Probably the most interesting thing happening in the BC legal world just now is the Justice Reform Initiative launched by the BC government back in early February. The review is chaired by Geoff Cowper, QC, of Fasken Martineau. The terms of reference for the initiative are ambitious. According to the government’s press release: “He [Geoff Cowper] will identify the top issues that are affecting the public’s access to timely justice and what can be done to ensure the efficiencies already underway have the desired impacts while respecting the independence of the judicial system.” The chief justices of the BC courts have taken a very firm stand on the issue of judicial independence; former Attorney General Geoff Plant also had some thoughts on this important issue.

Several other issues are also on the table: the Legal Services Society (that is, BC legal aid) will provide advice on efficiencies that can be achieved, and an outside review of British Columbia’s system for approval of prosecutions will also be conducted. (In BC, criminal charges are brought forward by Crown Counsel rather than the police.)

You can follow the work of the BC Justice Reform Initiative via the chair’s blog. A final report is due in July 2012.

Meanwhile, an international conference, developed by the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL) [Ed. note: headed by Slaw columnist Sam Muller], explicitly addressed some of these issues. Entitled “Innovating Justice Forum 2012: Towards basic justice care for everyone”, the conference was held earlier this April in the Netherlands. HiiL was formed in 2005 as a not-for-profit research and development institute for the justice sector. Their emphasis is on making justice work for both people and organizations, with a strong belief in “innovating justice”.

From the conference programme:

Everybody needs basic justice care: access to fair, workable solutions for problems that can become a threat to a person’s livelihood. Access to justice ensures secure, trustworthy and economically viable relationships: at home, at work, on the land, and within the community. The Innovating Justice Forum 2012 is the first attempt to assess how people’s basic justice needs are protected and what are the trends in delivery of legal services to meet these needs across the world.

Our own David Bilinsky, Practice Advisor at the Law Society of British Columbia, gave a keynote address on “The climate for innovation in the justice sector”. Again, from the conference programme: “Why is it that it is so difficult to bring fundamental change and innovation to the justice sector? The challenges for innovators in terms of funding, integrating innovations in the system, scaling up and many others. What is needed for a better innovation climate?”

HiiL has published draft recommendations and a report on world-wide trends in providing access to justice. Further reports and recommendations are planned.

Closer to home, a promising medical-legal project is underway here in BC. This new initiative is focused on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. A group with representatives from the Legal Services Society, CLEBC, UBC Faculty of Law, and Access ProBono is working in consultation with the Downtown Eastside community and an established medical community initiative known as RICHER. RICHER is an acronym for: Responsive, Intersectoral, Children’s Health, Education and Research; this group describes their work as follows:

This program is a community-based primary healthcare service specifically designed to meet the unique needs of children, youth, and families in Vancouver’s inner city neighbourhoods. The focus is on children who are particularly vulnerable because of their material and social circumstances as they are most likely to suffer the consequences of delayed development and poor health.

Our approach provides important links to specialized healthcare services in partnership with families and their community-based support networks.

The new BC initiative is just one example of a medical-legal partnership, in which lawyers are included as essential members of the healthcare team. Medical-legal partnerships are a growing phenomenon in North America. Through direct legal assistance, institutional and systemic policy change, MLPs address factors that have a direct impact on health, such as food and energy security, housing conditions, education, and personal safety. They recognize that legal problems are often linked to or the result of other issues. For example, close links between health issues and legal issues arise in the following situations, where families and those working to support them face a dilemma:

• parents who are homeless, unable to find suitable housing, or face eviction, where the only support offered by the formal system is the apprehension of their children;

• parents living in substandard housing who are told the housing condition (mold, standing water, lack of heating) underlies their child’s repeated hospitalizations for compromised respiratory status and risk being reported for neglect or eviction by their landlord if they complain.

If one follows through on what frequently happens in each of these scenarios, there is growing evidence of the short and long term health and medical costs of ineffective management. Preliminary research indicates that if a parent and children can be kept together in stable housing and the children supported through early childhood education, there is a direct correlation to significant savings in the health and justice sectors.

This medical-legal partnership movement increases our understanding of factors that affect the costs of the justice system and the importance of taking the broader view. If we consider the justice system in isolation, we may miss opportunities to provide the best and most cost-effective service from a systems and public policy perspective.

I’m hopeful that this good work underway both across the world and close to home can be brought to bear on the work of our BC Justice Review Initiative.

What does context mean for legal information? “Context” is one of the latest buzzwords in the world of publishing. In a new online collection of essays, Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, Brian O’Leary exhorts us to consider context when we are developing content. He defines context as “tagged content, research, footnoted links, sources, and audio and video background, as well as title-level metadata”. Although his focus is trade publishing, his ideas apply to legal publishing as well.

Christine Kirchberger, lecturer and doctoral candidate at Stockholm University, is working on a doctoral dissertation entitled “Legal information as a tool—Where legal sources meet technology and their users”. She tells us “creating context in legal information retrieval will be one of the main tasks in the 21st century.”

How does context apply to the specialized world of legal publishing? Most legal publications, whether a primary or secondary source, are already a mass of context. We may not immediately identify it as such because it goes to the core of our legal training (in other words, we take these ideas on board in the first term of law school and never look back).

Understanding context is critical to determining whether a statement of the law is authoritative, persuasive, or even relevant. Understanding context helps us provide reliable advice to our clients; for example, what is the governing legislation? Has it been recently amended? Are any amendments pending? Is the government reviewing the legislation? How about the law reform commission? This type of information is usually included in a secondary source.

