Respond to the  2020-21 What’s Hot and What’s Not Survey here. Although the world was shut down by the pandemic, our friends in legal tech continued their pursuit of innovation and market share.  Most of us had a sense of whiplash and disbelief when the world came to a virtual halt in March 2020. Law librarians who had built digital libraries over the years offered their attorneys a fairly seamless transition to their work from home desktop. Within weeks most legal publishers had developed a special COVID offering. These ranged from free alerts, to primary sources and workflow toolkits. Despite all of these efforts law librarians and knowledge managers faced a gap in COVID coverage. Almost overnight a “gray literature” emerged which major legal publishers were not prepared to track. Governor’s executive orders, county level health department policies, local school boards issued COVID documents and statement through the new social media channels: tweets, texts, .Facebook pages. It was “the year of the skunkworks” for many librarians and knowledge managers who scrambled to capture and analyze the torrent of local, state and national materials.

This year’s survey attempts to capture how both librarians and legal publishers developed resources in response to the pandemic.

On the product side. I was completely blindsided as legal news emerged as the hot new product class with new products from ALM, Fastcase and Thomson Reuters. I have a visceral sense of the need for legal marketplaces to facilitate the identification of new products and technologies. Analytics and workflow tools represented the most active areas of new product development in 2020.

Saying goodbye. Thomson Reuters announced that their innovative Panoramic product was being merged into HighQ and Ross Intelligence, the darling of the “robot lawyer” acolytes announced their shut down blaming the cost of ongoing litigation with Thomson Reuters.

Please take a few minutes (less than 5) to share your experience and insights with your colleagues. The survey will be open through March 1st. Respond to the survey at this link.