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sponsorship to navigate law firm spaces
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Transcript
[00:00:23] Marlene Gebauer: Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast designed to cover the legal information profession with a slant toward technology and management. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
[00:00:32] Greg Lambert: And I’m Greg Lambert.
[00:00:33] Marlene Gebauer: Well, Greg, you got to fly solo this week. Truly, there was too much construction, even for us, going on in my house to even consider recording. I’m really sorry I missed the conversation, and many apologies to Jason Wilson.
[00:00:46] Greg Lambert: Yeah, it was fun. So I, as you said, I got to go solo and interview former Vice President of O’Connor’s Publishing, Jason Wilson, and we got deep into the weeds of what’s happening.
[00:00:59] Marlene Gebauer: You got deep, deep. I listened. I listened like that was deep, deep, deep.
[00:01:02] Greg Lambert: Yeah, so we talked about what’s happening in the current market. We talked about O’Connor’s move from a very highly popular independent regional legal publisher to its acquisitions by Thomson Reuters a couple of years ago. And Jason thinks there’s still many opportunities out there for small regional publishers, and there are some advantages for the big publishers and perhaps licensing some of the content to these publishers. So we had a great time, and man, I made the mistake of telling Jason right before we started recording that sometimes if you, like we were Googling each other’s names, and there’s a county commissioner in Tennessee with my name, but he goes by the nickname of Lumpy. And, you know, hey, tip for any podcasters out there.
[00:01:49] Marlene Gebauer: So now you’re telling everybody this story. So, you know, don’t be surprised. Don’t be surprised.
[00:01:55] Greg Lambert: It’s all right. It’s all right. But I will give some tips for podcasters out there. Do not give Jason any ammunition in pre-interview that he might use against you during the interview.
[00:02:08] Marlene Gebauer: Yes, he will. And now, Lumpy, for this week’s information inspirations.
[00:02:19] Greg Lambert: So Marlene, my information inspiration this week, you know, we talk a lot about artificial intelligence in the legal information field. I’m telling you, you can’t swing a swag bag at a legal conference without some company telling you about how they are using A.I. to disrupt the industry.
[00:02:36] Marlene Gebauer: So let me see what you had there. So you had swag, A.I., disrupt.
[00:02:42] Greg Lambert: Yeah, I’m full of buzzwords today.
[00:02:45] Marlene Gebauer: You are. And you used artificial intelligence in the legal information field?
[00:02:49] Greg Lambert: I did, I did, I did.
[00:02:50] Marlene Gebauer: Good, well done.
[00:02:51] Greg Lambert: This goes back to one of the values that we talk about, having law librarians on staff at your firm, is that they can separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to A.I. tools. Ross, which is a Canadian-based legal research tool, which was one of the first commercial operations to state that they were using A.I. to change the way legal research is conducted. So they have been on a public relations tear for a few years now, and I worry a little bit that they may be pushing the envelope with their latest public relations release. So Marlee, let me just read you a couple sentences in this release. Ready?
[00:03:29] Marlene Gebauer: Okay.
[00:03:43] Greg Lambert: Wow. Dark ages. Okay. Natural language processing has been around a while. Yes. And, of course, there was emphasis added on my part there in case you couldn’t tell.
[00:04:07] Marlene Gebauer: Yes. And very well, mind you. I was brought into that. I was right there with you.
[00:04:13] Greg Lambert: So I’ve seen a few comments on social media about this, including one from our guest today. I’m not surprised. Let’s just say that many are talking about how this isn’t passing the sniff test. My suggestion is that if you see promises like this, contact your law librarian and have them test it. As the old saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
[00:04:41] Marlene Gebauer: Thomson Reuters has published a white paper on the advancing of lawyers of color where they interviewed 23 attorneys of color across generations, ethnicities, geographic locations, and segments of the industry. In an industry that is 85 percent white compared to 76.6 percent of the general population and 64 percent male compared to 49.2 percent in the U.S., the interview focused on what senior white male attorneys are doing to advance and retain lawyers of color. There were three themes in the interview, including sponsorship to navigate law firm spaces, access to critical assignments and increase understanding on the unique experiences of lawyers of color. This dovetails with your excellent recent blog post, Greg, on law firm culture, which everyone, if you haven’t read it, please do, as well as the recent ABA profile of the legal profession.
[00:05:38] Greg Lambert: Yeah, I was a little shocked at the statistics. You know, 85 percent white and 64 percent male is out of whack.
[00:05:48] Marlene Gebauer: I wasn’t surprised about the 85 percent white. I was surprised about the 64 percent male, given ΓÇô
[00:05:55] Greg Lambert: Well, I will tell you this. I graduated law school in 1997. The statistics then were 52 percent female graduates. We had more females than male.
[00:06:06] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I was going to ΓÇô that’s exactly where I was going. And first I was going to say, yes, I’m surprised. But I’m not surprised because, you know, we’ve talked in prior episodes about how we are losing, you know, women in the profession for various reasons. And so while they may be coming out of law school at a higher percentage than their male counterparts ΓÇô
[00:06:29] Greg Lambert: We’re not retaining.
[00:06:30] Marlene Gebauer: We’re not retaining them.
[00:06:32] Greg Lambert: All right, Marlene. That is a wrap for this week’s information inspiration. Well, I got to do this week’s interview without you, Marlene.
