Law Librarian Blog

Starting Off 2013 Thomson Reuters-Style

Those law libraries that still have West's Federal Practice Digest on standing order received an early Christmas gift from the Land of 10,000 invoices last month. They were informed that the 5th Edition is coming to their stacks starting this month. [Download the letter] Oh boy.

Since I killed off Federal Practice Digest 4th in 2010 as part of the still ongoing Shed West Era, I don't know how thick the 4th edition's pocket parts are right now or how many volumes are supplemented by pamphlets. But I doubt both updating formats are as thick as a brick to require producing a new edition and all the, you know, costs associated with that.

My hunch is news of the new edition may lead some law library current recipients to decide that the time is now ripe to cancel West's Federal Practice Digest -- one less relic of West's obsolete 20th century offerings of print-based research tools. This isn't even a case of substituting electronic access for print digests. [JH]

Friday Fun: Giving Scalia the WordRake Treatment

WordRake is a text editing add-on to Microsoft Word that was created to help improve the quality of legal documents such as contracts, memos, briefs and even court opinions. Bob Ambrogi gives a Scalia opinion the WordRake treatment at The WordRake Editing Program Takes on Scalia, Kagan and El Pollo Loco. [JH]

Lexis to Migrate pBooks with Companion CDs to pBooks with Companion eBooks "Over the Next 18 Months"

Well, that migration already started last month (earlier?). In addition to a few (how many already?) state-specific Ohio and Kentucky handbooks, titles with wider scope that already have been migrated include (or right now are limited to?) New Appleman Insurance Law Practice Guide and this is just based on what Ohio county law librarians spotted in their recent pBook with eBook "free" shipments.

Kudos to CRIV for the Committee's quick work on acting on this matter and obtaining a response from LexisNexis about recent shipments of pBooks with eBooks "free". The letter from Cindy Spohr, LN Senior Librarian Relations Manager (and a listed attendee at AALL's 2011 Vendor Colloquium) was published on various AALL web communities about a week ago as well as on The CRIV Blog here. The key business plan statement in the letter is that "LexisNexis plans to migrate our titles with accompanying CD products to eBook companions over the next 18 months."

Perhaps that is why on Dec. 14th CRIV started soliciting questions for its follow-up conference call next month:

CRIV will be having a conference call next month with LexisNexis Representatives to further discuss librarian concerns revolving around the change to the e-book format. If you have additional questions that you would like to ask regarding this change, please email your questions to Michelle Cosby at mcosby(at)nccu.edu by Friday January 4, 2013. I will compile a list of questions and the answers will be posted shortly after the call. Please check back to CRIV Blog or watch your listservs for this information.

Michelle Cosby, CRIV Chair

Clearly the CD is a dead medium but there is much more going on here than just the mere migration to another companion medium for pBooks. [JH]

ALA Leads the Way in Advocating for Fair eBook Lending Practices: Will AALL ever emulate this campaign?

“The library community cannot sit by while publishers openly refuse to sell libraries the e-books that they need to serve their patrons,” said ALA President Maureen Sullivan, who recently led several library meetings with publishers. “Librarians and our allies must speak out more forcefully in communities across the country. Everyone needs to know that libraries offer e-books and 21st century library services, but we are unable to offer all the e-reading choices our patrons demand and deserve.”

Towards that objective ALA has released an E-book Media & Communications Toolkit. For more information, see  Ron Jankowski's Nov. 27, 2012 ALA Membership Blog post titled ALA Launches E-book Media & Communications Toolkit to Assist Libraries.

Yes, yes, I know the vast majority of law librarians do not belong to ALA. But ALA is the only library association that has been campaigning against the current eBook status quo because many general trade publishers deny libraries access to their eBooks for their patrons use. These are issues that are only starting to be addressed in law libraries. We, law librarians and AALL, can learn from our colleagues in public libraries and from what ALA is doing to advocate for their user populations. ALA's consumer advocacy media campaign toolkit can be easily adapted to law library circumstances. [JH]

The Coming Second Citation War

Thomson Reuters "has not given permission to LexisNexis for the use of Westlaw citations to unpublished decisions on the Lexis Advance research service." -- Bruce Knudson, VP Large Law Business, Thomson Reuters.

The above quote is from a letter republished on 3 Geeks in Mark Gediman's post Citation Wars...or Mine! Mine! The post also publishes a response by LexisNexis. Quoting from Mark's highly recommended post:

Although I am sure that Westlaw feels that this response [to a LexisNexis advertising campaign] is justified, I think that to respond to what is really a common industry practice indicates a surprising degree of desperation.

Indeed it is for the moment. However my hunch is Thomson Reuters is preparing the stage for an anticipated new normal when West is not the official publisher of federal and state court opinions. Then all decisions may be "unpublished" as defined by the outcome of the First Citation War and vendor database file citations (i.e., WEXIS file number cites) may require permission to be used by a competitor.

Clearly the coming new normal will be court opinions which are officially published in electronic format at the court level that will be vendor neutral. Vendor specific database file citations may very well be proprietary. Just imagine the consequences for citation indexing and the practice of parallel citations provided in commercial research platforms.

