In 1984, Dr. Egon Spengler gave birth to a proverbial booger on the end of your finger—a meme that simply cannot be shaken off:
Print is dead.
It’s been a rallying cry of technologists for decades, but when I hear it today, the meme sounds more like a Stuart Smalley daily affirmation. Doggonit. But I suppose that’s just the print bias in me speaking.
A few years after Dr. Spengler’s quip, Thomas Woxland asked 20 legal publishers and 4 law librarians to reflect on the role of a law publisher and what each of them saw to be the future of the legal publishing industry. He collected the responses in his centennial reprise of the American Law Review’s 1889 Symposium of Law Publishers. There were some important names in the business who responded, and from those responses Woxland identified several recurring themes, one of which concerned the future of print:
The first recurring theme is that the occasionally prophesied ‘death of the book’ is not going to soon occur. No publisher, even those who are substantially involved in electronic publishing, see books relegated to the museum of quaint oddities of the past, along with buggy-whips and bustle-dresses, 3-D glasses and hula-hoops. Collections of books—or as we call them, libraries—do have a future; they are not expected to become just arcane reliquaries visited only by adamant Luddites and unreconstructed bibliophiles. Libraries and books will continue to be central to the legal information needs of the legal profession and our society as a whole. [¶] But books are no longer the sole format for legal information. The new information technologies are on the minds of all the publishers; either they are already involved in electronic publishing or they are considering entry into that field very shortly. Again though, a common cautionary theme is present: technology is not an end, only a means to deliver to the legal profession the information that the profession needs in ways that are faster or more comprehensive or more inexpensive or more accessible.
Twenty years later, where are we? More importantly, is print finally dead?
Sure, we (and that is the royal We, meaning law librarians, practitioners, professors, law students, paralegals, etc.) have been talking about the decline of print for those twenty years. And yes, library listservs are now riddled with the ubiquitous “free books with postage” emails. And, of course, there’s no shortage of law libraries reporting that they are dumping print subscriptions due to the high costs of maintaining serials. And the largest legal publishers continue to report a decline in print sales. All the while, technology has continued to evolve, becoming more … human. But does all of this spell the end of the future for print in law?
Before we can answer this question, we should probably consider how we got here.
I’m sure that readers of this blog have already thought this, so forgive me if I’m a bit slow, but with the release of the Apple iPad, it finally struck me that in my lifetime one of my employees will actually say:
What is a mouse?
At that moment, I will think of tube socks, Michael Jordan Nike Airs (the originals!), Polaroids, Commodore 64s, vinyl records, eight-tracks, cassette tapes, VHSes, CRTs, rotary phones, the Motorola StarTAC, the original Star Wars, and so on. I will be amazed that an entire generation of humans will never know that we used a device to move a cursor in 2D space. And then it will really hit me: comic books are dead.
Of course, it won’t come as a complete shock to me as I wave my hand in front of {insert name of whatever we’re calling computer screens at the time} to close my open applications. Certainly by then everything I use will receive 3D input.
We are, according to Bill Buxton, in the final throes (i.e., the next 5 years) of flushing out multi-touch innovation. Assuming, of course, it follows the course of what he considers the “long nose of innovation.” Frankly, given what the iPhone has already done, and what the iPad (and the alleged touch iMac) assumes to do, I can’t say that I disagree with him. More importantly, I’ve been thinking about the extension of multi-touch to online legal research, and whether it will usher in a new paradigm for discovering, researching, gathering, interpreting, or sharing results.
Here are some preliminary (and very rough) thoughts about the matter:
- Website GUIs should be thinking about touch now. Apple’s iWork suite was revamped for touch. In much the same way, publishers who deliver their content online should be thinking about touch interfaces, and not just for mobile phones. For example, are your menus too tight? Do you continue to use textual menus that could be reduced to icons (”Home” instead of a home button, or “Tools” instead of a wrench)? Remember, fingers are not transparent, like a cursor. If the vast majority of legal researchers are right-handed, should we be placing menus on the right-hand side of the screen? This would be contrary to current eyeball-tracking analysis that says we look at screens in a decidedly “F” shape pattern. But does touch change where we look on a screen? (I have an entire journal already dedicated to mock ups trying to anticipate GUI changes based on simple multi-touch gestures. It’s fascinating to think about the possibilities.)
