In his latest article for SLAW about the legal publishing industry entitled “Legal & Professional Publishing – It’s the Money Stupid” he kicks over some of the current sacred cows and mantras of senior management at the likes of Lexis, West & others.. especially the concept of being integrated into the workflow patterns of law firms the world over
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Here’s his introduction
Many areas of publishing, to me, are bizarre. For example, visit the Frankfurt Book Fair and see tiny stand after stand, staffed by families, displaying delightful books, over which they have slaved, yet nobody?s making money. Publishing is often seen like that; resembling academic and religious endeavour, done for the greater good rather than profit. It?s not my view but neither, mostly, is it any of my business how others think and behave.
When it comes to legal and professional information publishing, you?d think it would be different. With customers such as fat, succulent lawyers, accountants, tax advisers, big corporates and institutions, it should be just a question of knowing or finding out what they want, delivering it to the optimum quality standard and banking the cash. Yet, despite their undoubted qualities and strengths, the major international professional publishers seem to be increasingly less able to do that simple thing. Much of the evidence appears to be that, to some extent, their customers hate them and feel hated by them, while the endeavours of the publishers appear, in certain of their developed markets, to be directed at reducing revenue, profit and margin from what ought to be the dream market of professional, highly-qualified, rich advisers who get richer from trading on information.
and here’s his conclusion
(The Publisher’s)? solution? Use only metaphorical language, analogy and general management-speak to disguise ignorance and avoid specific challenge, draw all examples for intended actions from unrelated industry sectors so that everyone is ignorant in equal amounts, set up project teams to investigate issues but never complete tasks, when in trouble, announce an internal restructure to buy more time and get out quickly, on to the next job before being rumbled.
And there’s plenty more of this in-between . Make sure you read this article at? http://www.slaw.ca/2011/01/05/legal-and-professional-publishing-its-the-money-stupid/ and then watch (see previous post) the actions at LN senior management level over the next 8 months
If this were the old testament they’d call him a prophet !
