How the face of legal publishing is changing in response to the needs of modern legal practitioners.

Article provided by LexisNexis

When you think of legal publishing, you probably think of massive books filled with extremely dense and technical information. Legal research involves stacks of books on your desk, and several screens all working at once. However, according to New Zealand’s foremost legal publisher, this format is increasingly becoming a thing of the past.

According to head of content management Chris Murray, huge encyclopaedia can be a great starting point for law students, judges, and many lawyers, but most practising lawyers shouldn’t be expected to wade through thousands of pages of content to find the information they need. Instead, accessing the right materials from a broad range of authors needs to be easy – a goal that has been the key focus for LexisNexis over the last decade.

“One of the biggest changes that I’ve seen in the last eleven years has been a move away from publishing really large, 1500-page tomes of black letter law,” Murray says.

“In my experience, lawyers really want more practical content that they can actually use day to day. If a client has just left their office, they want guidance on what their key next steps are - they don’t have the time to read through 500 pages of law.”

Murray has been in legal publishing for over a decade, and he says he’s seen an increasing shift towards publishing precedents, checklists and targeted guidance – in short, practical assistance tools for lawyers in their day-to-day work.

As part of this shift, LexisNexis has been deliberately expanding its pool of authors over the last several years. It has also been issuing new guidance around writing style, which involves producing much smaller, more concise volumes of content, but with the ability to quickly find sources and refer back to the original text.

“This new style is particularly important for authors who are highly experienced and specialised, and our new writers have all done a really great job of putting themselves into the shoes of practising lawyers, not only academics or students,” Murray said.

“We still produce all of our large encyclopaedic works, but our Practical Guidance products really turn the traditional research method around the other way. Rather than only writing 100 pages of content, our authors are also compiling a guidance note or a checklist that may be five steps long, but the points on that checklist will feed out to that 100 pages.

As a further example, some of LexisNexis’s most popular content is its annotated legislation. This involves publishing an Act in full, but with commentary throughout the text that then links into case law. This saves lawyers from having to constantly flip between sources, and LexisNexis is regularly adding new and amended Acts.

“Between our Practical Guidance and annotated legislation content, we’re just trying to make it much easier for lawyers to do their jobs,” Murray says.

As part of its goal to make legal content more accessible, LexisNexis is on an ongoing drive to recruit new authors. With the aim of representing the increasingly diverse face of the legal profession, it wants to provide content from a broad range of voices – and according to Murray, lawyers approach LexisNexis with excellent ideas for content every day.

“We’ve worked hard to bring in a more diverse set of authors,” Murray says. “Over half of law graduates have been women for several decades now, and we have seen that demographic change represented in our author base too. It is important our author teams reflect the profession, and more work needs to be done to ensure we have the right authors creating the content our customers need.”

Scan the QR code to find out more about the solution designed for barristers or please email ana.cathcart@lexisnexis.co.nz to arrange a chat.