is a privilege
• Working with technology for solutions to problems, efficiency and innovation 
• Being in a people industry where teamwork, skills exchange and multi-tasking are necessary and where established roles and preconceptions of what traditional jobs are changing all the time. 
• Being able to earn a living in an industry in which, for the most part, it is civilised, full of the best people and where, chances are, nobody’s killing anybody or getting killed but equally, where no-one’s exactly saving lives, so everything in proportion
• Discovering that you may or may not get rich in publishing but probably won’t be poor, never forgetting that it is about money.
• Having the opportunity to be in the industry via a range of roles with enormous possibilities beyond content management and development, extending to sales, marketing, advertising, PR, finance, subscription management, administration, logistics, general and specific management, etc.
• Realising that publishing and its functions can be viewed in countless media and communication in all their forms
• Never forgetting that professional publishing is, generally, a commercial, money-making activity and not a hobby, pastime or alternative to doing something better; it’s about shifting product.

That represents aspects of what I think are core elements of the legal publishing trade. Naturally, many can be applied to many careers but that’s for others to boast.

Given the similarity in type and backgrounds that, in my opinion, tends to exist as between those in legal publishing and their customers, evidenced by frequent career movement from one to the other, it seems to be such a missed opportunity not to have more harmonious relationships across the divide. It must be assumed, logically, that if the customer is always right, the onus is on the publishers to move closer to their way of thinking, perhaps in ways that the banks should also do. To reinforce the point, I recall, with only a little embarrassment, the private, jocular, never publicly-uttered slogan of one subsequently acquired House, in respect of customer service standards, “we’re no worse than our competitors”. I suspect that some still have that aspiration.

Among the issues that can detrimentally affect both supplier and customer are those of conservatism and fear of change. The market isn’t growing and, looking at it from a UK perspective, is occasionally slow and frightened to embrace technology, thereby suppressing profit growth that might otherwise derive from a more wholesale shift away from the print tradition. Sometimes, all the publishers know is how to maintain profitability by over-inflation price increases, cutting costs and uninspired product development. In truth, though, this is changing steadily and there are impressive initiatives, particularly from Lexis Nexis.

However, on the other side, one sees frequently demands for the publishers’ output to be made available free-of-charge, or at prices and in ways that in no way reflect the added-value excellence, expertise and requirement to make a living among those in publishing. An outcome often appears to be a continuous battle of each side pulling in opposite directions, one to screw out as much money as is possible, while the other trying to screw into the ground. One way or another, everybody’s getting screwed.

Now, I don’t want to go all soft, rose-tinted and self-delusional. There is no doubt that within the professional publishing industry there are some managers and staff who can occasionally appear to be wicked, stupid and, worryingly perhaps, suffering from mental illness, in the way they attempt to conduct their business, thereby helping to diminish the standards and reputations of their companies. This is a great pity, as it harms those who care passionately about serving their customers, working ethically, honestly, efficiently and for the achievement of just reward, expressed in terms of healthy profitability. Sad to say, as almost any job-loss has to be mourned, such is the nature of the sector, that at senior levels, heads continue to roll at regular intervals, so that some of the perfect babies get thrown out with the stagnant bathwater. So, biased as I may be, I believe I only occasionally seem to meet people in professional publishing who conduct themselves in ways that are unethical, devious, dishonest and uncaring. For the most part, those who are, after a relatively short time, disappear to business environments to which they are better suited. 

Some see things otherwise. Of publishers, Cyril Connolly, the writer and critic opined:

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers

Whereas, Salvador Dali saw their likes among 

those middle-men of culture who, with their lofty airs and superior quackings, come between the creator and the public.

Doubtless there is an element of truth in both views but I hope that if I search extensively, I’ll find a more positive analysis. So, I’d say, give the law publishers a break occasionally and, unless there are very good reasons to believe otherwise, assume that they’re only doing their jobs and making an honest living.

Oligopolies? Reduction in healthy competition? Up go the prices. Down goes the quality. Customers in a stranglehold. 

Duopoly fear is discussed continuously. It’s a bad thing. Right?

I’m not so sure, my reason being that I want to see professional information thrive for all concerned – shareholders, employees past, present and future, customers, suppliers and society, and in the interests of the supremacy of law. My point is, what appears to exist now is hardly optimal, it’s clearly ripe for change and in this situation and for these purposes, I reckon market forces might produce a better outcome than the present one.

No doubt, great changes have occurred recently and we have seen massive metamorphoses of multinational media businesses. Thomson Reuters especially, has altered its character and Reed Elsevier must surely follow. Professional, financial and business information remains an important and profitable sector, involving high entry costs for outsiders. Inevitably, smaller, weaker, less-focused players, and those not fully committed to growth and innovation in the professional sector won’t be winners and some will disappear. Moreover, who wants to be Number 3, or worse, in a market?