[00:06:45] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I know.
[00:06:47] Greg Lambert: Luckily, Jason Wilson was able to come into the office and he sat down with me to have the conversation about legal publishing and where small or regional publishers fit in today’s market, which is dominated, of course, by two big publishers. So let’s listen to what Jason had to say. So I asked Jason Wilson to stop by the office today, and Jason’s the former vice president of O’Connor’s, and he is a well-known blogger, social media guy. He’s written for Slaw and some other blogs as well. So Jason, welcome to the Geek & Review.
[00:07:36] Jason Wilson: Thank you, Lumpy. I appreciate the invite. Always look forward to talking to you.
[00:07:45] Greg Lambert: All right. So we’re just going to sit down here and have a conversation. Marlene couldn’t join us, so unfortunately it’s just me. Jason, if you don’t mind, just give us a little bit of your background for people that don’t know you.
[00:07:58] Jason Wilson: Well, let’s see. I graduated law school in ’94, and I fancied myself somebody who really wanted to practice appellate law. I always liked closed exams. I felt like…
[00:08:14] Greg Lambert: You must have loved law school.
[00:08:16] Jason Wilson: I loved law school. Working with a limited data set and making arguments, especially in written form and then, of course, orally. And so I applied for a briefing attorney job, the First Court of Appeals, got it with Judge O’Connor. I’d actually been during school, you could get credit for during the year for interning with the court. And so I’d met her then and her current staff attorney at the time, the briefing attorney.
[00:08:48] Greg Lambert: And she eventually went on, or did she own O’Connor’s, the publishing, which was Jones McClure at the time?
[00:08:55] Jason Wilson: So at that time, they had just, she had published one edition already with Steve Brill with American Lawyer Media, which is now ALM. Steve obviously went on to sell that and then start Court TV and all that other good stuff.
[00:09:09] Greg Lambert: Which I think is coming back, right?
[00:09:11] Jason Wilson: I believe it’s coming back. So now we’ll get 24-hour coverage of, I don’t know what.
[00:09:17] Greg Lambert: Can’t get enough reality TV?
[00:09:18] Jason Wilson: Well, you know, we all miss OJ.
[00:09:20] Greg Lambert: Yeah.
[00:09:23] Jason Wilson: So I was hired for that position. I went to lunch with her one day. Went over to the cafeteria there and we were just shooting the breeze. And she mentioned ΓÇô I mentioned to her something about, hey, you know, you really should write a criminal trial book. And she’s like, that’s a great idea. We should do that. Suffice it to say, her son at the time had just started publishing her books. She sued American Lawyer Media for her book because they were claiming copyright to her book. And so she got the book back from them. And then so the company was sort of founded on that product. Right. And I became the first lawyer hired by Jones-McClure to start writing. And that’s essentially what we did. I left for a while to practice. I was just like, no, I’m not really sure about this whole publishing business.
[00:10:14] Greg Lambert: So like most good deeds, you get punished by ΓÇô she said, that’s a great idea.
[00:10:18] Jason Wilson: Yes, and we never wrote it. She had already started writing a federal trial book at the time. And so I picked up with the federal trial book. And I think it took us a couple of years to write it. Many lawyers like to think that they’re really good at writing. And many of them are just unbelievable writers. I tend to find that in the publishing business at least, good lawyers that are busy have a hard time sitting down to write a book.
[00:10:49] Greg Lambert: I can see that.
[00:10:50] Jason Wilson: And so we developed a model where after a lot of years of stops and starts working with lawyers to write product, we developed a model where we just would write the product itself.
[00:11:01] Greg Lambert: Right. Now I know that one of the things that Texas lawyers really liked about the O’Connors was that it was a plain English version. You had all these other what we would call reference books or desk books that they keep in their office as ready reference for them, whether it’s trial techniques or civil procedure, those sorts of things. They’re very technical. They’re just ΓÇô they’re not ΓÇô
[00:11:33] Jason Wilson: There’s a reason they say civil procedure nerds.
[00:11:35] Greg Lambert: Yes.
[00:11:36] Jason Wilson: If you are anybody that likes comparative procedure at all, you’re in a small group of individuals.
[00:11:43] Greg Lambert: So how do you take a topic like that and create something that’s actually readable?
[00:11:49] Jason Wilson: That’s a really good question. Time. It’s really more or less about organization. So you need to have some type of systematic approach to blocking off information and then presenting it to a reader. If you look at a lot of product now, I grew up with Dorsadios. Right. I was at SMU and Bill was there. And it turns out, oddly enough, my moot court partner at the time who kind of went into a similar business, he was Bill’s later, he was his research attorney and he was sort of our moot court advisor as well. Right. But if you haven’t looked at Dorsadios in a long time, then it’s titles and then subheads and maybe a sub ΓÇô maybe a third subhead after that, but mostly in sort of paragraph form. There are no sort of bold run-in headings contextualizing what you’re about to read. Right. And there’s a lot of repetition in that product as well. With the O’Connor’s product, we needed to mentally say, all right, what are all the components to this rule or this process? And then to block all of that off and then write focused paragraphs just on that content. But it requires digesting a lot of information as part of that. So you have to get really, really good at sucking up cases and finding the gems that are in them.