We’ve developed tools or shortcuts to indicate the context of legal information. Think of all the information contained in a case citation: not only the parties, but when (how recent is this decision?), where (jurisdiction: does this apply in my province or country?), and level of court (who is bound by this decision?). Sometimes we include the name of the judge; this information itself can provide excellent context. For Supreme Court of Canada or Court of Appeal decisions we usually indicate whether the decision came from the whole court or whether the court was split; if so, who was in the majority and who was in dissent. All this context helps us understand whether the case or statute applies or is relevant to a client’s problem.

There’s another important source of context as well: how has the case been treated in other cases? Not so very long ago, the BC Courthouse Library noted up cases in the margins of the printed reports. The big online legal research services have had this feature for many years; our wonderful CanLII now provides a note-up service as well. (When Colin Lachance inserted links to CanLII in a Wikipedia article about the Criminal Code, he was providing context.)

We provide plenty of context when we are creating secondary sources; our authors indicate the leading cases and applicable legislation; they often also note problems with the law. We also provide further context with glossaries, forms and precedents, and checklists.

When we started publishing secondary legal material online, it was obvious to include links to context. A large part of the appeal of publishing legal information online has been the ability to provide even more context, not only by linking to primary sources, but also by applying taxonomies and by linking related resources. For instance, case and statute citators are built into CLEBC online publications; when you click on a case link, not only are you directed to the primary law, but you can also see where else within the CLEBC library that case or statue is discussed.

Our challenge is to provide content in a format where the context is enhanced even further; for instance, by deeper and richer tagging so related content can be found more easily.

We can also liberate ourselves from constraints of print. For instance, wouldn’t it be excellent to include video demonstrations of effective advocacy or introduction of evidence in a trial practice handbook?

Can we pull it all together into one seamless and easy-to-use service? Should we make the information available in smaller pieces? Or should we offer the choice? There’s persuasive view that legal information consumers shouldn’t be forced to subscribe to one large service (particularly where you can’t subscribe to one service unless you also subscribe to the other), and that information should also be available in smaller pieces.

But what do we do with all this context? Here’s a challenging statement from Brian O’Leary:

Many current audiences (and all future ones) live in an open and accessible environment. They expect to be able to look under the hood, mix and match chunks of content, and create, seamlessly, something of their own.

Is this the future of legal publishing? And what will our business model be?

You can’t have missed the recent coverage of the housing and governance crisis in Attawapiskat. The story certainly captured my attention. I’ve been watching news of the situation travel over the Internet.

Social media played a key role in the coverage of this story. What particularly interests me is that the quality of some material published about Attawapiskat through social media is as good as or better than high quality legal information available through traditional legal publishing channels. And this caused me to consider again: what is the role of social media in legal publishing?

I first became aware of the dire situation in Attawapiskat through a Facebook post. One of my friends posted a link to a Huffington Post story “What if they declared an emergency and no one came?” The Attawapiskat First Nation had declared a state of emergency because they did not have enough suitable housing for the coming winter, but three weeks after the declaration, government response had been minimal.

I was dismayed (but not surprised) to find little coverage of the story in my usual news sources. But before long, comments and links started popping up in my Twitter feed. The story was indeed gaining traction. Many tweets linked to the original Huffington Post story.

But one tweet directed me to a blog by âpihtawikosisân. She had written an outstanding post entitled “Dealing with Comments about Attawapiskat”. She set out detailed information about history, context, process, and band finances. She linked to source documents. Apart from the importance and timeliness of the content, it was an effort that warmed my legal publisher’s heart: she provided an excellent synthesis of the topic and supported it with primary authority. She took exceptionally difficult material and made it understandable.

When I first read the post, a few comments had been made. But then the post went viral. I was not the only one who tweeted and linked. In the two weeks after posting, over 1000 comments were made on the primary post, and many other comments were made elsewhere on the site.

âpihtawikosisân moderated the comments, removing any hateful ranting. Many posters noted that it had become too painful to read the comment sections of the national newspapers because the posts were so vitriolic. Many appreciative and thoughtful comments were made; many deepened my understanding of the lives and challenges of First Nations people.

A couple of familiar names popped up in the comments thread. Joseph Boyden (the Giller-award winning author), and Justice Murray Sinclair (chairman of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission for victims of residential schools) both posted supportive comments.

Meanwhile, the government appointed a third-party manager for Attawapiskat. Back here on Slaw, Michael Posluns set out some good information about his perspective on third party management. I was very satisfied to see that I had connected these two posters.

The interest in this blog was exceptional given that, as far as I could tell, the author had no previous profile. She had plenty of knowledge and excellent writing and analysis skills, though. Who is this mystery blogger? Her name is Chelsea Vowel; she is Métis, originally from Alberta and now living in Montreal. She obtained her LL.B. from the University of Alberta, and is now working on her civil law qualifications.

She followed up her initial posts with interesting information about the experience of having a post go viral, and then further discussion of First Nations finances and Indian status generally.

My point is not only to compliment âpihtawikosisân for her good work. I wonder whether legal publishers have a role in supporting efforts like this. Obviously quality information could have a tremendous value for the legal profession.

Is there a place in the world of legal publishing for organized or systematic blogging (such as that found on the Courthouse Libraries BC site)? Or should we be directing lawyers to other great sources of information on the web as part of a curation or aggregation service? Is the blogosphere another place to find great authors? Or should we just get out of the way?

