An Open Invitation to Legal Publishers to Answer the Question "What Does LAW.GOV Mean to You?"

Last week, LLB published a selection of LAW.GOV videos featuring a wide range of participants including representatives from the legal publishing industry to illustrate the breadth and depth of interest and involvement in the LAW.GOV initiative. About LAW.GOV, representatives of a couple of legal information vendors have been quoted in the press including, for example, Michele Vivona, LexisNexis Group senior vice president for global Web strategy:

We do not see the initiative as a threat because at LexisNexis we deliver comprehensive analysis and innovative technologies that add value far beyond simply providing content — all helping to legal professionals efficiently and confidently make decisions and manage their legal issues.

Similar statements from other members of what now must be called the "traditional legal publishing community" are hard to find. Do they even exist? Isn't it time to hear what they have to say and hopefully in substantially more detail than the Vivona quote used by a NLJ reporter to write a story?

As institutional buyers, law librarians tend to think in terms of TR Legal, Lexis, WK and BNA. It most definitely would be interesting to know what our major legal information vendors think about LAW.GOV now that it's ten core principles have been released. This is an open invitation for them do so.

There are several new legal vendors who are delivering electronic products and services to a marketplace that includes but also goes beyond the user population of our traditional legal vendors. This is also an open invitation to these new players to explain what LAW.GOV means to them.

Responding to LLB's Open Invitation. Do I really expect our legal vendors, traditional or otherwise, to respond to this open invitation. Well, no, not really. But I think LLB readers would be interesting in hearing from them now that LAW.GOV's ten core principles have been published. So it's worth a shot.

All any legal vendor has to do is email me a statement with the text in the body of the email or attached in a Word document, or a link to one hosted on a corporate server, and it will be published in full, FIFO, for all to read. If it's an unofficial statement, just say so in the text. No doubt many LLB readers would be interested in hearing those perspectives on LAW.GOV, too. [JH]