[00:13:16] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Would you hire people that were straight out of law school and train them how to do this or would you look for more experienced folks that had some years under their belt and understood it?
[00:13:26] Jason Wilson: Sure. We eventually ended up with two paths, one which was sort of management track and then one was development track. And the development folks, we went out and hired people that had practice experience that wanted to basically leave the practice of law and never go back and spend all their day writing. The management folks, they were really adept at multitasking and they were really smart in terms of writing. They wrote, they just didn’t write from whole cloth. They had an existing product to build off of. This model is very different than the traditional publishing model. So the question then is, is there any room in the market for this to continue now that everything’s essentially owned by West and Lexington?
[00:14:13] Greg Lambert: You have things like D’Arsanio’s, which is kind of the Bible here. Most practices have that.
[00:14:22] Jason Wilson: And I don’t know why because if you look at just a volume of it, subject matter jurisdiction might appear in chapter five and venues 60 chapters later. These are two concepts that need to be next to each other. And it’s sort of like when you get into procedure nerds and that sort of thing. It’s really mind bogglingly frustrating.
[00:14:41] Greg Lambert: It’s a requirement. I think it’s one of those things that as a young lawyer, they’re probably told you got to have this. The judge is going to ask you, did you check this part? O’Connor’s kind of became that with the Texas lawyers. You had a niche operation. You tended to focus on certain areas of the law. To a general extent, you stayed in Texas.
[00:15:07] Jason Wilson: We also gave free books to judges.
[00:15:08] Greg Lambert: You gave free books to judges so you know how to market. You know, those types of small vendors, including O’Connor’s, you know, tend to get gobbled up.
[00:15:19] Jason Wilson: Now owned by Thomson Reuters.
[00:15:20] Greg Lambert: Now owned by Thomson Reuters. Is there still a market for these smaller vendors out there that are smaller publishers?
[00:15:27] Jason Wilson: Well, and they still exist. I think you have Imprimatur up in Austin that I think they’re still doing product. Obviously, jurisdictionally, there are a lot of other publishers in Chicago, in California, and so forth, that are creating content for some market. A lot of blanks, surprisingly, I think I’m still shocked to this day that there are quite a few companies that still make form blanks. I don’t know if anybody remembers, but you could actually go into a law school or a law bookstore. They had those, standalone. We actually had one right here downtown. And you could go in there and you could buy forms blanks for sales transactions, leases, whatever it was. And they were designed to go into your typewriter roll and your IBM Selectric and type in all the information into the blanks. There are companies that are still making these, which, again, I don’t know how or why, but they are. So I think there is a real opportunity in a lot of these jurisdictions where essentially most of the, what I like to call government-owned data, and then certainly the private, the secondary materials are owned by the two largest publishers in the United States. and then certainly the private, the secondary materials are owned by the two largest publishers in the United States. They set the pricing. And you don’t need to sell a tremendous amount of product in order to be successful, right?
[00:16:57] Greg Lambert: Well, let me switch over to the lawyer side of it.
[00:17:00] Jason Wilson: Sure.
[00:17:01] Greg Lambert: There’s definitely a cost involved in practicing law. And you have to decide with the money that you have to spend on the resources that you need on how lawyers run his or her firm. So does things like legal information, does that take a back seat in those sense?
[00:17:21] Jason Wilson: Well, it certainly has, right? The spend for legal information used to be a lot higher as a percentage of the firm’s overall budget. I remember we weren’t allowed to touch the Westlaw Terminal because it was so insanely expensive. And it took forever for the modem to finally, you know, sync up, do its handshake. And so we had things like Butterworth’s court charge reporter on CD- ROM, and we would be able to look that. Premise CDs were a great thing, if anybody remembers those, and CD caddies because it was super fast. You could run it over your network, and you could hit the cases all day long for free. But, whew, those are gone. For the longest time, we carted around our premise CDs as a joke just so we could show people, yes, you know, at one point you got cases on CD. As that share has dwindled, you know, it’s been replaced by other things. There’s a lot of technology services that lawyers buy. I don’t know what the average SEO spend is for a lawyer looking to, you know, make sure that they show up in the ranks of Google Pages. I’ve seen some really interesting articles written about plaintiff’s law firms and the number of domains that they own and how they manage all those domains around a particular subject matter like mesothelioma or something to generate referrals. The problem with the increase on that side and the dwindling of legal information puts a real squeeze on, all right, how are we gonna serve the lawyer market, recognizing that they may, a small firm may only spend $350 a year with you. Right. It’s a very small sum of money when they’re paying $500 a month on web hosting. I wish they’d spent $500 a month. That would be terrific.
[00:19:19] Greg Lambert: So what’s the problem from a legal advice or a legal education perspective if the importance of, say, secondary materials like your company had pushed out starts to wane?