I’m still pondering these questions. I am certain, though, that paying close attention to your Twitter feed can lead you to pure gold.

The story continues to unfold in Attawapiskat and obviously the primary issues there have little to do with legal publishing. I hope readers of this column will take the time to read and reflect on âpihtawikosisân’s blog; she has many things to tell us.

Readers of this column over the past year or so will know that I’m rather preoccupied with the quality of legal material. When I compare free to paid legal resources, I often find the free resources wanting, usually because I don’t believe that enough checks and controls are used when the material is created.

We are proud of the work we’ve done here at CLEBC to create authoritative practice manuals for BC lawyers. But how does that material become authoritative; that is, what do we actually do to ensure that BC lawyers can confidently rely on these resources in their daily practice?

The basis of CLEBC operations is the voluntary contributions of our authors, editorial boards, and course presenters. We receive outstanding material from our volunteers. I’ve worked with hundreds of wonderful BC lawyers who are committed to sharing their knowledge and raising the standard of practice. But how do we turn that material into a practice manual on which the whole profession can rely?

Our first step when planning a new publication is to investigate what’s needed. Where are insurance claims arising? What do senior lawyers see as the information gaps? Are there any good resources already published?

Once we’ve determined that a gap needs to be filled, we gather a group of leading practitioners from that practice area. This group provides us with valuable information about where the needs are greatest. They often work with us until the manual is completed; they serve as our editorial board.

We do a lot of investigation to figure out who will be the best authors. Our editorial boards are good sources of information; we also draw on our institutional knowledge to find leading practitioners who could write for us.

As in all publishing houses, our authors and editors work together. We take the contributions of our authors and work with them to make the final product the very best it can be. Once we receive material from the authors, the editorial process begins. The first step is to have the legal editor review and edit the manuscript.

The legal editors (all of whom are lawyers) take responsibility for the accuracy of the content provided to us. They read with a very careful eye, considering always: Does this make sense? Is it accurate and does it align with his or her understanding of the law? Have we covered every topic? Have we discussed every relevant case? Would this discussion make sense to a brand-new lawyer? Has every concept been explained fully? Is anything missing? (Of course, not all issues arise in every submission!)

For a multi-author book, we often find that our authors have different writing styles. They may also treat the subject differently, either by emphasizing the details of practice, deep discussion of the case law, or some other approach. We work with the authors to even out their treatment of the topics and do our best to ensure a smooth transition between the different styles.

The editorial board review process is the next quality control step. Our group of senior practitioners in the area will review every page of the book. This most often takes place over a series of meetings. I cannot overstate the importance of this process!

I’ve enjoyed many of these meetings over the years. I have seen with my own eyes the care that the editorial board takes to ensure the accuracy of the statements in our manuals. They bring an experienced and practical perspective to the topic at hand. This process can take some time; our BC Company Law Practice Manual was reviewed at weekly meetings over many months.

Thrashing out controversial issues at an editorial board meeting also ensures that all sides of an action or transaction are represented: for example, in motor vehicle accidents cases, plaintiff’s counsel and defence counsel often have very different views.

We often include the judiciary on our editorial boards; they bring another valuable perspective to the review. Our civil litigation resources have especially benefitted from the judicial perspective. Participating on our boards is also a good way for the judiciary to let the profession know what they’d like to see in court (for instance, the correct way to introduce certain types of evidence.)

Once the authors, legal editor, and editorial board have signed off the content of the manual, we start another round of quality control. We put the book manuscript into the hands of our copy editors. In our shop, we ask the copy editors to check grammar, spelling, and punctuation. They read all the material carefully and point out any part of the manuscript that should be clarified. They also check the page layout, the headers and footers, the headings, the tables of contents, and cross-references. They confirm all the case and statute citations and prepare the case, statute, and reference tables.

Once this work is complete, and has been reviewed by the legal editor, our production staff takes over to create the final print and online publication.

Is all this effort worth it? As I’ve said before, sometimes “good enough” really is good enough. But when time is at a premium or the stakes are high (and I believe this describes most lawyer’s work), then it is critical to have an authoritative source. Happily, BC lawyers also seem to take this view of our offerings.

When I was chatting with one of my American colleagues at this summer’s ACLEA conference, our talk turned to our competitors. We agreed that our biggest competition is the free material on the web, rather than legal resources published by any other legal publisher. (We both publish secondary legal material: practice manuals and the like.) This set me on a train of thought about the funding behind all that free legal information.

With my belief in access to justice and to legal information, I can’t help supporting initiatives to make primary legal material and legal scholarship freely available online. I think we all need to be clear about what it takes to get this done. I have a slight concern that providing free access to all this legal information feeds into the common misperception that everything on the Internet is or should be free.

The truth of the matter is that free is not really free. There’s plenty of legal information on the Internet. But it’s not really free. Someone is paying to put it there. And there’s a lot of expense associated with publishing specialized information on the Internet; technology has a significant cost associated. 

CanLII is the best free legal resource in this country. CanLII is supported by the members of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. In other words, a portion of our Law Society fees goes to CanLII. What a great deal! I’m very happy to have a portion of my fees support this excellent resource.

Sean Hocking’s recent column addressed the funding woes of LII (legal information institute) providers around the world. He noted that LII, other than CanLII, are often funded privately, and must put an enormous effort into securing and maintaining funding from those sources. BAILII’s recent appeal for funds shows what is necessary when some of the funding dries up. A recent post on VoxPopuLII, Reaching Sustainability of Free Access to Law Initiatives, gives a fascinating insight into LII funding and sustainability.