Yet, one or two small but important competitors have established sizeable niches and have undoubtedly stolen market share from some of the established law publishing giants which, sometimes, at least in the UK, cling to the security attached to owning portfolios that include 200 year-old high-profit cash cows. The more nimble competitors sometimes can concentrate on attractive segments of the market and benefit from lower cost bases. There are, occasionally, opportunities for them in low-volume, profitable services geared to specific customer needs and, increasingly in the future, from innovative and entrepreneurial cultures and capabilities, making it easier for them to respond to changing market requirements. Notable, in that context, is the fact that in the 2010 BIALL Supplier Survey, only two names were classified as “Good”, those being Justis and Wildy. Every other relevant publisher was at best “Satisfactory” with a few being “Poor”. It’s questionable whether the market leaders have been sufficiently and consistently dynamic on innovation, customer care and on new opportunities, in order to defend their future positions and ensure that they are in the forefront of change. Some remain impressive, however flawed, but the mid-ranking stragglers can find themselves in neither one place or the other.

There is impressive competition everywhere; from Government, the Internet, self-publishing, the professional firms themselves, from new, hopeful information and services providers. The Thomson Reuters combination, News International’s acquisition of Dow Jones, Bloomberg’s alleged aspirations and others, show the way towards integrating the communications media sector. These developments indicate that it’s not enough to continue as before; that understanding and researching customer requirements involves knowing, in minute detail, how they work. Information providers, large and small, need to understand customers’ relationships with their clients and help them achieve their objectives. Without diminishing the essence of the publishing trade, the future is about intervening in the target customers workflow wherever possible and profitably. In so doing, they are more able to satisfy needs for compliance, added-value and strategic planning/litigation-oriented information, training, networking and communicating, documentation, tools, software requirements, marketing solutions, business development, and more. Undoubtedly, greater success is achieved when customers are delighted to spend fortunes and buy from publishers whose products, services and support provide a critical route to their own profit improvement. 

If this is the case, maybe it would be better to have two world-class, all-service behemoths that can match the needs of equivalent international professional and corporate entities. This might create more space for the innovators, specialists and nationally based publishers to flourish organically and by merger and acquisition. 

It would be wrong and presumptuous of me to opine excessively about what goes overseas but, taking the UK as an example, what an appealing provider would be created by the combination of the Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer businesses. As a publisher, TR has no significant presence in the tax and accountancy markets while WKUK is almost invisible in law. Meanwhile, LexisNexis enjoys the advantage of being the only provider that can fully meet the needs of the legal, tax and accountancy professional markets. In mainland Europe, Wolters Kluwer is Number 1 or 2 in most (unconnected) markets but that great unspoken, the fact that each country has a different body of laws and they all speak different languages, puts something of a constraint on integration. One can see why Reed Elsevier conceded LexisNexis Deutschland to Wolters Kluwer. In the US, Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer (via CCH) see themselves as rivals in the tax market, where LexisNexis is less visible but WK’s weakness in law suggests that LexisNexis and WK would be good bedfellows to counter TR/Westlaw. Concerning Canada, I defer to Gary Rodrigues’ insight. Speaking in generalities and conscious of the many exceptions to weaken the statement, for the most part, Wolters Kluwer comes from and is most comfortable in the European, multi-lingual, Civil Law tradition while Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis are happier in that of the English-speaking, Common Law world. This suggests that the CCH brand, except in the UK, would fit well with Reed Elsevier, while Thomson Reuters would be better placed for growth in the UK and Europe with the addition of the WK businesses. Despite its snappily entitled research platform, Wolters Kluwer is without the power of an established globally-branded one, rivalling Westlaw and LexisNexis. Furthermore, other than CCH, WK uses a range of brands, particularly in Europe; another reason to see its future with its present competition. 

Of course there is nothing new here and even apart from the continual rumours, the possibility of a Reed Elsevier-Wolters Kluwer was a real story in 1998. Allegedly, the deal was aborted or withdrawn after EU regulators expressed concern that it would threaten competition in the publishing industry. The EU Competition Committee ruled that they could merge if the combined business sold certain legal and tax properties. Apparently, Wolters Kluwer, which was asked to sell assets it considered essential to its main business, unsuccessfully requested Reed Elsevier to renegotiate the deal. One wonders, however, the extent to which jostling for where management power would have lain, might have effected the failure. That was then and I suspect that nowadays, in the size and scale of things, the shenanigans of the relatively insignificant business of tax and legal publishing information would not raise many eyebrows.

That done, what an opportunity, certainly in the UK, for the smarter players to sweep up and make sense of a few stragglers like Jordans, that long-established business that offers potential for information and workflow in corporate law and market leadership in family law. There are PLC, Informa Law, Hart Publishing, Globe Business Publishing, Wilmington, XPL Publishing and others, some of which might be waiting for an offer they can’t refuse, assuming they’d value a godfather. 

In mainland Europe, one wonders when and where the likes of Editions Lefebvre Sarrut and CH Beck , indeed all those in the Law Publishers in Europe  group that are not already part of TR, LN or WK, will go. Undoubtedly they are long-coveted targets rather then acquirers.

So, roll on Thomson Reuters Kluwer and LexisCCH, until, of course, Bloomberg LexisCCH!

