Law publishing
Data protection intrigue
I was intrigued to see that DLA Piper has just published Data Protection Laws of the World. This 274-page PDF handbook “offers a high-level snapshot of national data protection laws as they currently stand in 58 jurisdictions across the world. It provides a quick overview of the aspects of data protection law that are often […]
ICLR online – who’s putting it through its paces?
I’m wondering who’s using ICLR online and how they’re getting on? The service launched 18 October to a list of over 350 delegates that was “fairly select and exclusive due to the nature of our Council”. Before the event no doubt there was lots of direct mail and email promotion by ICLR to its customer […]
Innovations in law publishing and the death of (some) print
The first wave of digital products in the CD era consisted basically of “books on screen” – existing print product repurposed with search and hypertext bells and whistles. This continued online with the advent of the web. More books on screen. Same old product, different medium. But the earth never really moved. However, one of […]
Are (law) ebooks the future?
You can’t have missed the fact that Amazon’s fastest selling product last year was its Kindle ebook reader. Even I bought one. And during the year his Godliness Steve Jobs gave us the iPad tablet. Though the iPad is more than an a e-reader, as such it is of course much more book-like than an […]
Footnotes suck
When I started out in law publishing I joined a young company with a modern approach. A key point in our house style, which I was instrumental in formulating, was “We eschew [nice word that] the use of footnotes.” Why? They don’t help the writer who has to partition their thoughts into mains and asides […]
A tale of two professions
Legal Research Plus comments on an article about John West [founder of West Publishing] and other non lawyers who have revolutionized legal research. Apparently West called for neutral citations way back in 1908. The author of the article, Prof Robert Jarvis, asks: how a man who did not go to college, and was untrained in […]
Wexisberg – is three a crowd?
Across the pond Bloomberg has had the effrontery brazenly to challenge the Wexis duopoly with Bloomberg Law. Bob Ambrogi has written an extended review of Bloomberg Law on Law.com. He reports that to bring itself up to competitive speed, Bloomberg hired an army of some 500 lawyers and has them nose to the grindstone writing […]
eLawtric Books anyone?
Jason Wilson explores the pros and cons of what he dubs “eLawtric Books“. In a series of posts he (for the most part) counters Eugene Volokh’s thoughts on the future of electronic books and the law. His view, with which I agree, is that ebooks a la Kindle et al are not the future of […]
Are we (still) in thrall to BigLaw?
Jordan Furlong bemoans (on Slaw and Law21) the fact that the legal media focus on BigLaw, because BigLaw makes a lot of money, so they’re attractive both as subscribers and as advertising targets. It’s not good for smaller practices, which count the majority of all lawyers among their ranks, that they don’t get to hear […]
Never mind the content … (2)
Paul Graham, an essayist and successful entrepreneur, pens a very interesting piece on Post-Medium Publishing which is worth reading in full (hat tip John Naughton). He opens: consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books […]
Not a problem
Clay Shirky eloquently states the problem facing the newspaper industry: People committed to saving newspapers [are] demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. […]
The future law book is not a book
Considering whether we were experiencing the beginning of the end of print, I ended my previous post with the prediction that the law text book would be the last print format left standing (after journals, law reports, looseleafs). I stand by that. The printed (and bound) book is wonderful information package, designed 500 years ago […]
The end of print?
We’ve been here before and each time the answer is no. There’s too much in favour of print to bury it prematurely. However, we know that particular types of print are under severe threat. The continuing decline of newsprint in particular is well documented. But what of legal publications? Law journals, particularly the scholarly, look […]
Law publishing at the crossroads
First Published in the Solicitors Journal, November 2008. Also published in Legal Information Management Vol 9 No 3 2009. In the current climate of increasingly rapid technological change and upheavals in the legal profession, are law firms’ legal information needs being adequately met by law publishers? And what does the future hold, particularly as we […]
In praise of editors
In the The end of the story – as we know it in Guardian Media Jeff Jarvis republishes the argument in his earlier blog post that The building block of journalism is no longer the article. Single posts, videos, Wikipedia entries or search results may be new building blocks of media, but we need order […]