Daniel Poulin’s informed and informative comment on Sean Hocking’s column shows that CanLII, at least, is properly funded.

Louis Mirando calls for creation of a digital collection of historical print resources (older primary law and legal scholarship). My first thought: what a great idea! My second thought: who is going to pay for it all? From what I can tell, at least initially this project will be part of the work of the Osgoode library.

We have some excellent free online legal resources in British Columbia. The best source for public legal education information is surely Clicklaw, created by our friends at Courthouse Libraries BC.

The Clicklaw website tells us: “Clicklaw is … aimed at enhancing access to justice in British Columbia. It features legal information and education, but it is not a site of laws. Instead, Clicklaw features legal information and education designed for the public from 24 contributor organizations, as well as selected others.” 

The development of Clicklaw was supported by a grant from the B.C. Law Foundation. The Law Foundation is a non-profit foundation that receives and distributes the interest on clients' funds held in lawyers' pooled trust accounts. These funds are distributed for projects and programs in legal education, legal research, legal aid, law reform, and law libraries.

The B.C. Legal Services Society (our legal aid provider) has an excellent family law website. The LSS is funded primarily by the provincial government; it also receives support for some projects from the B.C. Law Foundation and the Notary Foundation. 

Of course, these two examples are both public legal education sites. But I can see that a lawyer might use them as a quick refresher. 

When we’re thinking about free information online, it’s important to distinguish between primary and secondary material. Free secondary legal information is also available online in the many legal blogs now published. These blogs are usually a marketing vehicle showcasing the legal expertise of the author. They are easy to set up using an interface such as WordPress. Some blogs are marvelous; others less so. The best that can be said is that the quality is inconsistent; there is certainly no guarantee of accuracy. 

Developing and publishing authoritative secondary legal material can be very costly. Each step of the publication process: determining the needs of the market, recruiting authors, managing multiple authors, editing their work, and ensuring the accuracy of the content, comes with a price tag … and that’s before the many steps and details of the production process. Publishing that material online can be even more expensive. 

Is free material a serious threat to our online subscription products? In a column last year, I wrote about the use of wikis and other collaborative resources for legal publication. My conclusion that lawyers would continue to pay for authoritative and accurate secondary legal information hasn’t changed. But ensuring the accuracy of that information has a cost. And I continue to believe that having subscribers bear the cost of developing and publishing secondary information is still the best model for us.

E-books and e-readers are constant topics of discussion. Every new device released results in a flurry of activity; one only needs to think of the recent press around the new iPad 2 and the Blackberry PlayBook. Tablets and iPads are frequent topics here on Slaw. And in May, Amazon reported that since April 1, 2011, sales of Kindle books had exceeded the sale of print books. 

When I was at CALL recently, a show of hands indicated that more than half the audience owned at least one e-reader. Everyone I spoke with was enthusiastic about their e-reader or tablet of choice. I love my iPad; I can actually read what’s on screen! I mostly use it to catch up on email or access the Internet. But I haven’t used it yet for any e-books, either for personal or professional reading. 

There’s no doubt that e-books have enormous potential. Check out this impressive TED demonstration of a digital book. 

From what I can see, most legal publishers are actively considering whether to publish e-books. Our CLE colleagues in Massachusetts have embraced every format: they sell in print, CD, e-book, and an online library. Irwin Law is offering their entire collection as e-library. (To be honest, I haven’t looked at this closely, but from what I can tell, they are offering a subscription to their entire collection rather than individual title downloads.)

On the other hand, Mark Lewis notes that legal publishers have been slow to publish e-books. Several legal publishers have produced apps for iPhones but I haven’t seen a full-on legal information app yet (and by this I mean secondary legal material in the form of an app). It may be that we’re still trying to figure out what sort of legal information is best published on a tablet or e-reader.

Opinion is divided on whether a tablet is the best format for legal publishing: check out this posting from Binary Law, and read all the different views expressed in the comments. 

There’s a lot to consider before CLEBC jumps on the bandwagon. Most importantly, would an e-book format offer a better user experience that our online publication service? We’ve recently launched a new online platform that includes links to primary law, an excellent search engine, other finding tools, and a commenting feature. Is it worth the effort to offer all this in an e-book format as well? 

What makes a good user experience for legal material? Sophisticated browsing capability is essential, as is full-text search. Federated search is also important. All this is available on our online platform on our iPad. True, an Internet connection is needed, but I’m convinced that ubiquitous connectivity will be the norm very soon. 

I can see that an e-book may work well when portability is an issue; for example, an e-book of those big heavy books of annotated legislation that get taken to court would be useful. 

When we’re designing e-books, it’s important to remember that an e-book is quite different from a print source. For instance, legal material needs to have some easy-to-use citation system. A resource with no page numbers (whether e-book or online service) should include a system of locators.

Publishing legal material as an e-book raises a few issues for our friends the librarians. I don’t think I can add to Susannah Tredwell’s excellent column on the topic.

Then there’s the question of the best business model for the e-book. No standard has emerged. Irwin Law offers a subscription to their entire collection, while Massachusetts CLE sells individual copies of their e-books at the same price as the print copy.

On model might be to follow our business model for print: sell one copy initially (that is, one download), and then offer update downloads for sale as they are created. Another model is to offer a yearly subscription which includes the price of the update (if any) but which ends at the end of the year.

