{"id":66,"date":"2009-11-02T20:44:36","date_gmt":"2009-11-03T01:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/2009\/11\/02\/berring-on-the-merits\/"},"modified":"2009-11-10T10:49:50","modified_gmt":"2009-11-10T15:49:50","slug":"berring-on-the-merits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/2009\/11\/02\/berring-on-the-merits\/","title":{"rendered":"Berring on the merits"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven’t rushed a response to Bob Berring’s comments on free legal information, partly because I wanted my response to be thoughtful rather than rushed.\u00a0 I also felt that I’d made most of my rebuttal points in a previous response to a VoxPopuLII post by Dan Dabney<\/a>, a West Group employee.\u00a0 And if you’re looking for substance, I’d suggest that you read it now<\/a>. These observations are more scattered.<\/p>\n

I’ll make no bones about it: I felt that the tone of Bob’s piece was more than a little dismissive, and his use of the term “volunteers” reminds me of nothing so much as Vance Opperman’s use of “copyists” to describe West’s competitors back in the early 90’s.\u00a0 It’s a convenient, minimizing label from West’s point of view — why else play it up in the interview material chosen for their web site? — but I’m not sure exactly what it means.<\/p>\n

I’m not a volunteer in the ordinary sense of the word.\u00a0 I draw a regular paycheck — very possibly not as large a one as I would if I worked for West Group, but a paycheck nevertheless.\u00a0 Most of the folks I know in the open-access law game are getting paid by somebody to do what they do.\u00a0 And the competition that West must fear most — the lowering of entry barriers to the law publishing marketplace by government release of bulk data<\/a> — will not be the work of volunteers either.\u00a0 Many of us are information professionals, and have been for a long time.\u00a0 Some of us\u00a0 — notably in Canada<\/a> and Australia<\/a> — have built open-access systems that are the de facto national resources for their respective countries.\u00a0 Others, like SAFLII<\/a> or Kenya Law Reports<\/a>, are bringing law publishing to places which are simply too unprofitable for the larger companies to touch.\u00a0 Like a lot of local courts and municipal governments in the US, for instance.<\/p>\n

No doubt, though, there are a lot of passionate amateurs out there, and I’m sure they would qualify as volunteers.\u00a0 Innovation breeds short-lived projects, and passion does not always go hand in hand with the dotting of T’s and the crossing of I’s.\u00a0 And I have no doubt that there are many projects underway right now that will not be with us in a few years.\u00a0 Others will learn from them, if there’s anything to learn, and build on what was learned, and so on.\u00a0 It is remarkable, in some ways, that West has profited as little from such efforts as it has, except in areas like its core search and retrieval technologies, the automated classifiers that lie at the heart of the systems it uses to maintain its taxonomies,\u00a0 the\u00a0 web technologies it now uses to deliver its products, and so on.\u00a0 The key discoveries on which those were based were largely the work of “volunteers”, at least within Bob’s meaning of the word, which seems to be anybody not working at a for-profit company.\u00a0 Many were the product of publicly funded research.\u00a0 No doubt West devoted many dollars to perfecting them.\u00a0 But innovation tends to start with volunteers, people who have itches to scratch and no ability to resist the urge to do so.<\/p>\n

Bob, of course, very much knows what he’s talking about when it comes to indexing and librarianship generally, and I would not argue with his conclusion that law unassisted by finding aids of various kinds is not as well suited to professional, specialist use as law that has those aids.\u00a0 He leaves us to conclude all by ourselves that law that does not have those things, done as West has done them,\u00a0 is of no use to anybody. That’s a silly idea, and maybe it isn’t what he really thinks, but his arguments outline a void into which it can rush all unbidden.<\/p>\n

But in his defense, I have to say that Prof. Berring is not the only law librarian guilty of price insensitivity.\u00a0 I would never argue with anything the library profession has to say about the relative utility of various legal information products if cost were never an issue for anyone.\u00a0 What is remarkable is how little cost considerations enter these discussions, even as law firms and academic law libraries are slashing budgets<\/a> and personnel.\u00a0 No doubt there are times that it is appropriate to talk about quality in a way that is independent of price\u00a0 — for example, when you’re trying to teach fledgling legal researchers how to recognize quality and how to “do it right”, whatever that may mean.\u00a0 Most people end up doing it only as right as they can afford<\/a>.\u00a0 The public can’t afford West’s products, and increasingly large swaths of the profession are questioning whether they can either.<\/p>\n

The questions we ought really to be considering have nothing to do with whether legal data collections are made by volunteers, unpaid spokespersons, pug-dogs, or space aliens.\u00a0 They have\u00a0 to do with the nature of the legal information business in 2009.\u00a0 Suppose that the public and profession are patsies,\u00a0 unable to resist the siren song of the volunteer efforts. Suppose, as the old showbiz saying goes, they start staying away from more expensive products in droves? Does that mean that legal information is like the newspaper business, victim of a soon-to-be-regretted shift of public attention from high-quality products to cheap, cloying informational junk food?\u00a0 Or is it more like health care, where there is no price sensitivity<\/a> because, much of the time, someone else is paying and the professionals are telling us to buy as much as we can?<\/p>\n

That’s what us paid, long-term “volunteers” are thinking about.\u00a0 The library profession should be too.<\/p>\n

PS: Two other excellent rebuttals from our Canadian colleagues Daniel Poulin <\/a>and Catherine Best<\/a> have appeared today.\u00a0 I recommend them highly.<\/p>\n

[ Note: this piece is part of a trilogy on the West video:\u00a0 1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, and 3<\/a> .\u00a0 Kind of like the Lord of the Rings, only longer, with a less confusing plot, and very few cute hobbits.]\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

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I haven’t rushed a response to Bob Berring’s comments on free legal information, partly because I wanted my response to be thoughtful rather than rushed.\u00a0 I also felt that I’d made most of my rebuttal points in a previous response to a VoxPopuLII post by Dan Dabney, a West Group employee.\u00a0 And if you’re looking […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[262],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}