“Due to the nature of this product, it cannot be returned to us and there are no guarantees that a customer will delete it from their computer, so to discourage fraudulent refund claims we ask that you write your reasons for wishing a refund. This will also help us to better serve our customers. If you claim this refund, you may download this title again at a later date, but will not be elegible for a second refund.” e-Book publisher’s return policy
Back in the good old days when we were able to preview books before we bought them, 30-day return policies were the norm. They have been used forever to close the deal on buying a book; it was a means for helping the customer set aside any lingering doubts about the usefulness of a particular book product. If you didn’t like it or find it helpful, then you could return it.
A recent post from the Legal Research Plus blog about the authenticity of state primary source material got me to thinking about the same problem for legal blogs. Namely, when I’m reading a blog discussing an aspect of law, can I trust that the authority cited within hasn’t been amended or overruled in some manner? The answer is “no,” I can’t because it’s my job to verify the accuracy of those sources.
But what if I had a tool to give me a quick peek? Better yet, what if my search results could tell me “this article contains authority that has been {amended, repealed, overruled, etc.}, so you might want to skip it, unless, of course, you’re doing historical research”?
“Users of legal information can help create new kinds of arrangements with the information providers.” Evalyn Groove & P.J. Lucier, Banks-Baldwin Law Publishing Company in 1991.
Last year I was reading a post by Jordan Furlong titled “A message to my legal publishing colleagues,” and in it he referred to a 2006 post he wrote about the state of 21st Century legal publishing. In that earlier post, there were two things that caught my eye.
First, he quoted Seth Godin about the affect of blogs on old media:
Seth Godin is right: blogs are going to create thousands of expert media outlets with a total staff complement of one. It’s already started.” Seth’s actual comment added something a bit more interesting: “It’ll be a number of individuals representing themselves and building a following–with a filter to be named later. (Emphasis added.)
Second, Jordan made two observations about the new media and lawyers, the first of which was this:
What does this have to with you, the 21st-century lawyer? Two things. First, the day is soon coming when you won’t have to accept whatever the legal publishers decide you should know about. You can order tailored, in-depth legal news delivered to your desktop, be it through RSS feeds from the local courthouse, Yahoo! legal newsgroup postings, or a free e-newsletter from a sole practitioner outside Winnipeg who tracks the federal child support guidelines religiously.
In short, a proliferation of new media outlets (of 1, that is) will provide varied legal content from all reaches of the profession, undermining existing models.
Somebody mentioned brief banks on Twitter a few days ago, and that got me to thinking about the types of information that I use to steal from other partners’ and associates’ briefs when I practiced. It was mainly the procedural stuff. I would always look at the way they framed burdens and standards, and the cases they used. For any new attorney, you know how valuable a good brief bank can be. And for researching, good appellate briefs are excellent sources of information.
So during this thought, it dawned on me that a brief bank is something of a ratings system. When I was practicing, our firm used a DOS-based program called PC Docs to tag documents with all kinds of information, including the type of document (e.g., “motion for summary judgment,” “motion in limine”). This allowed you to search for documents based on the tags and build your own motions, briefs, etc. If I used someone’s previously briefed argument, I would double check all the cases and replace or supplement as needed. I remember specifically that one of our attorneys had constructed a particularly good summary judgment brief, and it became the standard for just about all MSJs filed after.
During this process of creating, using, and re-using briefs, each of us validates the decisional authority contained within them. It’s like saying “hey, I think these are the best cases to use for this topic.” The more briefs using those cases, the greater the validation, or popularity, among your colleagues.
Now, what if we could tap into that ratings system? If we could, I would call it something like “Linkrater.”
“My guess is that legal blogs will partially fill the ‘practicality’ gap between the legal academy and the rest of us. Blogs provide a unique opportunity for law teachers to directly influence the development of the law in near real time.” U.S. Dist. Judge Richard G. Kopf (April 2006 interview with Ian Best).
I have found over the last couple of years that our company’s process for creating and updating legal content (we write and publish practice manuals) has started to include a larger component of legal blog searching. The reasons for this are simple: (1) the traditional research model (primary + secondary) can sometimes yield less than satisfying results, and a good legal blog search might just capture the elusive analysis you were seeking; (2) more or less since 2003, the quantity (and quality) of legal scholarship on the web has grown exponentially; and (3) new services have made finding relevant material a bit easier. This got me to thinking about the problem of legal blog searching generally, and the related issue of whether lawyers have integrated it into their research practices.
Today’s idea for now is something all you Twitterholics out there might like: a social media audio system. Yes, it’s off the legal publishing path, but not everything can be about books.
If you’re like me and drive to work every morning, you’ve no doubt nailed your morning and evening routine. (And for you green conscience out there, I’m not opposed to riding the 15.3 miles to work on my bike; but hey, this is Houston. That could be a weather joke or a bad driver one, your pick.) So when I was driving in to work a couple of weeks ago, I just happened to be rolling slowly next to this dude who was scrolling through his iPhone checking e-mail, box scores, Twitter, Facebook, whatever. He was fully engaged in his phone, and driving. This is dangerous by the way. And I can’t claim I haven’t done the same thing, I have. I’m tuned in, just as much as he is, which is why I want someone to make this system now.
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“I have the sense that something is happening.” Dennis Kennedy
For decades, we’ve been using electronic law “books,” from law reviews to multi-volume treatises. So, the idea of a legal periodical or book being made available in an electronic form is not new or even that interesting. In fact, a lot of words have been written about how electronic legal content is king and the book is dead. But a couple of news items came out recently that got me to thinking about books as bits, and whether stories of the book’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Or at least, what the term “book” will mean for the next generation. The first was the news that Thomson West released their first iPhone App, the venerable Black’s Law Dictionary to the tune of fifty bucks, and the related blog post by Greg Lambert (@glambert) suggesting that perhaps Thomson West had made a mistake by not releasing the app on the Blackberry rather than the iPhone because, he reasoned, more lawyers have a Blackberry than an iPhone. The second news item was Jeff Bezos’ keynote announcing the third iteration of the Amazon Kindle DX (the DeluXe version), a 9.7 inch e-reading, pdf munching, Whispernet loving piece of technology, that could give you access to your entire library.
Today’s idea for now is “threaded statutes.”
I do a lot of writing that involves understanding the origins of a statute. If a statute has been around for any length of time (e.g., California’s Code of Civil Procedure hailing back to the late 1800s), it usually has seen its fair share of changes, such as having been renumbered, relettered, codified from an older revised statutes system, amended, etc. All along the way, decisional authority has been written interpreting those various versions of the statute, and secondary source material (e.g., law reviews, treatises) may have been written to explain each or a particular version in further detail. But if you’re a lawyer, and you research, this isn’t really news to you. In fact, in a post by Robert Richards surveying recent literature on law-related information behavior studies, he noted that one study revealed “history tracking” is a behavior unique to the legal profession.
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.]