For publishers going down this road, it will be important to determine a device-agnostic file format; that is, a format that will work on the Kindle, ipad, PlayBook, and other devices. I’m still waiting for a consensus to emerge. 

Ultimately, I’m going to be driven by what CLEBC customers are asking for. I can see that the best potential for a really useful legal e-book resource is a collection of annotated legislation that is often taken to court. But as usual, I’m keen to hear the views of our customers on this issue. 

I’ve been staring at the horizon again. It’s not hard to see that change to our legal system is on the way. Everywhere we turn we encounter reports of things broken or in disarray. 

For instance, access to justice is a pressing concern. Chief Justice McLachlin speaks about it frequently, as does British Columbia’s Chief Justice Finch (see here). They do important work identifying that access to justice has become a privilege of the wealthy. They applaud the pro bono work of the legal profession, and encourage us to work towards innovative solutions.

Meanwhile, legal aid coverage is shown to be inadequate. Respected B.C. lawyer Len Doust recently authored a report highlighting the problems created when our most vulnerable citizens don’t have access to legal services. One of his most telling findings is that we’d save signficant public money if we were able to broaden the reach of legal aid:

… it is very clear that there are very real economic costs to inadequate legal aid. … costs borne by society at large include: costs associated with delays in court and administrative proceedings; increased court operation costs attributable to unrepresented litigants and accused; and, more broadly, costs associated with legal problems that are not resolved in an acceptable manner (including increased health care costs, increased social assistance costs and so on). 

But given the current political climate, I fear that pleas to increase legal aid funding will not meet with success. A recent story in the Vancouver Sun set out some of the problems: budget cuts in court services and the prosection service and significant delays in the appointment of BC Provincial Court judges lead to delays in the prosection of criminal matters, often leading to charges being dismissed because they take too long to get to trial. 

Others have identified the coming changes to the legal profession. In my first SLAW column, I reported on Richard Susskind’s prediction that the legal profession is undergoing profound change. Two forces will drive this transformation: a market pull towards the commoditization of legal services and the development and uptake of new and disruptive legal technologies.

One over-arching issue is complexity and its impact on the rule of law. (Thanks to Simon Fodden for his excellent column on this topic last summer). 

Is one of the reasons that clients are moving away from the profession in droves (either choosing to go it alone, or aggressively seeking to contain their legal spend) because the law has become so nuanced? Has the law become so nuanced that it isn’t really useful any more? 

One good example of an excess of nuance is the strata property regime in British Columbia. Our Strata Property Act runs to nearly 300 sections. There is also an 80-section regulation, and Forms A to Z.1. CLEBC publishes an 1100-page practice manual to explain it all. We also publish practice manuals of similar length for family law; motor vehicle accident claims; company law; secured transactions; real estate transactions, and so on.

Where do we legal publishers fit in all this? Are we part of the solution or are we part of the problem? 

There’s no doubt that we serve the traditional model of legal services: we provide key tools that lawyers need to serve their clients. I’d like to think that at a minimum, we make the situation less dire; after all, as publishers of secondary material, we are actively trying to save lawyers time and money by giving them practical advice about how to handle their work. We provide information about the tiny little details of how to practice law in British Columbia. And our commitment to including precedents in our manuals saves lawyers from wasting time in repetitive drafting work. Feedback from our customers suggests that we’re providing a valuable service by taking much of the guesswork out of the practice of law. 

But our CLEBC practice manuals shouldn’t be confused with public legal education. Our books are written specifically for lawyers, and they discuss the law as it is. We do our best to explain complicated concepts in understandable language, but legal language and concepts can be exceptionally dense.

What’s ahead? There’s no doubt that the use of technology offers some promise. As I write this column, I’m following tweets from the NELIC conference being held at Berkeley. According to the conference description, they are exploring “the next biggest disruptive technologies in the legal industry.” They’re hoping for discussion about the long-term impact of these technologies, and how they might come to be broadly adapted. Topics include quantitative legal prediction, legal automation, legal finance, the design of user-facing interfaces that make it possible for laypeople to manage the law, and startups in the legal industry. I’ll be very interested to follow up on the conference proceedings. 

Legal publishers should prepare to engage with these initiatives; I expect that’s where our future lies. In our publications, we’ve taken the trouble to break down legal transactions step by step; surely this detail can inform the legal automation, legal prediction, and user-facing interfaces for non-lawyers that are being developed now.

At the other extreme, I’m still struck by a New Yorker story about driving in China. Apparently, minor traffic accidents are settled on the street, in cash. Witnesses and other bystanders participate in the discussion until a settlement is concluded. There’s a certain attractive simplicity to this form of dispute resolution; on the other hand, DIY justice is one step away from anarchy.

I recently attended the mid-year meeting of ACLEA, the organization for continuing legal education professionals. This excellent group was started in 1964; it declares itself to be “a dynamic organization devoted to improving the performance of CLE professionals”. It has been a fantastic source of information and support throughout my CLE career. 

Many American CLEs have publishing departments. Some put most of their effort into publishing first-class course materials, but others, such as California (CEB), Michigan (ICLE), and Massachusetts (MCLE) are superb publishers of secondary material. I always enjoy reconnecting with my counterparts from across North America; we all face the same issues in our work, from “how will we make the leap to online publication?” to “what is the future of the wiki in legal publication?” to our perennial topic: “how can I get my authors to submit their material on time?” 