- Does touch change the way we interact with our digital information? How many hands or fingers do you use to read, highlight, copy, create notes, etc. when you are researching a topic? How many books do you have open or documents in print lying around on your desk when constructing an argument? How does your physical (finger) interaction with this material translate to the web? It seems to me that we will see a greater use of context menus that change based on our input stimulus (e.g., one menu when you press and hold, a different one when you drag your finger across the screen, yet another when you use two or more fingers). Right now context menus are very limited, unless you combine mouse action with keyboard commands (something usually reserved for more sophisticated or “power” users).
(My desk on any given day. What is this going to look like in a multi-touch environment?)
- Does touch change the way I present my digital content? What I’m referring to here specifically are the containers legal publishers tend to put their secondary sources into for purposes of search. For example, some publishers limit your search results to a specific subsection of a section of a subchapter of a chapter. Do I display a larger selection of content (e.g., an entire subchapter) because it is easier to scroll or flip through it, much like reading a book?
Having seen and used WestlawNext, it is a modern system to be sure, but it is also several years old already. And the new Lexis system will undoubtedly be much of the same. These systems are going to satisfy the vast majority of legal researchers tethered to the old mouse and keyboard, but we are fast approaching the point on the horizon where multi-touch, like search, becomes a big part of the debate on researching efficiencies. I can’t wait for this debate because I think it will provide opportunities for start-ups to create better mouse-traps for secondary source material, which if Richard Leiter is correct, may be the biggest selling point for Westlaw and Lexis in the digital future.
[Image (cc) by Plastic Revolver]
My password to the private beta for WestlawNext is set to expire tonight, but before it does, I have some final thoughts on the platform for you to consider.
First, the browser. If you are running IE6, you will need to upgrade to IE8. If you are running IE7, you’ll get by, but there are definitely a few glitches I’ve experienced, so you’ll probably want to upgrade. Best performance currently is with Firefox, but IE8 runs a close second. Last week we were told that Google Chrome is the most stable browser for WestlawNext, but that won’t be rolled out until February 18th. For most of you, however, that won’t matter because you won’t see this thing until much later anyway. But why is this important? It’s just another cost to adopting the platform. If you need to upgrade, then you just have to factor in the IT time to do so. I’m still surprised at the number of firms running ancient-ass browsers. Really folks? Do you not care about online productivity?
Second, secondary sources. I started thinking about the fact that WestlawNext gives you access to over 6,000 secondary sources. And while that is a big number, it’s nothing compared to the primary source material made available, which is to say, search for secondary sources probably could be a lot better if it was a stand alone product. I suspect that relevancy in secondary sources could be much better if all a user was doing was searching those databases with WestSearch. I’m actually thinking there should be a two-step portal, where WestlawNext tries to help you find an explanation to your question first before sending you on to discover the answer for yourself through primary material. This first portal could also be optimized for reading secondary sources that is different than how we try to consume primary data.
Third, WestlawNext SEO. I didn’t think of this, I think Greg Lambert did. But after playing with the system, there are some inevitable questions as to whether the WestSearch algorithm could be gamed by users. If WestSearch is updated weekly with customer log information, as was indicated by the design team, then there must be some sort of potential for increasing the rankings of certain cases over others. Why would this be important? Well, I think Greg posited that if you found a case more favorable to you on a point of law, you might be able to increase its relevancy (for other users looking for the same or similar information) by creating artificial “meaningful relationships” (see my last post on this topic), such as, placing the case in your folders, printing, etc. You could actually encourage the entire firm to do it as a matter of practice. I’m not sure it would work, but it’s certainly something worth considering as more consumer-user data is incorporated into the search algorithm. Lastly, there’s also the problem of law students to consider. Once this platform is rolled out academically, I think it is fair to ask whether law students’ log data will be added to the algorithm mix. Honestly, I think they could screw it up faster than the concerted effort of a few lawyers.
Fourth, social tools. I’ve stared at this platform, and while I know that WestlawNext will be able to let users “vote” and “make comments,” that functionality appears to be specifically limited to the user communicating with Thomson Reuters Legal (TRL) through the “Next” link off the home page. It’s basically a way for you to tell TRL what you’d like to see in later releases. But that is it. An entire community of lawyers across the country, or in the same state, or same city, logged in at the same time, cannot communicate with each other, at all, other than through shared folders and sticky notes. I’m not belittling those advancements, which are important. I’m just puzzled why a company that wants to increase engagement for their site doesn’t find a way to leverage something no one else has, namely, the brain power of tens of thousands concurrent users online at any given moment. If you could connect to someone or more than one person reading the same case you were, would you? Would you ask, What does this passage mean to you? What if your identity was kept anonymous, or just showed Jill, Houston, Texas? Could we—can we—have meaningful conversations about the law in real time, or is it a waste of that precious resource? What has Twitter, or Google Wave for that matter, taught us about our capabilities for social?
