Legal, tax and regulatory information has hitherto been regarded as pretty much recession-proof; people resort to the law in good times and bad, regulation and compliance issues are on the up, and nothing’s certain except death and taxes. Not any more.
To be sure, tax is the one ‘bright spot’ in Outsell’s Legal, Tax & Regulatory Market Size and Share report for 2009 (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bbwgy). Beyond that, though, Outsell reports a 2.3% decline in revenue for the segment last year, compared with 6-8% annual growth formerly – referring to ‘unprecedented revenue pressure’ and warning that the difficult market conditions will continue this year.
Which may partly explain the continuing stream of announcements coming from legal information providers. Recently, for example, LexisNexis took advantage of the American Library Association conference to announce the redesign of its general reference services for the higher education, public library and secondary schools markets (http://digbig.com/5bbwgr), unveil enhancements to its Statistical Insights and DataSets suites (http://digbig.com/5bbwgx) and, most significantly, launch InterAction Strategic Account Management, a new customer relationship management application for professional services firms.
Describing itself as a ‘provider of content-enabled workflow solutions’ rather than a plain old legal information aggregator, LexisNexis explains that InterAction is the first application for legal markets to integrate a CRM solution providing compatibility with Microsoft SharePoint. As LexisNexis puts it, it’s designed to help ‘large, geographically dispersed client teams’ who ‘often struggle to operate efficiently and cohesively’ (http://digbig.com/5bbwgt).
Geographically dispersed is right. A recent Economist magazine article illustrates vividly how companies and law firms are increasingly turning to outsourced outfits in India for cut price legal services (http://digbig.com/5bbwgp).
Legal information units are no strangers to outsourcing either. At the end of last year, Michele Bate described how outsourcing specialist Integreon brought together the legal information teams of three separate law firms to provide a shared information service for all three (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27596).
Musing on Integreon’s blog recently, Ron Friedmann wondered whether legal process outsourcing was now driving law firms, and not just for cost savings either. Unsurprisingly in view of Integreon’s core business, he approved; outsourcing enabled law firms to respond to pressures for options and process improvements in service delivery (http://digbig.com/5bbwgq).
But could there also be some unintended consequences? The Economist article mentions some senior lawyers’ concerns about how young lawyers will learn the business if the routine jobs they typically do are sent instead to Delhi.
But the response of one senior attorney is unequivocal. ‘I didn’t learn a thing as a baby lawyer digging through boxes in a storeroom,’ she says. ‘We may have to rethink how our lawyers are trained.’
What goes for baby lawyers may well go for baby legal information professionals too.
Legal, tax and regulatory information has hitherto been regarded as pretty much recession-proof; people resort to the law in good times and bad, regulation and compliance issues are on the up, and nothing’s certain except death and taxes. Not any more.
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