In Canada, the legal community started reaping the benefits of open data not only before it became trendy, but even before governments started becoming familiar with the concept. Indeed, in mid-nineties, when our governments were still jealously protecting their information assets, the free access to law activities begun in Canada. Every crack in the otherwise watertight system of protection was exploited and opportunities were grabbed as they showed up. The Supreme Court is open to freely distribute its ruling: let’ start with that then. Justice Canada is ready to publish the laws for free: let’s go for it. At a . . . [more]

I thoroughly enjoyed all the discussion around my last column. It seems to me that these conversations are really around our long-time favourite legal publishing topic: where will change come from and what will it look like?

Colin Lachance’s response gave me plenty to think about. What’s the business model of the future for Canadian legal publishers? (This is another way of saying “show me the money”.) And what will new legal information sources look like?

There’s obviously an appetite in many parts of the country for more relevant and cost-effective secondary sources. Our CLEBC publishing program is something . . . [more]

What is the purpose of retirement? Some say it is to stop doing what you have to do and then start doing what you want to do.

But what if you are now doing what you want to do? Those lucky people say that retirement has no attraction for them because they are already doing what they want to do. Some say they love their job.

Apparently more and more people are continuing to work rather than retire. The American Association of Retired Persons reports that in the 65 to 69 age group, that 32% were still working in 2013 . . . [more]

As part of the consultancy work I do, I have the great pleasure and privilege to work with most important, high-profile clients, sometimes to conduct product review processes on their behalf. On a couple of recent projects, an understanding of the status quo was required, combined with an appreciation of the ways in which the products are used and will, most likely, be so in the future. These were to be analysed and measured against industry trends and perceptions and converted into strategic plans for their evolution. The projects were conducted well, I believe and clear directions, pointing out . . . [more]

This week we received via one of our sources, Reed’s financial wind up figures for 2013 and also in that document their comparison with the group’s 2012 figures. Even to a numbers illiterate like myself it’s fairly obvious that Lexis Nexis may well be generating some revenue but profit margins are negligible. Lexis capital expenditure compared to the other members of the Reed Group is also way out of whack as we’ll discover.

So first up …..

Revenue
Legal Year to 31 December 2013
2013  £m 1567
2012 £m 1610

Change Constant Currency -4%
Change Underlying +1%

Revenue is up, . . . [more]

Since late last year, a groundswell of opinion seems to be developing in favour of open and free access to legal scholarship and secondary sources.

Sean Hocking’s recent column speculates that “someone will see that a Wikipedia type solution to the cataloguing, editing and free distribution of legal information is of benefit to a functioning democracy in the 21st century.”

Who will do this work? He suggests that this role will be taken on by “unemployed or at least underemployed legal editors, academics and dare we say it, lawyers, out there who’d be willing to initiate the process of getting . . . [more]

Apparently, the brain is the least understood by the medical community of all the human body parts.

Some doctors say that a healthy brain is partly dependent upon physical exercise and a proper amount of sleep. Apparently good things happen to our brains when we are sleeping. John Ratey of the Harvard Medical School and author of the book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (2013) states: “Exercise is the single best thing you can do for your brain in terms of mood, memory, and learning”.

A healthy brain includes the conscious and the unconscious. Unconscious . . . [more]

I recently attended another drinks party, again to celebrate, or rather mark, the forced departure of a former colleague after his many years of working for a major professional publisher. There was neither bitterness nor acrimony on his part, just an acceptance of that being the way it is. You work with them until you become surplus to requirement, too old (however young) and/or too expensive (however underpaid) and then you are out. The problem is that there are years of work still capable of being done and bills still to pay. In this way, another aspiring and hopeful . . . [more]

Looking at the current contents of my ever expanding inbox, I see January has been a month of conflicting messages from the legal information world.

One moment it appears we really might have a real sea change in the way that legal content is perceived, published and prostituted.

Then, in the flash of an eye, a slew of endless press releases from Thomson Legal & Regulatory and LexisNexis praising themselves for the fact they are themselves; combined with their endless desire to control and purchase every and any new company (mainly tech based these days) that may actually have products . . . [more]

The day is not far off when the providers of free legal information services will be able to match the services provided by Lexis, Westlaw and Wolters Kluwer.

There was a time when I would have said that this was not possible. My belief was based on the idea that the free services would always be playing catch up to a moving target, as the major legal publishers continued to enhance their products with high quality content and product innovation.

The scenario that makes the seemingly impossible possible is the “attack” on all things “Editorial” in the major legal publishing . . . [more]

A friend of mine is concerned about the existence today of income inequality that is leading to the accumulation of disproportionate wealth and economic and political power into the hands of a few.

No one doubts that individuals try to better their condition. Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations at page 237 said “But the principle which prompts to save, is the desire of bettering our condition, a desire which, though generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go to the grave”. President Abraham Lincoln said “I hold that while . . . [more]

“Legal search algorithm” … now there’s a phrase to make your head spin. I’ve been thinking about legal search for years, but I confess that I hadn’t given the algorithm much thought until recently. Type it into Google, and you come up with an excellent post by Aaron Kirschenfeld in the Cornell LII blog: “Everything is Editorial: Why Algorithms are Hand-Made, Human, and Not Just for Search Anymore”.

For legal publishers, ensuring that our users can find what they are looking for is one of the biggest challenges we face. I’ve never encountered legal information that isn’t incredibly dense. We . . . [more]