[00:19:31] Jason Wilson: Yeah, that tail, right? So what are the most successful products in any publisher’s sort of stable, you know, their front list? And what starts running off to the tail where maybe it’s not updated as frequently, maybe it’s just not written that well, but it’s serving this really critical market of lawyers. Like, I need something on a pellet procedure, or I need causes of action, or I need an annotated insurance forms. I mean, Miller’s was always great. The question then becomes like, all right, well, if we’re losing dollars and we have to put most of our resources in our top selling products, then that long tail of information starts. Well, now you have to start making serious, serious decisions about sunsetting and things like that. And I think with Fastcase, new publishing offshoot, I think part of that strategy is looking at what products are being sunsetted by Lexus, by West. looking at what products are being sunsetted by Lexus, by West, and can we revive those And can we revive those products? And I think there is an opportunity rather than look at Lexus and West as the opponent, I suppose, or the competitor, I think there’s an opportunity for small publishing and especially jurisdictional publishing to say, hey, are you looking to sunset product? And if you are, we should have a conversation around maybe there’s a royalty fee that you would pay as the small publisher for picking up a title that incentivizes large publishing to maybe get rid of some of the product that they don’t want to really update anymore, and they’re maybe not making that much money but allows the small publisher to figure out a way, hey, we actually can make more money on this product and it helps them sort of focus on their core mission, which may be serving different size firms, not necessarily the small solos.
[00:21:20] Greg Lambert: It would be interesting to listeners of this podcast if they can see Westlaw or Lexus as not the enemy.
[00:21:26] Jason Wilson: Yeah. Well, look, for the brief time that I was there, I met so many great people and people truly dedicated to providing great information. And there are constraints, in an organization where you’ve got 25,000 people, you’re always gonna have constraints, Right? Capital constraints and direction and everything else. And you don’t really have the same problems in small jurisdictional publishing. You have the freedom to sort of go out on your own, do different things, try different ways. You have the freedom to sort of go out on your own, do different things, try different ways. You have the freedom to present information differently because you don’t have 1,500, 2,000, 3,000 products that really do kind of need to look similar because you can’t have a lot of variation.
[00:22:14] Greg Lambert: Well, that brings me to the next question. If these jurisdictional materials do start disappearing, are we moving to a more consolidated rules across jurisdictions? What’s going to be the good, bad, and ugly about that?
[00:22:27] Jason Wilson: No. Do you think Texas would ever concede, we should get in line with the federal rules of procedure, and everybody should just adopt the federal rules? Yeah, no. No, of course not. I can’t even, people have asked, can you describe Texas Civil Procedure? And I’m like, no, I can’t, because it’s not a field code state. We had our own revised civil statutes that touched on certain matters, and then we had the rules of procedure back in the 30s and 40s. And over time, they would say, hey, the feds have this really interesting rule. Why don’t we take one of those and we’ll add it in, not considering that the feds’ approach is holistic, right, across the whole system, not just this one little area. this one little area. And then you’ve got places like California and New York, field code states. California, the state legislature still writes the statutes for rules of procedure, good and bad, mostly bad, I think.
[00:23:22] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Well, I had to laugh when we had a vendor come in to show us a tax product and they started going into a certain tax issue. And the whole group was like, dude, we’re in Texas. We don’t have an income tax. So ΓÇô You’re gonna love it. Yeah, you’re gonna love this. And it’s like, you know, know your audience. But yeah, I think one of the things with the small market publishers is that you get to fill that niche as you were talking about. I know you can’t speak for Fastcase and what they’re doing, but I think you’re right. I think that there’s a number of opportunities there where there can be some crossover, there can be some offloading.
[00:24:04] Jason Wilson: Sure. Well, I mean, if you think about it, just taking Texas as an example, but I don’t think we’re alone. Fastcase, CaseMaker are both offered for free through the State Bar. If you qualify for the State Bar College, then you get access to all the CLE for free through the state. And that goes back to 1998. That’s quite a bit of information to have. If you ΓÇô for non-lawyers, if you sign up for the Texas State Library, you get Hein online for free in addition to a lot of other resources. If you go down to your local law school, most of them receive federal funds, so it’s a public library. You go in and they’ve got terminals there and you can get Westlaw and Lexus for free, or your county law library. So as far as legal information, primary core legal information is concerned, there’s a lot of information that you can go out and acquire without too much cost or effort. The biggest issue with sort of this dwindling of secondary sources or even withering on the vine type thing is something that I’ve been talking to people about, which is access to knowledge. I can’t imagine going into a state and I ask, I’ve just moved to this jurisdiction. I need to know how to practice before these courts and what are your rules of procedure? Oh, well, we don’t have anything.
[00:25:18] Greg Lambert: Right.
[00:25:18] Jason Wilson: Or we did, it was really good, but it was last updated in 2015. Not only will you have to spend time updating that content yourself in the sense of educating yourself on how to do something, you actually have to do it, right? You still have to do the forms, you still have to go to court.
[00:25:36] Greg Lambert: So the opportunity there for these smaller, typically regional type publishers is basically be an unofficial arm of the court and set these rules up. Well, Lord knows the courts aren’t going to necessarily step in and fill that void.
[00:25:53] Jason Wilson: We still have problems with Wi-Fi. Oh my God.
[00:25:57] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s the American way, right? It’s find a need, fill the need, charge for that need. Right. Nothing wrong with that. Let me change gears here. Let’s talk about information design. How is information presented to lawyers and what’s the trend that legal editors have when it comes to creating and presenting that legal information? How is information presented to lawyers and what’s the trend that legal editors have when it comes to creating and presenting that legal information?
[00:26:19] Jason Wilson: So I think right now you have a couple of different subsets, right? Everything ΓÇô it’s either law review style, right? So you’ve got footnotes, got body paragraphs and footnotes.
