A perfectly reasonable distinction to make in this day and age of hallucinations, expensive legal research AI and increasingly lazy lawyers who don’t like to check shit.
Robert writes
In pondering upon what interesting and timely topic about which to write, relating to legal information publishing, it occurred to me that what might be appreciated would be to write and repeat the word “artificial” approximately 333 times, followed by the word “intelligence”, the same number of times and finally the same again for the acronym “AI”. I wondered if readers might have found the approximately 1000-word totality of such efforts, or just the repetition of “blah”, to be as captivating as much of the other agenda-driven drivel produced on the topic, including that offered by the gullible journalists who want to join the bandwagon. However, I was not able to convince myself of its wisdom and, therefore, abandoned the idea. As with me, some might have been somewhat bored with the self-serving, endless, pointless and repetitive speculation as to its value, uses and future, in a world in which the practice and study of law, complex and important as they are, need to be protected from whatever might misrepresent, discredit or trivialise them.
Never one to try to predict the future, I was drawn recently to a few related reports, which might point a way to evolutionary trends, some of which, in my view, if real, might be better avoided.
Clearly, legal information publishing, especially for the lesser providers, is not the cash cow that it was many years ago, which might explain current tactics and decisions. For example, an announcement by James Publishing seems somewhat infra dig, in its offer to charge lawyers $6,000 to publish a legal tome in the lawyer’s name, even though it is not the lawyer’s work. The promise would appear to be of 200 pages of AI-generated legal content derived from James Publishing’s portfolio, on the back of a one-hour video call. Not that there is anything especially new or surprising about this, as, for many years law publishers have offered, as marketing tools, branded booklets and suchlike on tax changes, the provisions analysed in house, and offered to practitioners to give to clients. However, the blatantly stated proposition that professional credibility will be boosted and that the purchaser will be able to represent her/himself as a published author, stretches the imagination, at the very least. I expect that most professional lawyers would be embarrassed, if not appalled at any hint of possible or perceived misrepresentation of true expertise. One might hope that, at minimum, the true source of any such published content would be explicitly marked on the books in question.
More usual, as an indicator of profit trends, was the announcement that Centaur Media, based in England, has agreed to sell The Lawyer magazine to Lighthouse Bidco, the parent company of Legal Benchmarking Limited, which is owned by Triple Private Equity. The £43m price achieved was strong, but it leaves Centaur entirely out of legal markets, which probably makes sense in its apparent progression towards corporate oblivion, having also sold several others among its key titles and market positions, but this development comes after The Lawyer was set up in, and has remained with Centaur since 1987. It was interesting to see Centaur’s share price leap significantly on the news, possibly indication the market’s support for its plan to leave the legal business to business sector, with its normally precarious reliance on advertising revenues and profits. The surprise, if anything, is that The Lawyer remained with Centaur for so long, particularly after Centaur disposed of its financial and tax information publications some time ago and the legal magazine’s frequency of publication were reduced from weekly to monthly.
In not-dissimilar markets, comes the announcement that Law Business Research has acquired Legal Geek. According to the Outsell report, the acquisition follows ALM and LBR’s merger earlier in 2025, adding Legal Geek’s four events to an existing event portfolio, which includes Legal Week, Women, Influence & Power in Law, and the IPBC series. I have no doubt that necessary consolidation in these markets will continue.
What seems clear is that if the legacy and somewhat old-fashioned legal information businesses are facing challenging times, the path to artificial intelligence domination seems not to be without significant problems. It was recently announced that the artificial intelligence company, Anthropic, has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors, who allege that the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot. The settlement, if approved, is said potentially to mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers and others who accuse them of copyright infringement. Considering that the case in question deals primarily with a world of fiction writing, in which fact and reality are intentionally intermingled, it might be thought that greater harm would be done where the copyright infringements relate to the serious, factual, opinion and expertise-based world of legal and professional information, which is relied upon by, inter alios, lawyers, students, business, government and the population at large. Maybe closer to home is that the Encyclopaedia Britannica Group has filed a lawsuit against the AI search engine, Perplexity, alleging copyright and trademark infringement. Perplexity is accused of the verbatim copying of Britannica’s content without permission, and misusing its trademarks, potentially misleading users. There have been several such cases over recent times, including that of Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, which seems to go on endlessly, without resolution. It seems to me that many more are both likely and justifiable, in times to come. It would be a tragedy if the ethics, values and respect for the law that should persist especially around legally related matters were to be further diminished. I wonder if the geeks and nerds of legal information technology sufficiently prioritise these criteria?
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Added-Value Legal Information Publishing: What Seems Artificial and What Seems Intelligent
