Feb

22

Wexisberg - is three a crowd?

Filed Under Law publishing | Leave a Comment 

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 headnotes, tagging cases and readying a law digest.

500 lawyers x $ whatever = a lot of $$ invested in editorial, let alone tech, marketing and blah blah.

There’s no doubt that quality editorial (authored law) is what differentiates the established law publishers from most freeloading wannabees, but I wonder if $$ will be enough?

By Nick Holmes, 22 February 2010
Filed under Law publishing | Leave a Comment 

Jan

26

Crown Commons

Filed Under Copyright, Public Sector Information | 1 Comment 

With the launch of the data.gov.uk beta website - providing access to over 2,500 central government datasets - comes a new licensing model for government information which it is intended will be launched government-wide by the end of May 2010 to replace the existing “Click-Use” licence.

The new licence is interoperable with the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence and provides that you are free:

  • to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
  • to Remix — to adapt the work

provide that you

  • acknowledge the copyright and the source of the information, but not in a way that suggests we endorse you or your use of the information
  • ensure that you do not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the information

With the understanding that … blah, blah - see the data.gov.uk T&C.

This may seem quite unexciting, but is a big deal!

By Nick Holmes, 26 January 2010
Filed under Copyright, Public Sector Information | 1 Comment 

Jan

13

Are blawgs an effective marketing tool?

Filed Under Marketing, Blogging | 5 Comments 

I won’t get into marketing theory here (being unqualified to pontificate on the topic), but will restate my firm belief - supported by most genuine blawgers - that a blog “works”, ie it engages effectively, raises profile and is good for business, if it expresses a genuine personal voice. (I say “personal” rather than “individual” because there are many effective group blawgs which express the personal voices of a group.)

The effectiveness of blogs declines - and descends into the negative - as you move from personal and business blogging, through corporate and marketing blogging, to the downright evil of splogging.

Cogitate on this if you’re thinking “we should start a blog - it’s great marketing” and consider the case of Findlaw (part of the respected Thompson Reuters empire) whose splawg marketing tactics are deemed (by respected blawgers):

By Nick Holmes, 13 January 2010
Filed under Marketing, Blogging | 5 Comments 

Dec

9

More on Legal Opinions on Google Scholar

Filed Under Cases, Search | Leave a Comment 

From the Law Librarian Blog on a one and a half hour interview with Google engineer Anurag Acharya on the Law Librarian Blog Talk Radio looking into Google Scholar Legal Opinions and Journals:

Google designed this for people who know how to use Google at the very least, and to be successful with mining cases with that level of experience.  No one will see something like a citator beyond the “How cited” tab.  The panel clearly hungered for a more definitive free tool that matches Shepards or KeyCite.  Don’t expect anything like that soon, if at all. Acharya pointed out some technical difficulties in doing some of the things Lexis and Westlaw does for a case opinion database. Google is not going there. He also alluded at one point to agreements he has in place that prevent him from doing certain things, such as creating an API to embed case information in third party sites. This suggests that whoever is vending the text [Westlaw?] see the raw case law as a commodity. The real value to a vendor is the analytical tools they provide. The contract essentially seems to be that someone provides the text at a reasonable price provided Google does not compete on features.

Further comment on 3 Geeks and a Law Blog.

Update: comment on HeinOnline Blog.

By Nick Holmes, 9 December 2009
Filed under Cases, Search | Leave a Comment 

Dec

4

Can Google tame the law?

Filed Under Semantic web, Search | 1 Comment 

I recently posted on the FreeLegalWeb blog about Legal Opinions on Google Scholar. This was principally to question the assertion that the new service will empower the average citizen. But there are bigger questions to answer about Google’s ability meaningfully to address the needs of legal researchers.

For Google, scale is everything: index everything, analyse it with fancy algorithms and the results will speak for themselves. While this certainly seems to work for broad, mainstream data sets, can it work for the scholarly and professional where accuracy, reliability and domain-specific semantics are much more important, even essential? Can it work for the law?

Peter Jacso, professor in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa believes that with Scholar Google has produced a “metadata train-wreck” and he’s not optimistic that things will improve. Writing for Library Journal in Google Scholar’s Ghost Authors, Lost Authors, and Other Problems he concludes:

It must have taken some time to create such an imbecile parser. In the early days the GS [Google Scholar] developers decided not to use the metadata readily available from most of the scholarly publishers. …

The press and the public were so enamored of anything with the word Google in it that GS developers apparently believed they could create a parser to identify the metadata better than the human indexers at the publishers, repositories, and indexing/abstracting services who assigned metadata by listing author, title, journal name, publication year, and other metadata elements.

GS designers have sent very under-trained, ignorant crawlers/parsers to recognize and fetch the metadata elements on their own. Not all of the indexing/abstracting services are perfect and consistent, but their errors are dwarfed by the types and volume of those in GS. This is the perfect example of the lethal mix of ignorance and arrogance GS developers applied to metadata and relevance ranking issues.

It may be difficult for some to see why Goog would eschew explicit, accurate, publisher-provided metadata, instead relying on automatic recognition which amongs many other failings attributes articles to such authors as P Login (from Please Login) and N Subscriber (from New Subscriber), I Background and X Conclusions (from headings) and so on; numerous other examples of spurious Google-generated metadata are cited by Jacso.

