We like this post from Law21 that popped into our inbox yesterday..
Jordan Furlong calls it all a fragile ecosystem .. we coined the name for our blog a number of years back .. House of Butter ..as in House of Cards - (you don't need to guess that hard where the Butter bit came from)
Anyway as usual I digress...
Jordan writes: in his piece
Watching For Falling Dominoes ( good to see cold war terminology back in vogue)
Then there’s legal publishing. If both firms and schools are forced to cut back, law book publishers have a new set of problems, because that’s basically their entire marketplace. Those that have branched out into online legal research will find little help, because they haven’t really diversified: the markets for e-research are pretty much the same as for books. Legal periodicals depend heavily on advertising from law firms and their suppliers. I’ve already heard of planned cuts to law firm marketing and advertising budgets for 2009, and suppliers like software companies are going to find it harder to sell upgrades and new releases when people are more willing to hold on to their older versions and wait for prices to fall. And so forth.
Lawyers in private law practice tend to forget sometimes that they serve a more complex and important function in this industry than mere sellers of legal services. They’re also buyers of private law practice supplies, everything from students to books to software to newspapers to photocopiers to recruiters to memberships and much more. In The Elastic Tournament, Profs. Henderson and Marc Galanter point out that “large law firms have become immensely fragile institutions.” But really, the entire legal services industry is a fragile ecosystem, and if the center should ever give way, the domino effect could be extraordinary. And I don’t think anyone’s preparing a bailout package for that.