[00:26:29] Greg Lambert: I just read an article the other day that was actually presented in law review form, and I shared it with a bunch of people, and they said, this is great content, but the footnotes… are more massive than the content. Yes. And it drives them crazy. They can’t read it. And I don’t know if that’s social media. I’m used to now 140 or 280 characters and I can’t do that, but oh my God, stop with the footnotes.
[00:26:53] Jason Wilson: Right. Well, no, I agree. I’m not a fan of footnoting. I know that there are plenty of people way smarter than me that are huge fans of footnoting. I think it has its place. I would agree that case opinions are easier to read footnoted, especially when the footnote is essentially just going to be string sites. But I have been writing and reading in line for decades, so I’m set in my ways, right?
[00:27:28] Greg Lambert: Right.
[00:27:29] Jason Wilson: I think that the current state, as we were sort of alluded at earlier about Torsanios and other publishers, is that you sort of got this three-paragraph or three- heading level type organization. I think O’Connor’s got a little carried away over the years where it went to eight. That’s really challenging.
[00:27:48] Greg Lambert: Too much of a good thing.
[00:27:49] Jason Wilson: It’s too much of a good thing. You end up compartmentalizing too much information and separating it, and I think it gets difficult for the reader as well to see all of that. The current state, though, I think is more along the lines of long paragraphs. I still see a lot of historical writing where you’re providing background on, say, statutory developments, things like that. For a lot of our information, as far as information writing design, it was just, we’re not going to look backwards. We’re only looking forwards. So if you want to save an old edition, then save the old edition. Again, that’s another problem of deduplication of content and law libraries and the dwindling. What happens to all this secondary content that’s just thrown in a dumpster? Who has access to that anymore when the only thing that we have access to are the future volumes?
[00:28:43] Greg Lambert: I will tell you, we’re hoping that as someone who has thrown out previous versions, we’re hoping that the county law library has it. We’re hoping that the law schools have it, or there’s some other firm that hasn’t destroyed their library that has it, and we can go on listservs and ask people for it. And that’s not the way to run a business. No.
[00:29:06] Jason Wilson: Well, in Texas, we have this ridiculous thing called subsequent history, which I think there are many lawyers would say, please, please, can we get rid of subsequent history? Thomson Reuters stopped publishing the subsequent history table in 2014. That was the last year that it came out. So if you’re writing anything of substance, how do you check writ histories when you can’t get access to the subsequent history table anymore for older cases? And I think a lot of lawyers just cheat, right? They plug a case in to Westlaw, Lexis, Fast Case, CaseMaker, whatever, and then they see citing references. Case text, I’ll add case text in there, because I have a lot of colleagues that are using case text now. And then they look at citing references, and they say, somebody cited this case, and then I’ll just crib the subsequent history off of that. I mean, that’s really important information, because it collects writ histories going back to volume one, all the way through. You know, whenever we could get it on the web, early 90s, that sort of thing. But beyond just sort of writing and presenting information, and sort of like this logical parent-child relationship, you know, parent-child, grandchild, so forth, there’s a lot of opportunity in sort of jurisdictional publishing to be free with how you design documents. O’Connor’s right, we had big tabs, we had triple headers, we had footer information. We also had, you and I were just talking about Edward Tufte, and I just came back from
[00:30:35] Greg Lambert: Yeah, I was going to ask you if anyone’s doing anything experimental.
[00:30:39] Jason Wilson: Yeah, I mean, I think he’s experimenting, his new book is experimenting with sentence structure. And I just, I won’t even bore your audience with that. Wow, you are a nerd. Yeah, well, yeah. But his big thing, though, is, so if you have something like Sparklines, which, if you’ve seen the Wall Street Journal, they’ll have information about, say, Dow Jones Industrial. And then you’ll see a graphical indicator on the line, and it’s about the same X height. as the capital letter. But you’ll see a graph, sort of showing the progression over time of the, say, the market. close and open. And graphical indicators are really great sources of information. I don’t think a lot of people think about what it conveys. Oh, I see it. So we used to do buttons in the book, black buttons with the last two digits of the year. Well, that conveyed several data points. Number one, who is the legislature, when, the date, the year, the subject matter because of its placement on the page next to a particular type of content, and importance relative to what the reader needs to know. Right. And what? legislation. And you could, if you wanted to, you could take it a step further and use a gray scale to indicate whether it’s an enactment or whether it’s an amendment to something. I’ve certainly had conversations with folks that you could do something similar to, I don’t know if Fastcase was the first to display it this way, but let’s say they did, but sort of like the circles, right, to indicate how many times a case has been referenced, which may or may not go to its status as a seminal case. which may or may not go to its status as a seminal case. But it certainly would indicate to you, like, if I plug this case into the system. It conveys information. Yeah, it conveys information. But if I were to take this case and plug it in, I might be able to find a case on all fours for my particular argument. And so I’ve certainly thought, well, you could have something similar sitting right next to a case that’s cited in line that would indicate, by percentage of grayscale, would indicate the strength as far as its network effect in case law. And it might tell the user, hey, because I can’t cite to you every case on this subject, and the ones that I do cite, that may not be relevant to your fact pattern.
[00:33:07] Greg Lambert: But you want to go out and find something that is. What about things that have been around for a while? Is there any new techniques to say, like, checklist?
[00:33:14] Jason Wilson: Yeah, sure.