We are in the very early stage of official electronic distribution of primary legal materials like court opinions. UELMA is just the start. If a uniform system of official neutral citation format is not adopted by federal and state courts, will commercial vendors just provide their own and arguably proprietary database file cites? Could you blame our commercial vendors if they do? [JH]

Now You See It, Now You Don't: Plan for Contingencies When Negotiating Legal Research Services Licenses That Include Distribution Agreements Involving Outside Publishers

It's been about a month since it was announced that PLI content was no longer available on Westlaw. Missing Westlaw's PLI content? Apparently PLI and Thomson Reuters were unable to reach an agreement for providing PLI materials on Westlaw. Was PLI asking for too much money? Was Thomson Reuters offering too little cash? Were other factors involved? Remember some PLI content is available on Lexis and Bloomberg Law (but for how long?). 

So if an institutional buyer killed all or most of its PLI print titles because "it was on Westlaw," deal with it. Content licensed from an outside publisher and distributed by way of one of our major vendors is not something one can depend upon. It is not necessarily a per se material breach of one's license for Westlaw, Lexis or BLaw unless an institutional subscriber makes it one.

Plan for contingencies by modifying boilerplate licenses. First. try to obtain a written assurance that all content licensed from an outside publisher that is redistributed by your search vendor will be accessible for the duration of your next license. If that doesn't fly, see where you get when licenses come up for renewal by insisting on a clause that stipulates that if X, Y or Z disappears, the subscriber has the option to cancel the license or to reduce its fixed costs by a certain amount for the duration of the research platform license.

Reduced costs by how much? The cost paid to the vendor or the replacement cost incurred by the buyer to acquire the content in print or electronic format? Start planning for contingencies. For example, how long do you think BNA will be available from anyone except BLaw-BNA? It just does not make sense to sell a competitive advantage to another research vendor by way of a distribution agreement.

What's going on here? The era of distributing expert secondary resources via Lexis and Westlaw to fill in the deficiencies of their commodized content is coming to a close. One or the other or BLaw but not "all or some of the above." In the No Sacred Cows era of legal research platforms, my hunch is distribution arrangements will become single vendor exclusive agreements that go to the highest bidder. And that bidder may change when the distribution agreement is up for renewal.

I'm not sure one can read the future by recent vendor eCommerce sites but clearly vendors like Lexis are already supplementing their in-house pBooks by offering expert print treatises published by other publishers (e.g., ALM) and professional and trade associations (just like BLaw is providing online). This is private sector demand-driven content sales and distribution in p- and e-formats. High quality speciality titles, something WEXIS lacks in quantity, are now "hot properties" in print and electronic formats for the supply chain.  Remember when Sears switched from just selling its own goods to becoming "Brand Central" a couple of decades ago?

Was BLaw's acquisition of BNA a wake-up call for WEXIS? [JH]

Becoming Mini Me to Doctor Evil: Some law librarians may start WFT-ing (oops, I probably meant WTF-ing!) when they receive the "great news" accompanying shipments of Lexis pBooks "with eBook"

I have 60-plus copies of Anderson's (read Lexis) Ohio Criminal Law Handbook on standing order. Our little county law library keeps two on our shelves. We pay for all of them (pricing discounted because of the number of copies) but the rest are directly shipped across the entire county to government stakeholders (judges and public sector attorneys). Recently I looked at the packing slip for the 2012-2 edition. It read "Anderson's 2012-2 Ohio Criminal Law Handbook with eBook". Ah, OK. "With eBook" doesn't cost anything more than without eBook. Download the "Great news!" Dear Customer letter. It explains that companion CDs, clearly a tech dead end, have been replaced with free eBooks. Such a deal.

Of course when one realizes that many of my recipients do not have Lexis user accounts, won't know the difference between the two eBook formats available, wouldn't know how to install the eBook reading app on the desktop, and probably won't know how or won't take the time to learn how to use the app's functions without training, one has to give LN's corporate decider-ers credit for becoming the Mini Me to Doctor Evil.

There was no advance notice that this was coming and no opt-out choice in what is clearly a stunt to unsolicitedly expose Lexis pBook subscribers to the Lexis eBook format. My hunch is Anderson's 2012-2 Ohio Criminal Law Handbook isn't the only title being shipped on standing order with an enhanced eBook "free." It certainly is not the only Lexis pBook that comes (or came) with a CD.

So imagine the consequences of mid-sized and large law firms receiving shipments of some LN titles "with eBook" in much larger numbers whether or not law firm librarians want that at this early stage of the enhanced Law eBook era. According to Bess Reynold's The Challenges of E-Books in Law Firm Libraries many are not interested right now for a number of very good reasons. Well, institutional buyer disinterest be damn. Lexis is pushing out titles to end users in what I guess is a trial run to generate end user interest. When willingness to pay for Law eBooks is low, Plan B for Lexis appears to be to give some eBooks away for free for now.

"Free" however is not free. I, for one, will have to explain the following: 

1. how to install the Lexis eReading app on desktops if the individual's desktop is hardware and software compatable (more likely I will have to travel across the county to do it myself);
2. that click-thru may not be available without a Lexis user account;
3. I, the invoice-paying guy who is supposed to coordinate purchasing of these materials, had no say in this matter; and
4. most likely when "with eBook" is no longer "free" the Board I report to for acquisition approvals for government stakeholders may not approve the additional expense for "personal" copies of Lexis eBooks even if the end user gives up his or her pBook copy because we may go the eLending route to save costs instead.

