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The future for legal publishers?

The Law21 Blog has written a thought provoking post on the Future for Legal Publishers, which is well worth reading. In it they describe how changes to technology and the profits Legal Publishers make from selling traditional products will change the products they develop and who they sell them to.

Some of the issues currently faced by Legal Publishers or likely to be faced by Legal Publishers include:

• "Textbook sales drop, as law schools encourage cash-strapped students to turn to faculty-run wikis as reliable, and eventually authoritative, statements of current law.
• Law reporter series and caselaw databases fade into irrelevance, as court decisions become freely available and searchable on the web.
• Legal newspapers? print editions become unacceptably expensive and dated, and online versions struggle to find a business model that delivers familiar profit levels.
• Legal magazines, restricted to longer features that subscribers won?t read online, remain chained to the print medium and face ever-higher production and distribution costs."

The other factors influencing Legal Publishing and mentioned in the article include;

• Lawyer's knowledge demands changing
• Laywer's not being the dominant market anymore (and neither are Law Librarians)
• Blogs pointing the way to a "micro-publishing" future

Does the future look bleak or rosy for Legal Publishers? Like any commercial organisation Legal Publishers have to be responsive to changes within their own organisation as well as changes outside of their control, so developments in technology which mean sources that would traditionally be available only in Hardcopy are now available in a number of formats including free sources will undoubtedly have an impact on their strategy for the future.

Being aware of these developments and responding to these and customer requirements in an efficent and effective manner should ensure their survival, but there may be some casulaties along the way.

Full post as published by The BIALL Blog on July 25, 2008 (boomark / email).