Legal Commentary

Newspapers .... and the Law. Any Parallels?

By Patrick J. Lamb

I saw a link to a blog post on the most overrated and underrated people of 2008, and I had to check it out.  It's pretty predictible, but one "winner" got me thinking.  Let's start with the paragraph that triggered my brain cells:

Most underrated phenomenon: Newspapers. Here's a weird paradox. If you include the Internet, more people are reading quality newspapers than ever before. Yet newspapers are - as the bankruptcy of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune shows - dying. We don't just want it all, we want it free. Does it matter? As good as some bloggers are, they don't have the army of foreign correspondents or in-depth investigative teams that are necessary to make sense of the world. If print newspapers - for all their manifest flaws and corporate biases - die, there will be an aching hole where newsgathering used to be. Newspapers: buy them or lose them.

With the Tribune Company filing for Chapter 11, redesigns we faithful readers have endured since Sam Zell bought the company, I've had a front row seat to the demise of a really good newspaper.  "We want it free."  Then I started hearing words that my friend and client Jeff Carr of FMC Technologies planted in my head about his view of the future of law:  Clients will pay willingly for advocacy and counseling.  They don't want to pay anything for content and process.

If Jeff's prediction is accurate, there will be parallels between the legal business and the newspaper business. This begs the question, of course, as to what both businesses will look like in five years. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Full post as published by In Search of Perfect Client Service on December 18, 2008 (boomark / email).