Finally, search routine. Like most legal researchers, I’m a Boolean user. So, it is hard for me to abandon it. But I was committed to giving WestSearch the benefit of the doubt, so I always defaulted to the standard “plain language search.” Most of the time I was given relevant results, and my initial research expectations were met. However, I wasn’t satisfied I had gotten everything. So I would scan the first 10 to 15 entries, perhaps viewing 8 of those, and then narrow my results using Boolean in “Search within results,” probably two or three times with different queries. Only then would I be satisfied with what I’d found. This is important because it changes the value equation. I suspect that most users will be like me and feel compelled to narrow the results using Boolean. Now, I know that filtering (e.g., court, published or unpublished opinion, date range) is not an extra QuickView charge, but I don’t know about “Search within results.” You should probably ask your rep because if it does cost extra, then the value proposition for the service is also changed.
[Image (cc) by Kaptain Kobold]
At the beginning of this week, I was fortunate enough to get to spend some quality time with fellow legal information professionals at the Thomson Reuters headquarters in Eagan, Minnesota to discuss the history and future of the new Westlaw, which we now all know as WestlawNext (on February 8th, it will be found at “next.westlaw.com”). [Disclosure: Thomson Reuters paid for the flight, hotel accommodations, and incidentals.] And over the last two weeks, I have been lucky enough to use WestlawNext in my own research, and have learned a fair bit about its capabilities beyond what we were told this week. If you haven’t seen Jason Eiseman’s video of me, the always entertaining Tom Boone, and the desperately in need of hair coloring Greg Lambert, at Jason’s blog or on Henderson Valley Eggs, I suggest you skip over there for a bit and spend some time watching it because the video is perhaps the most honest, off-the-cuff assessment of the product you’ll find on the Tubes right now.
QUICK TAKE.
I like it, a lot. Thomson Reuters Legal (TRL) has put together a pretty solid offering that tackles, in my estimation, what Seth Godin calls the “paradox of the middle of the market:”
The middle of the market is a paradox because of the inherent contradiction between the ease of reaching the nerds and the geeks and the need to reach the middle. The solution, if there is one, is to enter a market to the enthusiastic cheers of those in search of the new, but to build a product/service that appeals to those in the middle. After the initial wave of enthusiasm, you hunker down and ignore those that first embraced you, obsessing instead on the needs and networks of the middle. It’s a difficult balancing act, but it’s the only one that works. Seth Godin, The paradox of the middle of the market (June 28, 2009)
WestlawNext does a good job of satisfying those who want a new, modern interface with some Web 2.0 bells and whistles without sacrificing core functionality. Not everyone is going to be satisfied though, and that’s the point because most users will. And the loudest voices won’t come from the nerds and geeks wondering where all their social media tools are, it will come from the established among us, the Boolean diehards. In fact, if you listen carefully now, you can already hear their rising cacophony of shouts, “Give me Terms and Connectors, or give me Death!”
We are on the eve of Apple’s “Come See Our Latest Creation” event, and the only thing I am thinking about is whether the fabled New Device will be a significant advancement beyond my Old Device, thus rendering all previous devices completely undesirable and highly repellent. And from what I’ve read by Tim van Damme, John Gruber here and here, Marco Arment, John Siracusa, Aaron Mahnke, Andy Ihnatko, Neven Mrgan, and Jim Darlymple, it will be an amazing Latest New Device. Yet, I’m still unsatisfied because none of them talk about how the Tablet will usher in a new vision of how we will read. The closest is John Siracusa, who observes,
[The Apple Tablet] will provide an easy way for people to find, purchase, and consume all kinds of media and applications right from the device. It’s that simple. … Apple’s doing the hard work to make all of this happen, of course. That means courting a new class of content owners whose wares are a good fit for a tablet-scale device: print publishers. Apple’s got a lot to offer publishers: millions of existing customers who’ve proven their willingness to buy digital media, relationships with other big media companies to show that Apple knows how to get along in this world, even a CEO who is himself the head of a movie studio and the largest single shareholder of a media giant. Add to that the color, video-capable touchscreen, which current electronic publishing suitors lack, and Apple can now appeal to new kinds of publishers: glossy magazines, comic books, and mixed media hybrids (e.g., People magazine with embedded celebrity videos).