Just like TR Legal's ProView eBooks are tied to WLN, Lexis eBooks are tied to the Company's search platform. So exposing Lexis eBooks to non-Lexis users mimics TR Legal's strategy to increase search platform adoption rates by way of end user frustration. Meanwhile our little county law library has a couple of Ohio Criminal Law Handbooks "with eBooks" but not one eBook edition is available via the Lexis enterprise eLending solution unless I want to pay for that.

Frankly, I don't even know if this is the first Lexis pBook "with eBook" title we have received. While I check every damn TR Legal pBook title we receive, I used to have more trust in Lexis pBook deliveries. Now, well this is strike two in about a month or so. Strike one is here.

Do note: Standalone purchases of the 2012-2 edition title apparently come "with eBook" at no additional cost on the Lexis eCommerce site. [JH]

Nudging the FTC on the Prenotification Negative Option Rule to Include Institutional Consumers

In 2009, AALL submitted comments to the FTC that advocated expanding the scope of the Prenotification Negative Option Plan Rule beyond individual consumers to include institutional consumers. Nothing happened. In a renewed effort to get the FTC's attention, AALL's Consumer Advocacy Caucus developed a model Prenotification Negative Option Plan complaint that was approved by the Executive Board this summer. See FTC Prenotification Negative Option Rule Recommendation and FTC Prenotification Negative Option Rule Update.

AALL’s Government Relations Office has issued Action Alert: Submit a Vendor Complaint to the Federal Trade Commission Re: the Prenotification Negative Option Rule (Sept. 2012) to carry forward this effort. The objective is that if the FTC receives enough complaints, the FTC might actually do something about revising the scope of the Prenotification Negative Option Plan Rule.

Will It Work? My hunch is the bad actors in the legal publishing industry eventually will stop sending and billing institutional consumers unordered publications without adequate prenotification periods and disclosures to avoid FTC oversight. That in itself would be a consumer advocacy victory but we will have to wait and see.

Do note that the Action Alert requests that a copy of any complaint submitted to the FTC should be sent to AALL's Government Affairs Office to "keep track of the complaints submitted." I don't know if this means the Government Affairs Office intends to monitor the FTC's responses to complaints or not but the Office has done its job.

By promoting more robust AALL consumer advocacy efforts, I believe and it is only my opinion, that the Consumer Advocacy Caucus, author of the sample complaint, should receive copies of all filed complaints and any FTC responses received by law libraries in a watchdog-like manner for follow-up purposes.

But first, AALL and the Caucus must work out their differences. The E-Board recently rejected the revised statement of purpose the Caucus submitted during AALL's re-registration process. I, for one, have not seen the re-registration statement so I have no opinion on this issue. The E-Board may have legitimate reasons for its rejection. Alternatively the Caucus may need to explain whatever changes it made are necessary for executing more robust AALL consumer advocacy efforts. [JH}

Get Ready For MS Surface And Windows RT

This is the week when the world changes for Microsoft and its customers.  Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface “tablet” start distribution this Friday.  There is excitement in the air and press over the event though coverage of the development of the new version of Windows has been decidedly mixed.  The touch oriented version of Windows 8 sports a new interface that has seen good reviews on tablets but is seen by some as a detriment on a desktop machine with a keyboard and mouse.

I’m not going to rehash whether Windows 8 is a good or bad move from Microsoft.  My feeling is that the company is right to design an operating system for mobile devices as that is where the consumer market is obviously headed.  It’s not a question of whether Microsoft made the right move as much whether the design and approach of Windows 8 is right.

The success of Windows 8 on traditional computers with keyboards and mice will only become apparent once the general public has a chance to use it.  Articles in the tech press are loaded with comments for and against features in Windows 8.  I tend to discount those to an extent as a majority of readers there work in technical industries.  My suggestion is to try it out for yourself and see how you like it.

With that, I want to clear up some confusion about what Microsoft is distributing this Friday.  There are two types of Windows and two types of Surface tablets.  The iteration that appears at the end of the week is the tablet that runs Windows RT which is not a full version of Windows.  While it will sport a desktop, it will not be able to run any legacy applications that are not preinstalled by Microsoft.  These will include a version of Office RT that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, but not Outlook.  Microsoft wants users to use the live tile version of the mail app instead.  There will be no option to install programs to the desktop side of Windows in Windows RT.

For those wanting that capability, wait for the Windows Pro version of the Surface or other OEM equipment that runs full Windows.  Microsoft’s version won’t appear until January at the earliest.  These type of devices are expected to cost significantly more as they mimic the desktop experience in a tablet/laptop/ultrabook form factor.  Microsoft has released pricing and specifications for the Windows RT version of the Surface.  The device will cost $499 without a cover/keyboard and $599 with.  A more tactile keyboard is available for $129 as a separate option.  The summary specifications and a feature by feature comparison to the iPad are in a nice chart courtesy of PC Magazine.  There is a nice article in SlashGear on how the Surface Tablet came to be.