[00:33:16] Greg Lambert: What’s some examples of that?
[00:33:18] Jason Wilson: Well, so one of the greats, right, D’Orsanio’s, was probably one of the first big publishers or big books that I saw that, you know, at the end of the book, many, many volumes. His products had checklists after every subchapter or every chapter. I think that one of the things that was probably missing from our products was instituting something along the lines like checklist manifesto, right? You know, something along the lines of a checklist manifesto, right? Like if pilots have it, if doctors have them, nurses have them, like why not lawyers? Something that I don’t have to just dive into a 25-page chapter on a particular subject matter. I can actually go and just look at the checklist and say, all right, am I familiar with this? Have I done this? Have I done this? How you present that in a way that is repeatable is really sort of ΓÇô and again, this is sort of where jurisdictional publishing can come in. You’re not tied to a domain, so Lexis.com or Westlaw.com. You have the opportunity to sell information in a lot of different ways, and one of those would be like, yeah, we’ve got the checklist included in the book, but we’re also just going to give you digital copies of that checklist as well. So you can just have literally everything just sitting on your system, and then you can call it up at any time and print it out and manipulate it.
[00:34:43] Greg Lambert: Yeah. And I think checklists are probably one of the most underused, and I know our general counsel would love it. It’s like there’s a reason why your pilots go through a checklist is they want to reduce errors. It’s almost like one of the hardest things to get lawyers to go through and say, all right, before we do this, let’s go through our checklist to make sure that we’ve got everything. Well, we’re naturally ΓÇô instead we rely on, oh, well, we’ve done this 100 times, we know what we’re doing.
[00:35:11] Jason Wilson: Right, but we’re skeptical. What? We’re skeptical as a profession, which is a byproduct of our education and our jobs. And part of that is, yes, I see your checklist, but is it really everything that ΓÇô you know, what’s missing from here, right? Oh, God. Somebody’s trying to get ΓÇô you know, pull a fast one on me.
[00:35:37] Greg Lambert: Well, you’ve got to understand, Jason, we’re unique.
[00:35:40] Jason Wilson: Yes, all of you are special butterflies. I am well aware. But ΓÇô and I think that’s where ΓÇô checklists are hard to create because you have to write the information first. the information first. In all of our writing, we never created a chart until after we had written the material. And then you realize, all right, this would benefit from some sort of visual table that you could just sort of skim down and find information. But the one thing we never executed on really was creating checklists.
[00:36:10] Greg Lambert: About the small publishers again, is there still room for print? Are we, I can’t tell you.
[00:36:18] Jason Wilson: Have you managed to get rid of print here?
[00:36:20] Greg Lambert: I will tell you this though, I will go to happy hour at five o’clock today with a bunch of attorneys here and one of things that will always come up is, well, now that everything’s online, blah, blah, blah.
[00:36:31] Jason Wilson: Yes.
[00:36:32] Greg Lambert: And I’m like, okay, well then all those desk copies that we buy you, we’re gonna take those away. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, that’s different. So, where’s the value still in print?
[00:36:42] Jason Wilson: Statutes.
[00:36:44] Greg Lambert: And ΓÇô Well, but ΓÇô
[00:36:46] Jason Wilson: Well, and as Tufti mentioned yesterday, the best, highest resolution technology is still PAPER. Prints still cannot compete with the resolution that PAPER provides, and so the answer to that is ΓÇô
[00:37:04] Greg Lambert: I just now ΓÇô
[00:37:05] Jason Wilson: You just put the word ΓÇô
[00:37:07] Greg Lambert: P-A-P-E-R. Yes. P-A-P-E-R technology.
[00:37:10] Jason Wilson: If you say it like that, then it actually sounds like technology, particularly in print statutes.
[00:37:21] Greg Lambert: Yeah.
[00:37:22] Jason Wilson: They’re just ΓÇô they’re easier to use on paper. Now, the question is, well, do I want single column, do I want dual column? There are debates about that, but PAPER still very much is widely used, and I think a lot of reports about its demise and death and everything else are a bit overrated. It may not be as significant as it once was because we’re not housing multi-volume sets in law libraries as much as we are, and that’s a good thing. I don’t know any information professional that says, please bring back inter-filed pages. I cannot wait to actually insert those in a three-ring binder, or the really heavy-duty binders that have the screw-down backs. Those are amazing.
[00:38:10] Greg Lambert: I do not miss those.
[00:38:12] Jason Wilson: Well, you know what’s really funny about that is sourcing binders is getting harder. Those heavy-duty binders just aren’t being manufactured.
[00:38:22] Greg Lambert: As we were getting rid of, say, the National Reporter Sets and our third edition of Vernon’s statutes, the price of print kept going up, and in my simplistic view of things, it’s like, well, demand’s down, price should go down. Someone pulled me to the side and said, no, you idiot. He said, you’re still demanding this print. I think with some of the volumes and where you’re going to see the value in print, if the best form for it is print, then you’re not going to see cost go down. I think you’re going to see cost go up because you’re going to be kind of a captured audience.
