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.