One great new addition to the program at this latest meeting was a panel of law librarians discussing “Tight Times in Law Libraries”. The panelists were all from the San Francisco area: two law firm librarians, one law school librarian, and one librarian from a public law library.

I’ve always admired the law librarian community here in British Columbia. (Full disclosure: my sister is librarian at a mid-size Vancouver firm.) They give us excellent feedback on every possible topic of interest to a legal publisher: Will this proposed title meet your needs? Is our new search engine any good? What are your lawyers asking for? And of course, they are our best customers. 

The panelists at the ACLEA session were also full of first-class information. Their focus was the increasing pressure on law libraries and their librarians. Not surprisingly, they had plenty to say about the impact of online publications. For instance, they were enthusiastic about incredible space savings realized by discarding print. Hein Online came in for special praise for publishing law journals online; this service alone resulted in significant space savings for at least one library. (For more on the topic of library space, see Ruth Bird’s excellent columns). 

But what is saved in shelving and real estate is often gobbled up by the high cost of electronic resources. Not only are librarians spending a much higher percentage of their budget on e-resources, they are also noticing that subscription prices are increasing astronomically.

As publishers, we were keen to know whether lawyers are starting to us e-readers or handheld devices more than print books. The librarians mentioned this as another pressure point: users continue to prefer print, while funders want the space savings that come from holding the collection online. Librarians are stuck in the middle. 

All the librarians on the panel were clear on one thing: they found books published on CD utterly frustrating. This was because the CD is a small, easily lost item that still needs to be tracked. They contrasted the ease of use of online databases that were always on and never lost.

They also mentioned the pressure from governing boards, funders, and partners arising from the perception that everything is free and available on the internet … “surely we don’t need so much money or space for the library now?”

Meanwhile, another, different, pressure is being applied as more and more people choose to solve their legal problems without the help of lawyers. For self-represented parties, the knowledgeable law librarian can be an essential resource as they struggle to locate the information needed. The panelist from a county public law library impressed me with her commitment to her mission to serve the public and support them in meeting their legal information needs.

Back in the world of big firms, the library of Morrison & Foerster, an international firm of 1000+ lawyers based in San Francisco, has renamed and rebranded itself. It is now known as “Research and Intelligence”. I thought this was a clever way to communicate the library’s value to those who sign the cheques.

The same firm has also developed its own app. The app, known as MoFo2Go, was developed for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It contains information about the firm’s lawyers, news, and office details (including nearby transportation hubs, restaurants, and hotels).

I was so impressed with the panel at our conference; they had such a clear understanding of the issues before them; they were so alive to the political realities of their positions, and each of them appeared deeply committed to doing the right thing. I see excellence in law librarianship at every turn: the panelists at our ACLEA conference, the always-interesting law librarian blog, and through my close connections with the Vancouver law librarian community. Law librarians: I salute you!

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently considering the next generation of legal publication. Louis Mirando’s excellent column about the future of print reporters identified the future storage and delivery of primary law; in a nutshell, bound volumes of the law reports are soon to be just a memory. 

One comment in Mirando’s column that particularly caught my attention concerned the importance of headnotes and report collections generally. What this says to me is that even though there may be comprehensive databases of case law available to us, there is still value in providing summaries of lengthy decisions and identifying decisions that actually change the law. Just consider the many support and property division decisions made by our courts; we can all see how useful it is to have a knowledgeable editor tell us which ones are important, and have access to a short summary of the case so the researcher doesn’t have to spent time wading through irrelevant material. The buzzwords in publishing circles for this service are “curation of content”. Curation of primary legal information is one of the most important services legal publishers can provide. 

But although this is all very interesting to me, my real concern is how to deliver secondary legal information online. One key theme in discussions about how to deliver information over the Internet is that consumers now expect information to come in bite-sized chunks. I take that to mean a paragraph or, at the most, a page. To what extent can we deliver legal information in small chunks? 

Here’s some news: a lot of legal information by its very nature requires much more than one page if it is to be explained fully. Sophisticated concepts, complicated transactions; that’s what the law is all about. But it may be that because I spent much of my editorial career working on massive practice manuals (1200 pages plus), I have a hard time seeing how all that content can be broken down.

It’s true that answers to certain kinds of questions can come in chunks; for example, what is the limitation period for a motor vehicle accident claim? Can you pay out on a pending registration or do you have to wait until your charge is fully registered? Who may apply for a wills variation? 

But a discussion of the factors to be taken into account in advising a group of minority shareholders whether they should sue a company? Sure, this discussion can (and should) be broken into understandable paragraphs, but without the benefit of access to the full discussion, there’s every likelihood that the response would be incomplete or would miss some nuance. 

We now divide our practice manuals into chapters and sections. Most sections are one or two paragraphs, but some are many pages long and consist of a discussion that cannot easily be broken down. 

Will we need to design and publish legal information in a whole new way by breaking down problems or transactions into smaller segments? Or will we continue to publish well-designed practice manuals, organized by manageable sections, online? With a good index and a first-class search engine, subscribers should be able to find the chunk of information they need quickly and easily. And users who need to dig deeper will be able to do so. 

One way for publishers to address this conundrum is to prepare the content in the smallest chunks possible (in our case, usually by topic and subtopic) but sell subscriptions to the whole book, the whole practice area, or the whole library. Many American CLEs have had great success with this model. And I notice that this is how the mega-publishers are doing business as well. Is this the model our customers want? There’s certainly an opposing trend in the way people are now consuming and purchasing information online. Whether that trend will also apply to legal information remains to be seen.

