COVID exposed the stark boundaries of traditional legal publishing. Lexis and Westlaw built their reputations by developing robust libraries of federal and state primary law material ( cases, statutes and regulations). The issuances of individual state agencies e,g, health departments as well as the terra incognita of village, township, borough, and city law was not
The 2020-21 Dewey B Strategic What’s Hot and What’s Not Survey included a series of questions related to the COVID-19 Crisis.
COVID Resources Every legal publisher launched some kind of COVID related legal resource. Many of these resources were made publicly available outside the paywall. These products included toolkits, trackers, practical guidance, advisories, checklists, legislative
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
Continue Reading What’s Hot and What’s Not? Welcome to the Dewey B Strategic 2020-2021 Hits and Misses Survey
HBR Consulting just released the 2020 Benchmarking + Legal Information Services Survey (BLISS). The innovative and interactive delivery format is at least as interesting as the content. The survey focused on the core metrics such as staffing, budgets, and resources 
but also covered hot topics such as innovation and COVID-19 impact. The survey was undertaken during June and July 2020, three months after most law firms were two months into mandatory work from home. That enabled the survey designers to capture some insights into how law firms were adapting legal research and knowledge services in response to the pandemic.
I asked Colleen Cable, director at HBR Consulting, to provide some insight into HBR’s goal in creating the survey. According to Cable “HBR recognized that there was a need for law firm library benchmarking data that could be utilized to support decision-making within the firm. This type of benchmarking, available by Am Law segment, is not offered anywhere else in the market, so HBR stepped in and BLISS was born.” One of the things I noticed immediately is that this report captured attorney staff ratios. This has been an elusive “holy grail” of library benchmarks that I have been begging for over the many years I have
Continue Reading HBR Releases Interactive Library Benchmarking Survey with COVID Insights
The American Association of Law Libraries is preparing to publish their second State of the Profession Survey. The AALL State of the 
Profession Report “provides an overview of the law library and legal information landscape.” The goal of the survey is to examine the contributions of legal information professionals across, academic, private firm and governmental
Preview the 2020 Benchmarking + Legal Information Services (BLISS) Survey results, learn how leading law firm 
libraries are using data to plan for 2021 and receive a special pandemic report.
The program will be facilitated by HBR Director Colleen Cable. I will be joined by two large law colleagues for a lively discussion of how
Today Feit Consulting is releasing a new report on the state of market for major legal vendors: Thomson Reuters. LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law and Wolters Kluwer. I hesitate to even refer to the market as the legal research market 
because that completely ignores the dramatic integration of workflow, drafting, brief analysis and analytics into the 21st century progeny of the foundational case law research systems.The 2020 Legal Information Vendor Market Survey was conducted between June and August 2020 and is targeted at law firms with 50+ attorneys. There were 104 responses: 26%(<100 attorneys), 56% (100-499 attorneys) and 20% >500 attorneys.The The report provides context by comparing results to the 2018 survey results. These results will be include in an upcoming book Optimizing Legal Information Pricing which will be published this fall.
The financial crisis of 2007 triggered a convulsion in the legal industry which continues to offer aftershocks exacerbated by “economic, demographic, regulatory, technology and competitive demands.” And then as we know,
the COVID-19 pandemic triggered new a new crisis. Wolters Kluwer was analyzing the legal marketplace back in January 2020. Today they are releasing the survey results in the 2020 Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer: Performance Drivers and Change in the Legal Sector” which was designed “to assess the future-readiness and resilience in the legal sector.”
The survey gathers feedback from an international group of 700 legal professionals working in law firms and as in-house counsel.. The full survey is available at this link.
The report is 29 pages long but is full of graphs and data illustrating various trends as well as the disconnects between law firms and in-house counsel priorities. Both law firms and in house counsel share an awareness of technology as a critical success factor but the majority of both organization types are f ailing overcome obstacles to implementation.
I spoke with Dean Sonderegger, head of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S about the survey results. Sonderegger predicts that the COVID pandemic will accelerate all the trends identified in the survey.
Top Trends and ReadinessContinue Reading Wolters Kluwer 2020 Future Ready Lawyer Survey–Tech Aspiration vs. Tech Implementation
2020. Although budgets may have been cut since the survey was taken the