Law Publishers’ List, a new co-operative

The Committee on Relations with Information Vendors (CRIV) of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) currently maintains (at least as of May 1, 2006) what is known as the “Legal Publishers List: Corporate Affiliations of Legal Publishers.” The original list of publishers was created in 1997 covering roughly 500 publishers and their imprints, what you might call good old book publishers (although many were using new technology at the time, such as CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web, to deliver legal content electronically).

The current CRIV list, which is a bit outdated, is a fairly comprehensive listing of the Big Three (Thomson, Reed Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer) and the “Others,” smaller publishers with and without subsidiaries. Unfortunately, it does not include among the names of content providers the ever growing list of new media publishers, namely legal blogs (“blawgs” as coined by Denise Howell)  and microblogs (e.g., @dkennedyblog).

For me, the law publishers’ list probably should look something like this:

1. The Big Three: With annual revenues around $12, 7, and 5 billion,Thomson, Reed Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer are undoubtedly the largest kids playing in the legal information sandbox.

2. The Niche Players: As of 2006, there were roughly 250 legal information content providers that were not making billions of dollars a year. For reasons I do not know, the original CRIV list broke them down into publishers who were owned by a parent company (the Others) and “independent” publishing companies (the Indies).

3. The New Co-Operative: I stumbled across this moniker after reading a paper submitted to the first symposium of law publishers in 1889 by James E. Briggs, the founder of a little start-up called Lawyers Cooperative Publishing.

“A co-operative organization, capable of doing all branches of the work in law reporting and publishing, was perhaps somewhat novel; but its novelty has worn off, and we have come to be known, as we always expected to be, as those whose publication is done con amore, and not merely for the money there is in it.  We have done several unusual things. We have put prices down with quality up, and thereby disgusted certain old publishers who retaliate by calling us “Amatueur Publishers.” We do not, however, claim to be infallible, nor almighty.”

Over 100 years later, a new (albiet less formal) organization of governmental agencies, law students, librarians, lawyers, law firms, professors, judges, and philanthropists are publishing legal content.  To my knowledge, there is no single list of what I call the “new co-operative,” but at the very least, here are some good places to start looking for members:

(1) A directory of federal, state, and world legal resources, from Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute.

(2) The ABA Journal Blawg directory and LexMonitor’s Blawg directory.  At last count, the ABA directory had over 5,400 legal blogs listed. I’m not sure about LexMonitor’s, but the count seems pretty high. [For the best search of indexed legal blogs, I suggest using ALM's Law.com.  You can search within your results, and sort by date and relevance.] There’s also a good list of law library blogs at AALL here.

(3) Lawyers on Twitter list, by Adrian Lurssen. [There are plenty of other collections out there, just search the web for them, such as twibes, tweetlaw, etc.]

(4) Lawyers on Facebook. I don’t have a list yet, but I plan to.

(5) Carl Malamud’s Public.Resource.Org project. You can follow Carl on Twitter here.

I realize that this list is short, but the number of publishers of legal content it represents is vast.  If you have other directories or lists you think should be added, add it to the comments and I’ll put it up on the list.

[Note: Related to the new co-operative, I would be remiss in not mentioning lawyers on social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook, which I don't include as microbloggers or link publishers like I do for Twitter or FriendFeed.  By last count, I found 437,000 individuals listed under the "law practice industry" for LinkedIn. (Big hat tip to Kevin O'Keefe.) I have not been able to pin down the number of lawyers on Facebook, but you can do a profile search for "attorney" or "lawyer" (the former preferred more than 10:1) for your own home town and get an idea. The number is big.]