Two very good columns were posted here recently on the topic of looseleaf legal publications—one by Susannah Tredwell; the other by Ruth Bird. Ruth in particular painted a very negative picture of the looseleaf—basically the care and feeding is too onerous—and predicted its demise within the next 10 years.

Susannah referred to an article in BoingBoing; the comments on the article are most entertaining—mostly cries of woe from people who had been forced as part of their job duties to file looseleafs. From the tone of some of the comments you would think that looseleaf filing is a sophisticated form of torture. I’m certain that the filers are not usually the ultimate users; this is probably one of the reasons that the format has persisted for so long. 

In my early years in legal publishing (some 20 years ago), we never questioned our assumption that looseleaf was best for our purposes and our customers. We would very occasionally have a discussion about the format of our publications. Should we publish a softbound volume (so easy for the lawyer to slip into her briefcase on the way to court)? Or should we go with the traditional looseleaf? We saw the looseleaf as the only easy and cost-effective way to keep our publications up to date. Our authors and editorial boards supported this view.

In other words, for as long as I can remember, we’ve taken for granted that publishing in looseleaf is the best format for material that changes frequently. As a publisher we have sought to reduce the pain associated with this format by pledging only to update when necessary (it is very rare for us to update more than once per year). We’ve also always provided replacements for missing pages on request.

But I recently reflected on the production work necessary to create replacement pages. Our staff spends a great deal of time on fitting content to existing pages, ensuring that page beginnings and endings are accurate, inserting additional pages (known to us as point pages; numbered .1, .2, etc.) as necessary, creating filing instructions and contents checklists, and so on. Training staff to do this properly also takes considerable effort. I’m quite certain that if we replaced entire chapters, rather than just the changed pages, we’d save staff time, though our printing costs would be higher. We’re doing a little work now to figure out what the correct balance should be. And of course, as part of our review, we’ll consider the opinions of our customers. 

This type of review is important as long as we continue to publish in print. But it is apparent that publishing online is the way of the future. I realize that this is a statement of the obvious for librarians and legal publishers everywhere; however, I frequently encounter lawyers who are adamant that they prefer print.

A recent chat with my sister (who is librarian at a downtown Vancouver law firm) gave me a clear picture of how the change will come. She tells me that a lawyer will rush into her office anxious to find the hard copy of a CLEBC practice manual. But the book is not on the shelf and hasn’t been signed out of the library … where could it be? Time is of the essence! She tells me that she directs her anxious lawyer to our online version—the question is quickly answered and equanimity is restored.

As the legal profession comes to fully understand the convenience (not to mention the rich research experience) of online publications, their attachment to print will diminish. And with the enhanced reading experience of iPads, Kindles, and the like, some of the objections to the online reading experience should also die away. Ruth Bird may well be correct—we’ll see the demise of looseleaf before the end of my career.

What’s the best thing about Wikipedia? It’s a source that’s “good enough”. It’s an excellent way to get up to speed when all you really need is general or background knowledge. And the price point is so attractive! But would I rely on Wikipedia exclusively? Doubtful … and I certainly wouldn’t rely on it in an important situation without checking primary sources. 

Some wikis are now appearing as sources of legal information. I was fascinated to read the recent post on this site about the new tax wiki established by Professor Ben Alarie, of the U of T Law Faculty; its objective is to provide an unofficial forum for making known the current views of the CRA and the demands of Canadian income tax law. They describe their content as follows: “Official Interpretation Bulletins do not have the force of law. This is true of the following wiki version as well.” 

Meanwhile, out on the west coast, Vancouver lawyer Michael Drew has created legaltree.ca, described on the site as “a collaboratively built website with legal research resources maintained by the site administrators, and legal literature contributed by lawyers in the Canadian legal community.” The site’s best feature is its excellent bibliography of secondary sources. 

One area of the site is devoted to user-generated content. It contains some digests of Supreme Court of Canada cases, at least one great article on heading to chambers for the first time, and some other short articles. This part of the site includes a tab for “books”. The site says that it will have books on specific legal topics, authored by Legaltree users. But although the site states that legaltree.ca invites authors to submit proposals, no books have been published yet. 

Other sources such as lexpubli.ca and jdsupra.com aim to provide free online precedent services. 

How will wikis and other collaborative sources fit into the world of legal publishing? Are they “good enough” as information sources for the practicing bar? Will they ever be more than sources for learning about an unfamiliar topic quickly and conveniently? 

Another way of looking at this question: as more and more legal information is available for free on the Internet, will the market for legal publications be eroded? The big question is: will the market for legal publishing continue to pay for curation (also known as quality control)? I strongly believe that lawyers are willing to pay for authoritative legal information; in other words, the information has to be more than just “good enough”. 

Jason Wilson’s thoughtful column looked at this topic from the 30,000 foot level. My comments relate to curation from about 1,000 feet. 

What does curation mean for us at CLEBC? When we publish a BC practice manual, it means finding an editorial board of experts in the area; working with them to develop a table of contents; finding great authors to write the book; and then carefully editing all the submitted chapters. 

When CLEBC editors review chapters, they ask: have we covered the correct material? Is there enough depth? Is there too much depth? Is coverage consistent across the whole book? Is there duplicate material? Is authority provided for every proposition? Is the authority accurate? Can the editor (the first reader) understand what the author is saying? 