Many areas of publishing, to me, are bizarre. For example, visit the Frankfurt Book Fair and see tiny stand after stand, staffed by families, displaying delightful books, over which they have slaved, yet nobody's making money. Publishing is often seen like that; resembling academic and religious endeavour, done for the greater good rather than profit. It's not my view but neither, mostly, is it any of my business how others think and behave.

When it comes to legal and professional information publishing, you'd think it would be different. With customers such as fat, succulent lawyers, accountants, tax advisers, big corporates and institutions, it should be just a question of knowing or finding out what they want, delivering it to the optimum quality standard and banking the cash. Yet, despite their undoubted qualities and strengths, the major international professional publishers seem to be increasingly less able to do that simple thing. Much of the evidence appears to be that, to some extent, their customers hate them and feel hated by them, while the endeavours of the publishers appear, in certain of their developed markets, to be directed at reducing revenue, profit and margin from what ought to be the dream market of professional, highly-qualified, rich advisers who get richer from trading on information.

Remember the 1980s fictional character, Gordon Gekko, recently revived? Now we mightn't have publicly agreed entirely but we certainly knew what he was saying with his "greed is good" mantra. Greed is such a powerful motive. It's often seen accompanying its slightly anaemic sibling, Fear. So, if, as a publisher, one had to choose to play to one motive or another, Greed should win out. You identify areas in which big money can be earned. You have the best authors and editors. You know the market requirements, including competitive costs and price points that optimise profit and facilitate growth, go after them aggressively and commercially and you're done. The professional advisers see that the investment in winning content assists them greatly in underpinning their expertise and currency; they add value and pass it all on to their rich corporate clients; billing is constantly sustained or increased; the cost of acquiring and maintaining quality content is seen as a small price to pay to increase the size of the kids' trust fund. Sure, it's not quite like that and there's a recession and other elements of the equation are changing but you get my drift. I would repeat the quotation that Alison Baverstock kindly took from me for her book “How to Market Books”, 4^th edition, Kogan Page (2008),

Information publishing is of limited value if it simply serves to inform but does not form part of a growth strategy for the customer. We need to understand our customers’ relationships with their customers and help them achieve their objectives.

Fear is OK but less appealing. Everybody’s in fear of the consequences of making mistakes and of doing harm. Keeping out of jail is indeed a powerful motive but it's still not like Greed. Fear is about saving and protecting. Greed is about making money, growth and power. It works better.

So why is it that the big players often can’t tell the difference between the two? They appear to put more of their efforts into back office activities for lawyers and others. It’s fine to help them take costs out of their businesses and manage efficiency, and very worthy, of course, but better to find ways to help them increase their billing by selling them quality information wholesale, allowing the advisers to add value and sell it on retail, at a larger profit. As everybody knows, any fool can take cost out of a business. You need to be clever to do the growth thing. They increasingly sell themselves as providers of “solutions”, implying that they’re giving responses to problems of some kind. Perhaps rather than a focus on problems, they should direct themselves to encouraging “opportunities”, helping their customers get richer by growth.

What, therefore, are we seeing? Publishers whose wonderful reputations have been built of the quality, expertise and suitability of their content seem more obsessed about outsourcing capabilities to take out cost, with software to reduce the clients’ back-office costs, consultancy and call-centre services using cheaper labour, document management and time-management tools. Obviously, it’s important to understand the customer’s workflow and to find places within it to intervene profitably and in relevant ways but where do you take it? Lawyers need many services but that doesn’t mean that publishers need to focus on providing low-margin, as compared to legal publishing, commoditised products and services. I refute the notion that “content is king” but rather it’s what you do with it that matters. It sometimes looks like with all the amazing innovation that is possible in collecting, creating, exploiting, adding value to and delivering content, the point has been lost or certainly diminished.

There is a massive difference, in terms of capitalizing on opportunity that brings high rewards, between, at one level, providing compliance and back-office solutions, through structured source-based information provision, to helping to drive strategic planning decision-making to deal with or avoid litigation though the genius of great legal minds, at the other.

One wonders what might be the reasons for the situation that appears to prevail? Some might suggest that a problem lies in the de-skilling of publishing, taking out the legal editors, publishers and marketing people in favour of lower-cost generalists and bluffers. Arguably, there are those who are likely to defend or seek to hide their own weaknesses and ignorance by surrounding themselves with others who won’t make them look stupid and ill-informed. Therefore, they play down the importance of real knowledge and expertise, derived from the inside and only make decisions based on the advice of clever, earnest but knowledge-free consultancy clones, quick to prove their cases by spurious research intended to confirm the decision first thought of. It’s far too tedious to learn the difference between a case and a statutory instrument or the distinctions between Civil and Common Law. 

The solution? Use only metaphorical language, analogy and general management-speak to disguise ignorance and avoid specific challenge, draw all examples for intended actions from unrelated industry sectors so that everyone is ignorant in equal amounts, set up project teams to investigate issues but never complete tasks, when in trouble, announce an internal restructure to buy more time and get out quickly, on to the next job before being rumbled.