But that’s the way Goog works; it does not index data in the same way and it is confident (arrogant?) about its approach. Legal Opinions on Google Scholar undoubtedly opens up legal research to more people and provides a useful, complementary way to search (primarily US Federal) opinions and link them together via citations; but it will be limited in its appeal; it will not empower the average citizen and it will not at present satisfy the seasoned legal researcher.

As with all things Goog, even if we see many flaws in its initial Beta offerings, we know it has to be taken seriously as it has the financial, infrastructure and intellectual resources to make things happen over time. To satisfy the more demanding it would have to beef up its editorial input and effectively become a legal publisher and that would mean treading on the toes of those it depends on. But as web data becomes more discoverable via linked data (aka the semantic web), so Google’s approach will bear fruit and start to challenge the “traditional” methods.

By Nick Holmes, 4 December 2009
Filed under Semantic web, Search | 1 Comment 

Nov

23

Why pretty print is bad for the web

Filed Under Publishing | 6 Comments 

Here’s another of my beefs: publishing PDF on the web is lazy, bad practice.

PDF - portable document format - what does that mean? It means, here’s what you want to print … in a file. It’s a portable print format; not a native web document format and not an open document format. It looks pretty, but is substantially dumb. You can create TOCs and embed links and annotations etc but almost all the document structure and semantics is lost, subverted to the holy grail of print replication.

Most often PDF is published on the web because it’s convenient and no hassle to do so. We’ve authored a pretty Word (or other) doc; we’ll print it to PDF and publish it on the web; it looks good … job done!

It looks good, but how does it feel? If you want to navigate it or extract meaning from it, it feels bad. There’s a place, a big place, for PDF, but it’s no substitute for an open web format which can be rich with meaning.

In the US Adobe is touting its technologies as good for open government; but Adobe is Bad for Open Government; bad for open anything.

By Nick Holmes, 23 November 2009
Filed under Publishing | 6 Comments 

Nov

20

eLawtric Books anyone?

Filed Under ebooks | 4 Comments 

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 law books. Since the web came along, it’s been clear to me that the web was it. We have the cloud and we have increasingly smart devices connected to it. Dedicated devices to which we download stuff are only temporary, transitional technologies. Clearly, Amazon have a vested interest in selling “books” and they’ll milk the ebook bandwagon. For publications that are read serially, ebooks make some sense; for legal publications they make no sense at all.

By Nick Holmes, 20 November 2009
Filed under ebooks | 4 Comments 

Oct

26

Supreme Court judgments - where to read the full story

Filed Under Cases | 2 Comments 

Thanks to Jennie Law for pointing out  that the new UKSC needs to get its publishing act together.

It’s been in existence for almost four weeks now and has the most advanced court technology in the world. It delivered its first judgment on 14 October, yet no cases yet appear in the Decided Cases section. As Jenny discovers, you can currently find these only under News and Publications by clicking, under Judgements, the Read the full story (sic) link.

And not a nice orange RSS button in sight.

Just goes to show that the best technology in the world is no magic web delivery bullet. A modicum of thought for the end user is required.

By Nick Holmes, 26 October 2009
Filed under Cases | 2 Comments 

Oct

22

A letter

Filed Under Miscellany | Leave a Comment 

Today I received a letter! Not a love letter*, nor a middle class thank you note, and not an impersonal business letter, but a thank you letter which sought to maintain and progress a business relationship. What a pleasure!

Anyone else remember the days when tweeps and other peeps wrote letters?

* Weren’t the 60s fab! And check out the turn of the next decade cover

By Nick Holmes, 22 October 2009
Filed under Miscellany | Leave a Comment 

Oct

16

Is the law a can of beans? (reprise)

Filed Under Future of law | Leave a Comment 

Way back in 1999 I wrote a piece on the commoditisation of legal services which still resonates today.

Some lawyers are still arguing that there are so many potential pitfalls in using commoditised online services that the customer should always seek legal advice. For example, Angela Davis of Nottingham law firm Berryman warns that DIY divorce websites could be a false economy (PDF): “In my view, there is no substitute for obtaining good quality legal advice, tailor-made to each individual’s particular requirements.”

At the same time we have Susskind urging law firms to decompose their work and see which parts can’t be done more efficiently using technology. Though he focusses on BigLaw, his entreaty needs to be taken on board by firms of all sizes doing all types of work. It’s fact that standard wills, standard conveyances, standard divorces and many more upmarket legal processes are being delivered more efficiently with commoditised services. The argument is not whether or not these standard processes should be commoditised and sold, it is about how those commoditised processes are sold and how lawyers can best sell them together with their related (and often necessary) bespoke services.

It’s all very well to say that customers should always seek legal advice, but they will be attracted by the cheap and easy option which they find at the top of their Google results. If they are to be aware of the potential pitfalls in using some of those services without legal advice, short of more regulation, it’s up to lawyers to innovate and package and sell their services more effectively.

By Nick Holmes, 16 October 2009
Filed under Future of law | Leave a Comment 

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