When all that’s been done, the editorial board reviews the book to verify that it is accurate. As you can imagine, editorial boards made up of knowledgeable, senior, lawyers, sometimes from opposing sides of the bar (plaintiff and defence, for example), with the occasional helpful judge thrown in, will usually have strong opinions about the content of the book. Not only does this combination make for lively meetings, the process ensures that the content of our publications is as authoritative as it can be. 

There’s one final aspect of quality control: our team of copy editors and production staff comb over the manuscript to ensure that the grammar, spelling, and punctuation are correct, that the case and statute citations are accurate and included in reference tables, that an index is prepared, and that the publication is attractive and easy to read. 

(Note that every step in this curation process is also needed for material published on the web (with some differences on account of the different format)). 

Over the course of my two decades in legal publishing, I’ve learned that most lawyers are strongly motivated to “give back” to the legal profession. However, these wonderful volunteers are only too happy to leave the organization and management of these projects to legal editors (who serve as project managers). Part of our curation process not only ensures the quality of the material provided, but also that material is submitted on time, and that it receives the widest possible distribution. (This is entirely as it should be; it makes much more sense for our authors to be practicing law rather than chasing down their fellow authors to enforce deadlines, for example.) 

The final result is a lengthy, comprehensive, well-written, and most importantly. authoritative and reliable publication. I’m very proud that our practice manuals are regularly cited by the BC courts; here’s a recent example. 

Will we be supplanted by something that is “good enough”? I continue to believe that lawyers will continue to pay for the curation work we do, mostly because the final product is authoritative. After all, I don’t believe any lawyer wants to use a wiki for research, only to have the judge look over her glasses and say “What’s your authority? … I don’t think so, counsel”. 

Richard Susskind has been far and away the most interesting speaker I’ve heard this year. He’s been travelling around the world delivering his message of coming change for the legal profession. He spoke at a recent CLEBC course and at the BC Court of Appeal 100th anniversary course.

For those of you who haven’t yet had the Susskind experience, he predicts that the legal profession is undergoing profound changes as corporate clients are under increasing pressure to cut costs, and as private clients cannot afford the bespoke services provided by lawyers. He anticipates that over the next ten years, the legal profession will be driven by two forces: a market pull towards the commoditization of legal services, and by the development and uptake of new and disruptive legal technologies.

His observations are consistent with recent reports on the use of legal services from the Law Society of BC and the Law Society of Upper Canada. The LSBC report includes this sobering conclusion:

… despite their need for assistance, it’s also clear that most British Columbians do not avail themselves of legal assistance, preferring instead to “go it alone”. It appears that a lack of knowledge, and perceptions of cost are the two key underlying barriers preventing the public from turning to a legal professional for assistance … More than two-thirds of British Columbians have experienced at least one serious and difficult to resolve problem in the past three years … Seven-in-ten British Columbians who faced a serious issue sought no assistance.

And according to the LSUC report: “For the hundreds of thousands of Ontarians who need help with a civil legal issue, the system is poorly understood or perceived to be inaccessible by many.”

Meanwhile, David Bilinsky reports on a recent conference on civil justice at Duke University. Corporate counsel surveyed in anticipation of the meeting agreed that the civil justice system is “too complex” (55%) and “too expensive” (97%).

But what does it all mean for legal publishing? Susskind’s fascinating book “The End of Lawyers?” has a few comments.

He is particularly interested in work being done to create document assembly systems; he admires the work of the Practical Lawyer Company, an English company (with a New York office). PLC is not a traditional legal publisher in that it does not publish primary sources or traditional secondary sources such as textbooks or practice manuals; instead, it provides web-based subscription services to law firms and law departments on specialist business law topics. PLC provides automated document systems for common transactions such as asset and share purchases, leases, and so on. It collaborates with law firms (its clients) to produce finished documents.

In a recent blog, David Bilinsky identified North American companies who are leading the way with online legal services, including North Vancouver-based Self-Counsel Press. Susskind correctly observes that development of these services has the potential to be enormously disruptive to our traditional customers: lawyers and their law firms.

How can legal publishers best support the coming changes in the legal profession? Should we enter the fray with document assembly programs? Should we continue to develop highly detailed secondary sources to support the increasing complexity of practice? Should we abandon print altogether? 

Susskind also muses on the future of law books themselves. He anticipates a decline in sales of the familiar and traditional bound volumes over the next 20 years and wonders whether they will survive. He notes the developing preference for online law reports given improved display technology, storage, and search, and predicts that our move away from print will only continue. 

Even so, I sense some regret behind this prediction. He calls traditional books and articles “reassuringly finite”. “You know where you stand with print. The end is always in sight and in hand”, whereas when you are researching online, it is easy to feel that your research could go on forever.

He also observes that we love the look and feel of bound books; there is enormous satisfaction in collecting and housing them. It’s true that my world is populated by book lovers and book collectors (first edition Iris Murdoch, anyone?), but I don’t know anyone who is madly in love with their bound law books. In fact, I see fewer and fewer bound law books wherever I go. I’m afraid I can’t really worship the hardcover law tome. Too expensive to produce! Not updateable! I believe CLEBC published our first and last hardcover book some time in the mid-1980s. 

I take his point about the beauty of books, though. I heard a prediction at a publishing conference recently: that books will become beauty objects in themselves (more “bookly”) and will be treated as such. Meanwhile, back in the land of legal publishing, we’ll be improving our search engines, considering the viability of document assembly, making our online experience richer, developing community around our resources, and keeping a close watch on the horizon. 

Richard Susskind will be the keynote speaker at this summer’s annual CBA conference.