Susanne Stein, managing partner of Vienna’s MANZ Publishers, explains how she harnessed Artificial Intelligence to transform the company from a traditional publishing house to a cutting-edge online legal publisher.
One of the advantages of being a family business is that you can take a five-year horizon on decisions and not worry about quarterly reporting – but it is also necessary to be aware of the tensions created by the decisions you make. Within a family business, you always end up asking yourself, “What would my grandfather do?” On the one hand, you need to hold on to some of the tradition and some of the history, but at the same time, every generation must find its own path.
A case in point was the decision to sell our printing company in 2001. As the fifth-generation owner of a publishing house, it was hard for us to stop printing books. But it was clear that what printing was in the 20th century, artificial intelligence and software engineering are going to be in the 21st century.
MANZ’s digitalization journey began with my father in the 1970s, after he had travelled to the US and saw the first computer-assisted legal research databases from Westlaw, the company that is now owned by Thomson Reuters. He came back to Europe and founded the RDB Rechtsdatenbank which has evolved to become the leading database of relevant legal journals, collections of decisions, commentaries and handbooks for law in Austria.
A regulatory push
The Ministry of Justice has set the pace for technological adoption in legal publishing by making much of its data public and, more to the point, free. While it’s true that the biggest
competitor you can have as a publisher is free data, it does drive competition and improvements within the sector. It also pushed us to move quickly and to evolve to offer our customers extra features and more information.
The challenges we now face are centered on artificial intelligence and products like ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI which launched in November last year. Responding to these challenges is not something for the future. We have already brought examples to market. Last November, we launched a product as part of our RDB Rechtsdatenbank called RDB Genjus based on this type of generative AI, but we trained it ourselves. Instead of searching through all the data available online, it is more precise, which is important for our customers.