When will the cord be cut in legal publishing?

Law firms, law schools, public relations firms and even the courts use third party publishing solutions — and, by doing so, many hand over control of their content to third party publishers. 

Most of the publishing solutions the creators of the content pay for and some creators give their content to the third party publisher in exchange for distribution. 

Examples include:

• Legal scholarship published on third party solutions, many of those third party publishers then licensing the use of such content by subscription.
• Articles and blog posts the creators pay to have distributed by distribution services, some of which index the content in the distributor’s names, versus the creator’s names.
• Articles written for third-party publishers and news sites in exchange for the publicity and notoriety.
• Courts empowering large legal publishers to publish case law which third party publishers then sell effective access to the law back to people. 

This made sense before digital publishing. How else could one get an article published and distributed without a third party publisher? How else could courts get the law published?

Digital publishing puts a printing press and distribution systems in the hands of any publisher in the law (not third party publishers). At some cost of course. But not at the cost of losing ownership or control of their works.

Techdirt’s Karl Bode writes today that ESPN lost $14 million due to cord cutting. 

The penalty for ESPN’s failure to adapt has been severe. Disney’s recent earnings revealed that ESPN lost another 2 million regular viewers this year. And while ESPN still has 86 million regular viewers, that’s a 14 million regular viewer dip from the 100 million regular viewers it enjoyed in 2011. Those 14 million lost users generated around $1.44 billion per year for the “worldwide leader in sports,” which is still saddled with the severe costs of set redesigns and sports licensing contracts the company struck while it was busy not seeing the massive locomotive of market change bearing down upon it.

Markets shifting caused some of the problem, but ESPN management’s refusal to listen was the real problem.

ESPN execs often tried to shoot the messengers instead of listening to the message. And once the damage was done, ESPN decided to fire hundreds of longstanding sports journalists and support personnel…

Common sense dictates that sooner or later, legal content creators (the true publishers) are going to take control of their publishing. They are going to cut the cord. 

Sure, content distributors, third-party publishers and news sites will make use of the content, by license (could be perpetual), but the content will be published first on a domain and on a system the creator controls.

It’s a losing proposition for today’s large legal publishers to ignore change and count on the law being slow to change and people and organizations being afraid to challenge them.

Again, many cable and broadcast industry executives are under the mistaken impression they get to choose when to adapt to the markets shifting around them. In reality they only have two choices. One, get out ahead of the shift toward streaming video by giving consumers what they actually want, even if that means losing some money in the short term. Or, refuse to adapt, double down on the belief that traditional cable TV is a cash cow that will never die, and watch as smaller, more flexible outfits continue to steal your massive subscriber base out from beneath your feet.

Lest legal publishers think the cord can’t be cut in legal, look at just one legal publication, LexisNexis’ Martindale-Hubbell. A cash cow that relied on law firms paying into the hundreds of thousands dollars, each. per year to have their content published and distributed. 

From its peak to being sold off for near nothing in five years with everyone losing their jobs. 

When will legal publishing see its cord cutting – en masse? 

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