[00:39:05] Jason Wilson: Yes. I will say that the price per product to print was infinitely cheaper back in the day. It was expensive, and I wouldn’t say infinitely cheaper, but certainly that cost has gone up. up. But you would expect, to some degree, especially with the consolidation of the printer business, the cost of milled paper generally, you would expect, like everything, that cost to go up. The question is how you translate it to the customer, and I think one of the things that we did in the state, our product pricing was set at $50 when we started, and that was based on Judge O’Connor said, I can go into the computer store and I’ll try anything for $50. Well, our books never kept up with inflation, and I haven’t gone back to look at Ken’s, I don’t know if Spenglis is doing legal information, the buyer’s guide. He still is. But, you know, if you’re ΓÇô if you crack that open and look at the progression of print over time, that’s just insane. We didn’t do that. But I think we were just more sensitive to it, but we also were of the opinion like it’s better to sell, you know, 10,000 of something than one at 10,000.
[00:40:17] Greg Lambert: One of the things that you keep hearing is, well, we’ve got a new generation of people that have never known life without a screen. Sure. And so are they ΓÇô I almost hate to say this. Are millennials going to be killing print?
[00:40:33] Jason Wilson: No, millennials love print. Yeah. You know, it’s just got to be the right kind of print. Do you want your procedure manual in print? I don’t know. I think you do. There are certain key things that you might want, but do you want ΓÇô you know, we publish causes of action, for example. Do you want causes of action in print? No, maybe not. Maybe you want one edition in print or something along those lines, but you really want to access it digitally. But that’s the other thing, though. It’s not just ΓÇô it’s not necessarily just a reflection of is print viable, but what are your digital options? If your digital options are I have to ΓÇô the only way I can get access to this is through a service and I can’t actually get a digital copy of it, then I think that’s where you run into some interesting choices. I think you can take the economist approach to things in terms of pricing and say, hey, it’s $100 for this print. It’s $100 for digital. It’s $125 for print and digital.
[00:41:32] Greg Lambert: Right.
[00:41:34] Jason Wilson: But I do think portability is a big deal, and I think there are many people that would be okay with the separation of, say, secondary sources from primary in the sense of we don’t need to display these the same or we want to be able to put our books on our iPad or we want to have some other type of .mobi reader or e-reader or something that gives us access to this. And it would be really nice if you could sort of perpetuate this through a couple of other services, right? Offer it up through Fastcase. Offer it up through CaseText so that it would show up or reside next to something that I’m looking at.
[00:42:08] Greg Lambert: Right. Three to five years ago, one of the issues that we were running into was that courts were not allowing attorneys to show up with their electronics.
[00:42:18] Jason Wilson: I think there’s still a lot, right?
[00:42:20] Greg Lambert: I think that’s got to go away, right? What’s your thoughts on that?
[00:42:25] Jason Wilson: I would hope it would go away. I don’t know what the objection ΓÇô phones, I can see, right? Counselor, put your phone ΓÇô but an iPad? I mean, it’s a tool.
[00:42:35] Greg Lambert: Yeah, I’ve got a Surface Pro here. I live off this thing, so I can’t imagine going, all right, well, I don’t want you ΓÇô I guess I don’t want you distracted. I don’t want you checking email. I think that’s going to be an issue that’s less and less as new judges come in.
[00:42:52] Jason Wilson: Right, but ΓÇô so one of the things when we created our online product prior to the acquisition was can we get offline use because really a big part of that problem was data connectivity in a lot of the counties. We have 234 counties in the state of Texas. Or no, 256, 54, 254.
[00:43:13] Greg Lambert: Something like that.
[00:43:14] Jason Wilson: Something like that. That’s right. I don’t know. It’s so many.
[00:43:17] Greg Lambert: Someone will tell me.
[00:43:18] Jason Wilson: It’s so many. Someone will correct you.
[00:43:20] Greg Lambert: Yes.
[00:43:21] Jason Wilson: They will say you’re wrong. We have a lot of counties, a lot of small counties, and a lot of judges still ride circuit over multiple counties. There are connectivity problems, period. I’ve been told there are still some courts that want checks. Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:41] Greg Lambert: I can verify that. I can tell you that.
[00:43:44] Jason Wilson: And I’m like, what is a check? Ask a millennial what a check is.
[00:43:49] Greg Lambert: Yeah. So do you take Amex? They’re like, no, we don’t take anything.
[00:43:54] Jason Wilson: One thing I would go back to sort of adding about non-jurisdictional publishers for anybody that is listening that is really interested in sort of setting down this path, I think I could do that. Technology has gotten to the point now where you really can’t open a storefront. And you can have product housed in a warehouse. You can have it shipped through these services. You can have these services build your front end, have you build your e-commerce back end. Things that we had to figure out as a non-brick-and-mortar business in the early 90s, credit card processing. We actually, a friend of the judges who was general counsel for a very well-known family restaurant chain here in town, vouched for us essentially with one of the credit card vendors to allow us to be able to use them for processing. Because we didn’t have a physical store for people to come into. We were selling over the web. Or we were doing phone orders. We were selling over the mail and that sort of thing. And those barriers to entry are just gone now. That really does allow you to focus on a couple of core issues. Number one, creating the content. And then number two, creating your marketing and your business plan.
[00:45:15] Greg Lambert: Is there enough interest in the smaller regional publishers to get investment?
[00:45:21] Jason Wilson: It’s not sexy.
[00:45:22] Greg Lambert: It’s not.