Microsoft’s success is far from assured though I have no doubt Windows 8 will be a success in one way or another.  The much hated Vista (let us never speak of it again) sold millions of copies despite being much of a joke in the technical community.  Google and Apple both have new tablets in the offing.  Google will announce the next generation of the Nexus 7 before the end of the month.  Apple is expected to announce the iPad mini tomorrow.  Amazon, of course, keeps speeding along with the Kindle.  I expect Microsoft to have an impact in the mobile market with the Surface.  I won’t predict success.  The Wall Street Journal  (subscription required) is less sanguine.  [MG]

Grappling with the Current Law eBook Status Quo as an Institutional Buyer

Unlike our general public library colleagues, law librarians are just beginning to grapple with the management of  Law eBooks. That's because our vendors, after a couple of failed attempts, became very careful before diving into the eBook marketplace in a systematic fashion. Business models had to be crafted. Target markets had to be identified. Sales cannibalization of current offerings had to be questimated. Platforms had to be created.

The current strategic objectives are clear:

• Maximize potential recurring revenue streams based on the vendor's current subscriber base.
• Lock-in potential eBook users by way of vendor platforms and enhancements like link-thru to vendor research services

The only real difference is buyer-focus. Individual consumers and institutional buyers by (1) owning the eBook and being able to loan eBooks by an offered vendor-provided eLending solution (Lexis) or (2) selling licensed-only access to the individual consumers (eg TR Legal)

Note well, at Boston 2012's PLL Summit, a TR Legal rep mumbled something about "looking into" eLending as a panelist when asked the question from the audience. WK's panelist ignored the topic of the session completely, opting instead to give a pitch for the Company's eBook platform. To his credit, only LN's panelist actually addressed the topic at hand and had the guts to say "print is dead." By that I believe he meant that Law eBooks eventually will replace their p-Book editions as the dominant content delivery system. Professionally, I happen to agree with that forecast; Print-on-Demand will be "Plan B." But there is still a lot of work to do for eBook-ing content integration that maximizes the technological benefits of professional grade enhanced Law eBooks as well as managing a Law eBook collection to resolve institutional buyer issues.

Test driving Law eBooks in the private sector. Bess Reynolds descusses the eBook trials her law firm, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, ran with LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwers in 2011 at The Challenges of E-Books in Law Firm Libraries. In her article, Bess identifies a number of Law eBook problems experienced by the library from the perspective of being the provider of eBooks to the firm's users. She concludes that "the vendors have made the entire experience of acquiring, distributing and supporting e-books far too complicated. ... [L]icensing and digital rights management ... add[s] additional complexity. Pricing is another issue to consider, with Thomson specifically charging a premium for e-books over print. Lexis is keeping prices the same, and Wolters Kluwer offers discounts if you purchase both formats."

For the moment, according to her linked-to June 2012 survey of 85 law firm librarians, the adoption rate of eBooks is low. While I believe eBooks sales will increase eventually, adoption rates will be constricted by a number of issues Bess identifies. They include tie-ins to vendor research services not accessible by end users, eBooks being vendor platform dependent, and the inability of institutional buyers to manage their own eBook collections by integrated hosting such as Adobe Content Server for user discovery (which, of course includes eLending) and library collection management purposes.

Law eBooks in the public sector. In a recent internal planning and budgeting memo (lightly edited for LLB publication below), I addressed enhanced Law eBooks in the context of a county law library that funds p- and e-resources for government stakeholders which are delivered to their workplaces and local attorneys and members of the general public in our county law library. The issues Bess presents in the context of law firm libraries are similar to ones government libraries have.

The current state of the art in enhanced Law eBooks is beginning to require serious consideration for longer term planning purposes. The following factors, however, must be taken into consideration. The review is fairly detailed because Law eBooks are not similar to general trade eBooks.

• Unlike general trade titles, the pricing of enhanced Law eBooks is equal to or greater than print title editions. The possibility of volume discounts for specific titles remains an open question at this time. The availability of desirable eBook titles from each publisher’s sales catalog is increasing.
• Enhanced Law eBooks link to each vendor’s own “next generation” database service and thus are fully functional only if the eBook user has access to that vendor’s service.
• Only one of our major vendors (Lexis) provides its eBooks with an electronic lending solution at this time. There is an opportunity here to reduce print spending in the library collection as well as for our in-office users by acquiring that publisher’s eBook titles for electronic lending eventually.
• Cannibalization of print sales and database sales by increased sales of Law eBooks as they become more popular will increase the cost of print and legal database research services in the future.
• As with all technological innovations, acceptance of enhanced Law eBooks will be slow but will increase. For many resources, enhanced Law eBook are more usable than the database versions of the same content. Law eBooks also may become a viable alternative for their print editions used by in-house users in their workplaces. 

End note. Bess Reynolds' The Challenges of E-Books in Law Firm Libraries is one contribution to a compilation of articles published in AALL-ILTA's The New Librarian white paper. [JH]

Tie-ins Between eContent and eCommerce

Here's just one example:

Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar introduced ShopBazaar, a website owned by the magazine that features merchandise from its print pages—part of the magazine’s broader effort to diversify revenue. It is a “true content-to-commerce venture”, an editorial site that allows readers to buy the products that Harper’s Bazaar editors have curated to fit their tastes and the brand’s identity.

