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The Reinvention of Legal Research

By Robert J. Ambrogi

At The Huffington Post, Peter Schwartz writes that we are in the midst of "the radical transformation of the legal publishing marketplace," a transformation, he contends, that will no longer support the two largest legal publishers, West and LexisNexis. As they suffocate under their own weight, the legal research marketplace will open to "nimble, low-cost competitors and new rivals with deep pockets such as Bloomberg." His prediction should be read with the understanding that he is the founder and president of one of these "nimble, low-cost" competitors, the online legal publishing company Knowledge Mosaic, which sells a news and research service targeted at the securities industry. That said, Schwartz makes some interesting observations about the state of legal research. He makes three key points: Data trumps documents. Where legal documents were once valuable in and of themselves, they are now "mere information containers." New methods for extracting and organizing that information will change how we perform research. Information is liquid. Not only is it liquid, it is a raging flood. We need to manage it and filter it. Information is a commodity. With so much information available to us, value is not in access to information, but in tools to...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on August 14, 2009 (boomark / email).