[00:45:23] Jason Wilson: It’s not. Could you imagine throwing that? You are. I remember it was probably Bob’s, Ambrogi, post that he put up about Fastcase enters into a dead medium. They’re printing books. My goodness, why on earth would you? I could not imagine putting up on Angel’s List or something like that. You know, business plan to create print and digital publishing company for lawyers. Selling legal content to lawyers. And it’s just so dull. It’s not sexy. There’s no app. There’s no, like, what do you mean? Are you using artificial intelligence? Well, sure, my brain, you know, or something along those lines. You know, like we’ve got these writers and they’re really good. And, well, wait a minute. Where’s the technology? Where’s the buzz? Where’s the sizzle? There’s no sizzle in that business proposal. It really is just the hard work of producing content and going out and selling it to lawyers. But I would say for anybody interested in doing that, it’s really, really important work.
[00:46:31] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Well, the thing I worry about is when it does turn sexy, it’s going to get bought up.
[00:46:39] Jason Wilson: Well, you definitely have to have ΓÇô it’s always possible. But it’s also possible that it won’t. There’s probably some content that’s sitting on Lexis or West’s shelves that, in the hands of a jurisdictional publisher that wants to come in and reconfigure it, could make it sexy, I suppose, for lack of a better word, for consumers.
[00:47:03] Greg Lambert: There’s obviously, I think in this day and age, everyone’s looking for, or expecting, whatever niche topic that they have, there’s going to be an answer for that.
[00:47:12] Jason Wilson: Yes.
[00:47:12] Greg Lambert: And I think in publishing, there’s still voids out there that people want filled.
[00:47:18] Jason Wilson: Right. You can find a lot written about the Texas Citizens Participation Act. If you want anti-SLAPP stuff, SLAPP stuff in Texas, tons of people writing about First Amendment, things like that are just super sexy issues. You want to know how to interpret mandatory venue provisions? Who’s going to write that? Who wants to write that? Only hardcore nerdy people really want to get into those types of issues. But they’re hugely important because it can cost your client a lot of money going to the wrong court. And then all of a sudden, you’re faced with a motion to transfer and you’re in some other jurisdiction. And now, maybe you’ve got to find local counsel in that jurisdiction. So those are really, really important issues. And there have to be people willing to do it. Otherwise, we come back to this access to knowledge problem that I’m talking about, where the cost of acquiring that knowledge goes up not because there’s a print book whose price is increasing. It goes up because there is no print product. And now, all of a sudden, you’re having to spend your hour or two or three or whatever piecing information together and doing case research on something that’s so fundamental as just basic procedure.
[00:48:34] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Well, who knew legal publishing could be so exciting here?
[00:48:39] Jason Wilson: Those of us in legal publishing, we’ll talk your ear off.
[00:48:43] Greg Lambert: Well, Jason, we’ll have to bring you back for another episode just on forms and checklists.
[00:48:47] Jason Wilson: And blanks.
[00:48:48] Greg Lambert: And blanks. All right. Jason Wilson, thank you very much for joining us today.
[00:48:52] Jason Wilson: Thank you for having me.
[00:49:00] Greg Lambert: So one of the best things about interviewing someone in my office is that right after the interview, we went out to grab a bite and some beer afterwards.
[00:49:07] Marlene Gebauer: All right. Well, hold that thought and hold my beer.
[00:49:10] Greg Lambert: So there’s not much better than a post-interview burger and beer from St. Arnold’s Brewery here in Houston.
[00:49:18] Marlene Gebauer: And I am not ashamed to say how envious I am of that. St. Arnold’s is great. Love it.
[00:49:23] Greg Lambert: It is.
[00:49:24] Marlene Gebauer: You know, I did. While I didn’t get to participate in the interview, I did get to listen to it before the release. And my thought on this was was Tufte. Tufte, my hero. So when I first heard about him, I was in library school and he had just put out his first data visualization book. And he’s had several data visualization books since then. And I find it so fascinating that he’s now going back to the written word and looking at how that looks. So, you know, stock ticker. Yeah. And, you know, I admit I my life has gone on and I haven’t been keeping up with Mr. Tufte as much as I should, perhaps. So I will need to go back and dive into this a little deeper.
[00:50:11] Greg Lambert: Yeah. As soon as he started talking about Tufte, I thought, oh, man, Marlene’s going to hate that she missed this.
[00:50:17] Marlene Gebauer: Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to pick his brain on that a little bit more at another time.
[00:50:22] Greg Lambert: Well, that brings us to the end of the episode. Thanks again to Jason Wilson for sitting down with me and talking about legal publishing and then going out and getting a beer with me afterwards.
[00:50:33] Marlene Gebauer: You just have to keep rubbing it in, don’t you?
[00:50:35] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. It was a good beer too, Marlene.
[00:50:38] Marlene Gebauer: Please stop killing me. Listeners, do us all a favor and subscribe to the Geek & Review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Rate and review us as well. Yeah. Rate and review us.
[00:50:52] Greg Lambert: Yeah. If you have comments or suggestions, you can reach us on Twitter at @GayBauerM or @Glambert, or you can call the Geek & Review hotline at 713- 487-7270.
[00:51:05] Marlene Gebauer: And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSicca. Thanks, Jerry.
[00:51:10] Greg Lambert: All right. Thanks, Marlene. I will talk to you later.
[00:51:13] Speaker E: Ciao.