Quoting from Pam Horan's (Online Publishers Association) Lean Back 2.0 article, Commerce through content. Horan adds

These innovative, editorial-minded approaches to e-commerce allow publishers to provide a convenient service to their loyal audience that enhances the overall user experience. One of the beauties of the digital age is instant-gratification: why simply mention quality products, when you can help your readers shop for them right from the page or website?

How long do you think it will be before our major vendors promote their wares to "enhance the overall user experience" because "that's what our customers want" by way of their search services? Imagine, for example, a message like this:

This source is blocked from your license but you can use your user account to acquire the title in print or eBook at {insert publication's direct link on vendor's eCommerce site].

See also No Business Model Required.

Might be wise to start drafting addendums now to add to your vendors' boilerplate search licenses when they come up for renewal if you don't want to be stuck picking up the tap. I'm already working on two:

1. Sales transactions based on user accounts will not paid without prior authorization from [insert title or name of institutional buyer's license contact] because user accounts are solely for the purpose of performing research; and
2. Contact from the vendor to any and all users based on information provided for user account establishment is strictly prohibited. This includes but is not limited to contacting any user for sales promotions, sending unsolicited research tips and instructions, and follow-ups after a user views a vendor-hosted "how-to" video.

Too extreme? If "[o]ne of the beauties of the digital age is instant-gratification," I don't think so. [JH]

How to Find the Law: Another chapter in the publishing tradition of legal research and legal bibliography comes to a close

How to Find the Law in any of its many editions was never my favorite legal research and legal bibliography title. Effective Legal Research was but that pBook has been "history" for many, many years. Now too for what certainly deserves to be acknowledged as one of the standard works in the field, How to Find the Law.

"After much thought, Beth [Edinger] and I are letting Finding the Law go. The world of textbooks in general is in flux, but I do not see a role for a standard textbook on legal research in it. I continue to believe in the value of research instruction, but it will not come via the standard printed textbook. That day is gone." -- Bob Berring.

For much more see Bob Berring's Finding the Law R.I.P. on Slaw.

Is finding the law by way of expert texts also dead? So who is going to be the brave soul to write the first fully enhanced -- not slanted to any one vendor's e-resources by limiting embedded links to in-house services and including stable open law links -- and regularly updated legal research and bibliography eBook? Professionally, I believe there remains a need for one. If interested, don't, however, pitch the idea to the publisher of How to Find the Law. That day is gone for Thomson Reuters' legal education publishing strategy. [JH]

How Not to Go Green: Killing trees by way of Lexis expanding its Ohio Court Rules pamphlet set

Stealing a chapter of TR Legal's playbook, those of us in the Buckeye State recently received a p-volume expansion of the Annotated Rules Governing the Courts of Ohio from Lexis. (Are institutional buyers seeing the same for other state court rules pamphlet sets from Lexis?) But unlike TR Legal, the expansion does not cost anything more, at least not yet, if one doesn't factor in the time some of us have been spending fielding calls and emails from the folks we buy the office copy court rules. In our little county law library government-run system, that's not an insignificant number of copies. Our end-user preference has been to want  "Anderson's," which is now a Lexis brand name for some Ohio-specific primary and secondary practice materials. 

Hey, it is good to know my judges and government attorneys are cost conscious even when funding the standing orders isn't costing them anything! But, I've really got more productive things to do with my time. While not costing a penny more than the usual annual roll-up right now, my hunch is that someday it will. In addition to killing trees, this is an interesting end-around the unsolicted shipment rule because the additional stuff is "free."

It is a common legal publishing industry rule-of-thumb to do the opposite of whatever TR Legal does. In this instance, however, Lexis has outdone West in its gamesmanship. Prime the pump by giving something away for free now. Then ... well, you know. None of my subscriber base will need the additional stuff so Lexis better be offering options to pick the specific volumes subscribers want before (OK, wishful thinking on my part but you can see the corner the Company has trapped itself in) when pricing increases beyond the usual annual percent roll-up. (And I was just thinking about killing my standing orders for TR Legal's over-priced Ohio court rules pamphlets because it is budget prep time and we don't need both WEXIS versions.) 

Smells like snake oil to me. But since I've gone there already, time for Steve Earle's Someday by placing the song in the context of the very small town that is WEXIS. [JH]

The Bluebook: There's an eReader app developer selling that

Bob Ambrogi reports that the first moble editon of The Bluebook has been launched for the iPhone and iPad using Ready Reference Apps' rulebook as its platform. While the rulebook app is a free download, the content is not. The Bluebook via Ready Reference Apps costs $39.99 or a one-year online subscription costs $32. Bulk licensing discounts are available. Bob notes that the print edition of The Bluebook costs $34. There is also an online web-based subscription service not produced by the app developer for the The Bluebook.  

Ready Reference Apps also sells the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, Bankruptcy Procedure, Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure and Evidence priced at $1.99 each for it's rulebook platform. Bob notes that today (August 22) and only today the federal rules but not the The Bluebook will be available for free to all rulebook app users.

