Publishing has entered an age where instant culture has become the dominate theme. It is all about content being readily available in the required form by the end user in the fastest possible time and digital publishing service providers are trying to supply every possible need for publishers worldwide. The future of legal publishing revolves around many factors.

1. The Challenges Facing Publishers

The principal challenge that legal publishing faces is to remain profitable. Irrespective of the format, it doesn’t generate the kind of returns we expect as human capital is expensive. Secondly, the problems faced by large publishers are also complications that law librarians face, especially in the domain of ‘practice intelligence.’ The idea of making complex ideas/concepts easy to understand is a significant challenge.

Legal information is growing exponentially in terms of size and complexity. The volume of law has grown, and with that growth, the relationship of that data to each other—whether judicial, legislative, or executive—has become more complex. With the workflow and efficiency trap, smaller publishers have realized that the big publishers have changed the narrative to efficiency as profit. Not all firms see efficiency as a good thing and aren’t building cycle-of-life workflow systems & rely on quality and editorial practices to sell content.

In the new authoring economy, or on the Internet, everyone is an expert. We are in a phase where lawyers, in earnest, started to blog, marketers made blogging an imperative, and we instigated the discussion of law firms as publishers. Firms are encouraged to consider in house editors-in-chief to not only coordinate what would be published but also to ensure the quality of the material would be worthy of the firm.  The information remains largely outside of the structured environments but completely accessible to all concerned parties.

2. The Changing Market Structure

The sharing economy has great potential as the number of digital sharing spaces increase and blossom into knowledge centres. With the customer as a competitor, a source suggested that, for a legal publisher, roughly 80% of their revenue comes from 20% of their customers.

3. How Business Models Are Effected

A lot of investment in human capital is required while going digital with content. The value lies in “enhanced” services, and this is where it gets interesting. As there is a rise in popularity among customers, smaller publishers and upstarts are challenged to convert or create content that matches the narrative. Online legal publishing should be focused on business processes and capturing and publishing them across the ‘firm’ network.

As the primary law expands, authenticity, reliability and networkability as standards of that data should be important to end users. Publishers should be investing more in networking original author content. With the new authoring economy, it seems like publishers could be equally disruptive by appropriating the new authors’ ideas by organizing the web and appropriating self-published content for the publisher’s digital network, assuming there is enough content, and the publisher has a digital platform to publish the material.

Digital publishing service and providers with the right blend of creativity, knowledge, technology, and experience makes it one of the best platforms for providing quality content services and solutions.

Sources:

• http://www.slaw.ca/2015/04/24/the-future-of-legal-publishing/
• http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/tech/ltrc/publications/trendslegalpublishing.authcheckdam.pdf
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