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has another excellent post, this time on the Apple Newton. In considering why the Newton failed, Gruber says this:
I think it’s OK for a 1.0 product to be ahead of its time, to be too ambitious. The trick is not to be too far ahead, and more importantly, for the follow-up products to improve practically.
When it comes to products generally, I wholeheartedly agree with him on this point. If you’re too far ahead, the consumer will never catch up. But when I survey what is happening in legal publishing, I have what Dan Visel says is “the sense of being on the verge of a future that’s dragging its feet.” Our industry (like science, according to Michael Clarke) has not been disrupted, even by Product 1.0. I wonder who among us will the first to be ambitious enough.
[Image (cc) by Visual Media]
I’d like to offer a few more predictions about Thomson Reuters Legal’s (TRL) latest version of Westlaw, known now only as Project Cobalt:
- Default search will not require Boolean connectors, however, the user will be able to switch to Boolean. I wouldn’t be surprised to see users run the same search with and without connectors just to compare the results. The user will expect the same results, and this is where I think education will be important. The results should be different with natural language processing, meaning better because it will undoubtedly be supported by semantic and sentiment analysis. This should yield better, more accurate search results.
- Search queries can be targeted to specific databases, but the menus will be consolidated. For example, I suspect law reviews will be collapsed under a single directory, and if the user wants to narrow the search to a specific journal, she will just type the name of it in the search box along with other search terms. Perhaps similar to Google’s “site” search feature, except more flexible.
- Search speeds will be significantly faster, but will probably still be throttled to maintain uniformity of user experience at all times of the day.
- Faceted search will finally make an appearance.
- Results Plus will be more tightly integrated into the search results. I don’t see this as a separate application any longer because the user needs to be able to appreciate, visually, the relationship and ranking of Results Plus hits to her primary search query. This may help drive in-platform upgrades.
- A “Westlaw Store?” I wouldn’t be surprise to see TRL borrow from Apple and allow users to set up a store account and to buy one-off access to books and databases in an effort to increase conversion to higher tier plans. How this could be accomplished without completely infuriating sales reps, I have no idea.
- I agree with Joe Hodnicki that I think we’ll see pricing packages similar to Microsoft, with TRL Solo, Small Law, Large Law, and Academic packages. I’m sure the matrix will be more complicated than this, and the need for publications outside of these packages might be satisfied by one off purchases through the Westlaw Store.
- Maintenance fees? Once you purchase a package, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a yearly maintenance fee as part of the offering. This is a common practice in the software industry, and can be adjusted by TRL every year, most likely based on your usage (which will still be heavily monitored).
- Free web results. The user will now have access to blog posts, law firm articles, etc. and will be able to click through to the them (meaning outside of TRL’s frame). I suspect these click throughs and leading content will be used as part of the sentiment and semantic analysis for the in-Westlaw results.
- More white space. I think we’ll see a cleaner, leaner look with minimal visual interference. The focus will be on search results.
[Image (cc) by jovike]
Three recent posts by Kevin Hunt over at Thomson Reuters Legal Current blog caught my attention this week because they reminded me about a video TR did about a year ago on the day in the life of a case. That video was sort of the first glimpse (for those of you who have never seen the process) into how much work (and people) go into putting a single case online. The latest videos give us yet another perspective on legal publishing through interviews with the people who are working to deliver analytical and other content to you. If you know nothing about the business, you might find these posts worthwhile, and I would encourage you to check them out:
- Creating the aha moment in legal research.
- Making legal research easier.
- Reference attorneys ready for your call.
[Image (cc) by duncan]
By some strange coincidence, I decided to wrap up my take on Eugene Volokh’s series “The Future of Books Related to the Law” on the eve of CES 2010, a portentous event for those of us following the development of eReaders and slate computing technology. Knowing that Professor Volokh’s series was written in part to flesh out ideas for the Foreward to Michigan Law Review’s 2010 Books Related to the Law issue (which won’t be out until April), I will be very interested in reading the finished piece, which will follow not only the vendor announcements at CES, but also Apple’s possible announcement of the iSlate and other mobile computing products on January 26th. This month should be pretty fun.