For more on rulebook's functionality, see Bob Ambrogi's LawSites post. Bob does not indicate plus I have my doubts that Ready Reference Apps has an exclusive license to be the sole provider of a moble edition of The Bluebook. [JH]

Beyond Copy and Paste: Intelligent Content EveryWare as the Next Wave of Technological Innovation from Wolters Kluwer

Unlike our other major vendors, Wolters Kluwer's executives and technologists in Europe present business ideas with a minimum of the usual marketing pablum on the Company's Intelligent Solutions Blog. In a recent two-part series of posts, WK's Jack Lynch, a member of the Executive Board of Wolters Kluwer whose responsibilities include global shared services, technology and business development, discusses the "next wave" business model for delivering contextualized and actionable solutions for intelligent data-intensive professional use.

I believe our business is evolving along two dimensions—1) The Computing dimension where we find ourselves today in the Post PC era barreling towards an era of Ubiquitous Computing or, what Adam Greenfield has termed, “EveryWare” and; 2) The Information dimension where today we are just beginning to contextualize information in different customer contexts as we continue to move along the data to information to intelligence continuum.

For more, see Part 1 and Part 2 of Lynch's "Next Wave" post series on the Intelligent Solutions Blog.

Angel Sancho Ferrer, Research & Development Director in Content & Online Services, Wolters Kluwer, South Europe follows up on Lynch's theme at Content in Search and Inference Engines.

The integration of content and software is a topic as broad as how to create Artificial Intelligence; and it is very deeply related with the core assets of Wolters Kluwer, with enriched content and algorithms that understand those special structures for research or workflow tools.

Expanding on the concept of "actionable content" presented by Lynch, he discusses the limitations of current search technology compared to rules-based inference engines.

Search technologies, as powerful as they have demonstrated to be, have limits. They:

• are reactive, and so depend on the quality of the query;
• cannot create information, just select the best documents and fragments (without modifying them, just copy and paste).

Rule systems, on the other side:

• Can follow a dialog-based approach to obtain more information from the user, and even from a software system, changing its internal states and strategy.
• Can create information that was not there (i.e. a computable document).

The delivery of actionable content by way of inference engines can be viewed as a solution that embeds search and professional-grade editorial content to generate made-to-order templates for work product. Think today's personal income tax preparation software only ratched-up well beyond Form 1040 rules for complex legal matters. This borders on Artificial Intelligence. But to make it work it will require specialist legal expertise with an editorial staff constantly reviewing legal developments to update inference engine rules.

One could argue the case that WK's US legal platforms are not even close to WK's "Next Wave" business development model. But they may be someday. If they do, WK presents a competitive threat to BLaw in several specialist market segments and could "nudge" BLaw and WEXIS to offer specialty-centric "solutions" that are state-of-the-art as defined by WK. [JH]

Law Prof as Innovator of Online Legal Transactional Skills Training Platform

Drexel Law prof Karl Okamoto's LawMeet teaches lawyering skills by having students post videos advising "clients" on hypothetical transactional scenarios. The students then receive feedback on their performances through a voting system. The top-rated performances are reviewed by experienced transactional lawyers in a competitive setting.

It has been reported that several law firms are using the online training platform with junior associates and faculty at 48 law schools expressed interest in testing LawMeet exercises after Okamoto demonstrated LawMeets at AALS this year. Hopefully interest in this platform will expanding legal skills offerings for law school courses and in-house law firm training with additional topical competitions for transactional lawyering. Perhaps someday LawMeet execises will offer law school course credit and CLE credit hours as standalone transaction-based legal skills offerings.

LawMeets was launched by two-year old start-up ApprenNet. Okamoto's venture recently received a $500,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation to expand LawMeet. For more see Drexel Law Prof to Use $500K Grant to Expand LawMeets, an Online Lawyering Skills Platform and Philadelphia Inquirer Features Professor Karl Okamoto's Online Experiential Learning Platform. [JH]

eBook Business Model Report Published by ALA's Digital Content & Libraries Working Group

Quoting from the introduction to "Ebook Business Models for Public Libraries" (Aug. 8, 2012):

In response to urgent member concerns, the Digital Content & Libraries Working Group of the American Library Association (ALA), in close collaboration with ALA’s president and executive director, has focused on influencing the largest (“Big 6”) trade publishers to sell ebooks to libraries on reasonable terms. During the past months, the Working Group has developed considerable knowledge about the ebook market, publishers, and the new challenges posed by library ebook lending to inform its discussions with publishers and distributors. However, the Working Group is well aware that information about this topic is highly sought in the library community generally, and so this report was prepared to share some of what we have learned.

(Emphasis added.)

From ALA's perspective as a library association advocating for libraries and their patrons, three basic attributes should be included in every publisher's business model for eBooks:

• Inclusion of all titles: All ebook titles available for sale to the public should also be available to libraries.
• Enduring rights: Libraries should have the option to effectively own the ebooks they purchase, including the right to transfer them to another delivery platform and to continue to lend them indefinitely.
• Integration: Libraries need access to metadata and management tools provided by publishers to enhance the discovery of ebooks.

For more, including a download link to the report, see ALA Releases "Ebook Business Models for Public Libraries" on ALA's E-content blog. [JH]

Snake Oil Pitches from the Land of 10,000 Invoices: Playing "Guess the Title" for TR Legal's format switcheroos

Remember when we received official word via a "Dear Colleagues" letter about the 450 unidentified titles that met TR Legal's format switheroo critera? "[P]rint products that exist in one- or two-volume sets, and are updated only once or twice annually, are good candidates for conversion to pamphlet." Lately, I've been playing "quess the title" with the few remaining TR Legal "loose-leaf" secondary legal works in our little county law library collection. The one-volume Consulting Agreements Deskbook loose-leaf was just switched to pamphlet. According to the "Dear Valued Subscriber" letter [Download the full text of the generic letter, if you want], annotated:

There are several benefits that you, as a customer, will see in moving to the pamphlet format, First, it is easier to locate materials in pamphlets, as opposed to loose-leaf binders. You will no longer need to flip back and forth between the main content and the supplement to verify whether the material you are reading is current. [Ed. note: That's because part of the supplementation was nothing more than a pocket part that was three-hole punched for insertation at the end of the volume.] Similarly, it is easier to keep pamphlets up-to-date. Simply replace your existing pamphlet with the latest version. You no longer need to worry about filing or inserting new chapters and supplements into a binder. [Ed. note: OMG yes. Oh wait, we aren't talking about filing loose-leaf pages CCH-style. Filing a chunck of "new" chapter pages and the three-hole punched pocket-parts isn't something to really, really worry about.] Lastly, pamphlets are more convenient to carry and take up less shelf space than most loose-leaf binders. [Ed. note: And when you kill your standing order to "buy new" in print in a couple of years, you won't have to check how out-of-date it is because the year will be displayed on the cover and/or spine. Of course, should someone try to license the ProView edition via OnePassYourAss and then you cancel the library e-lending unfriendly ProView edition because authorization of that purchase wasn't verified by the folks in the Land of 10,000 Invoices Licenses, then "valued customers" or "dear colleagues" will be screwed.]

So ... in the game of Guess the Title. I got the Consulting Agreements Deskbook right and now I will kill my standing order for it. But I guessed wrong about the two-volume loose-leaf set of O'Neal's Close Corporations and LLCs: Law and Practice this update merry-go-round. Not only did we receive the usual itty-bitty supplementation pages, we also received new binders as replacements for the existing binders! What does that say about the snake oil pitches from TR Legal's format switheroo-ers?

Oh well, my hunch is that after TR Legal's "valued subscribers" file all the existing content plus the wafer-thin current supplementation pages into the new binders, they will receive in TR Legal's format merry-go-round a generic pamphlet switheroo letter for O'Neal's Close Corporations and LLCs when it has been scheduled for ProView-ing. Hopefully the folks in the Land of 10,000 Invoices will speed up production because my hurry-up defense is to kill my standing order after receiving the title in its first year-stamped "new ed." pamphlet format.

One, two, one, two, three, four. "Heard trouble come to your town" so step right up for snake oil because "it's been around a long, long time." [JH]

Adoption Rate Watch: Tracking WestlawNext as an Indicator of Customer Acceptance of the Current Gen Platform Model

WLN Adoption Since Launch
Quarter	Customers	WLN as % of Westlaw Revenue Base
2010 1Q	2,300	N/A
2010 2Q	5,700	N/A
2010 3Q	9,000	18%
2010 4Q	15,000	31%
2011 1Q	18,500	34%
2011 2Q	24,000	41%
2011 3Q	29,000	46%
2011 4Q	34,000	54%
2012 1Q	N/A	65%

Being first to the market can be a dream come true or a scary nightmare of lost opportunity. The WestlawNext launch confirmed the old "do the opposite of whatever TR Legal does" rule. Being second to launch has been advantageous for Lexis Advance. See "WestlawNext": What happens when a brand becomes synonymous with the negatives of all similiar products. Whether it will benefit the adoption rate of Lexis Advance remains to be seen. For now, the only indicator of customer sentiment for today's legal search platform model is tracking WestlawNext's adoption rate.
 
"WestlawNext has been sold to approximately 65% of Westlaw’s revenue base" according to Thomson Reuters Reports First-Quarter 2012 Results (May 2012). No additional information was provided in the Company's 1Q 2012 documentation. In previous quarterly presentations, the Company would identify the number of customers. See table, right. But that factoid isn't as interesting as the consistent omission of reporting the actual revenue being generated solely by the WestlawNext "premium" and related revenue generaton, meaning the investment community has no idea what the return on investment for WestlawNext really is.

About all one can say is that approximately 35% of Westlaw's revenue base has not jumped on the WLN bandwagon. However, note well that if Westlaw subscribers accepted (or insisted upon) WestlawNext with no premium add-on costs to them, their Classic Westlaw spend would be moved to the less than enlightening reporting category of "WestlawNext as a percentage of Westlaw's revenue base." Oh well, David Thomson knows the score.

I'm wondering if David Thomson is also scratching his head. If he was taken in by the Mad Men's marketing pitch for WLN, he has to be wondering why in the parlance of the Mafia, WLN isn't a "good earner" yet. Two years since launch now and WLN hasn't exactly had a psychedelic Purple Orange Haze effect on the market. Of course, Thomson is too smart to be taken in by narco-marketing but you know damn well that the MBA-types dive into their business modeling calculations before anything is given the green light. One very important factor is forecasting when a legacy platform can be killed based on an estimated adoption timeline for the new platform.

Quoting from Interview with Mark Schiff, Vice President of Product Marketing at Thomson Reuters regarding Launch of WestlawNext, The CRIV Sheet, May 2010 at 3 (conducted by Caren Biberman on Feb. 24, 2010):

The long term vision is that there be a single platform, WestlawNext, but there is no date for the retirement of Westlaw.com and Mark believes it will be “years.”

Right, "years" isn't exactly the kind of specificity any business model analysis will spit out; it certainly isn't the sort of forecast any enlightened corporate executive wants to base a $1 billion investment decision on. If drunk on the TRI corporate Kool-Aid, the predication might have been one (1) post-WLN launch multi-year Classic Westlaw license renewal before the remainder of the Westlaw subscriber base would be sufficiently small that they could be PO-ed by having no choice but to take WLN (or switch vendors). Under a worst case scenario, two (2) multi-year Westlaw renewals before all Westlaw revenue can be converted to WLN revenue.

In addition to serious concerns raised about West Search as a reliable search engine by law librarians, cost comparisons are another major issue even if TR Legal would eliminate the WLN "premium." Quoting from the abstract of Emily Marcum's The Quest for Client Savings in Online Research: WestlawNext V. Westlaw Classic (April 3, 2012 draft posted on SSRN; Paper not available to download as of June 12, 2012):

WestlawNext and Classic were each used exclusively in transactional mode for eight days. Cost to the client was assessed using a discount off retail model. Classic was found to be 51.6% cheaper. This difference was so stark that the experiment was terminated early and only two days of each platform in hourly mode was completed. WestlawNext hourly was four times more expensive than Classic, even with fewer minutes used.

I haven't had the opportunity to read the full analysis but the conclusion does dovetail into many law librarians' expectations that West Search's federated search model could ratchet up out-of-plan charges substantially. The same, of course, is true for Lexis Advance but at least one gets a sneak peak at an out-of-plan document first. Clearly a variable cost explosion is not going to increase WLN's adoption rate. Clearly, continued comparisons by legal information professionals where Classic Westlaw bests WestlawNext isn't going to increase the voluntary adoption of WLN. If anything, it might advance the take-it-or-leave-it involuntary adoption proposal as current licenses come up for renewal. The best way to sell WLN is to eliminate comparisons with Classic Westlaw and there is only one way to do that -- kill Classic Westlaw.

While the launch of and sales push for the adoption of full-text online legal database search services produced some Luddite reactions in the professional literature 30-plus years ago, that is not the case now. Today's law librarians are tech savvy and cost conscious. Out-of-plan licenses have increasing become the exception, not the norm, in the private sector. A study like Marcum's will only do one thing, namely, increase the march to in-plan only WLN licenses.

There is no doubt in my mind that despite all of the new platform's faults, WLN's adoption rate would be higher than it is today if Thomson Reuters had not applied its 20th century database selection in-plan/out-of-plan licensing scheme to its 21st century West Search federated search engine. One per seat flat rate price for the entire database universe is the only model that makes sense if a federated search engine is going to be the major selling point for current gen search platforms. The same, of course, is also true for Lexis Advance. But I seriously doubt WEXIS will ever consider going that route.

Now, if BLaw grabs and keeps more than a 15% share of the legal search market in the private sector, WEXIS business modelers may start crunching the numbers. Despite BLaw marketing, flat rate pricing is the norm but per seat flat rate for a vendor's entire database universe is not. At least, not yet. [JH]

Penetrating the Once Impenetrable WEXIS Market: Fastcase's Android App for Legal Research as an Illustration

I don't know how many of Fastcase's 500,000 paid subscribers use Android devices but those who do now can use Fastcase's legal research app built for the Android OS. Yesterday, the Company announced the launch of the first legal research app for Android phones and tablets here. The app also may attract cost conscious practitioners who have not jumped on the iPhone-iPad bandwagon to Fastcase. Smart move.

Fastcase CEO Ed Walters was quoted in a paidContent article published the day before the Android app roll-out (no, not about the app per se). A snip:

Today, digital technology is letting Bloomberg Law scan and sort a vast pool of law that would once have taken decades to assemble. But while its tools rival those of the incumbents [WEXIS], there is also a bigger question of whether the industry’s underlying business model is still viable.

That business model is based on charging lawyers enormous money to access a tightly controlled pool of information is still viable. It is also highly labor-intensive. Fastcase’s Walters described practices like Westlaw’s technique of reading and annotating cases as a “relic, an anachronism from the age of print … they’re acting as if search engines never existed.”

Fastcase’s own model relies on using algorithms to rapidly sort cases and track precedents. The company sells retail subscriptions for $95 a month and also offers bulk memberships to state bar associations.

Companies like Fastcase are far from displacing the giants, but they do illustrate how technology is allowing not just Bloomberg but upstarts to challenge a once impenetrable market. At the same time, Google and the Cornell-based non-profit Legal Information Institute are making stacks of cases, patent histories and more available for free.

(Emphasis added.) For more, see Jeff John Roberts' Bloomberg’s big bite for billions of legal dollars (June 4, 2012).

Once WEXIS "owned" virtually 100% of the commercial legal search market. It is quite possible their combined market share will be reduced to 50-60% with BLaw, Fastcase and other search providers grabbing the rest of the market from them. [JH]