Introduction: Peter's background
Peter has a degree in English and entered publishing via working at Dillons after graduating, where he applied for a job at Pearsons. He was employed by Longmans in the tertiary education area. He moved to Butterworths and then became marketing director at Gee & Co, a Thomson company, becoming Managing Director there from 1991 to 1997. He then moved on to the Westlaw UK project at Sweet & Maxwell and also worked on business development in Europe. He became Managing Director of Sweet & Maxwell in 2003 when Wendy Beecham returned to the US.
Peter Lake
The business
Sweet & Maxwell is part of the international legal business arm of Thomson. The parent company is currently known as Thomson International Legal and Regulatory and is headed up by Helen Owers in London. It consists of all the Thomson legal businesses outside North America, including Aranzadi in Spain, Forlaget Thomson in Denmark, Roundhall in Ireland and the Australasian businesses – Brookers in New Zealand and Law Book Co in Australia.
The print element of the business is resilient and print revenues are stable. Although there has been a decline in volume sales with the advent of online services, there will not be an imminent collapse of the print market. At present revenues are 30% online and 70% print. Even where customers access material online they still print out much of it.
In the more litigious US, the current figures are about 55% online and 45% print and Peter would expect the figures in this country to move upwards in favour of online.
Online - Westlaw UK
The new platform has been very well received and Sweet & Maxwell have seen a big increase in usage. The pre-new platform legislation data had not been completely fit for purpose, but the new version is much more intuitive and easier to use. Most customers have now been migrated and the operation will be complete by Spring 2008.
All academic institutions now subscribe to the service and 49 of the 50 top law firms. Within the top 100 law firms 94 subscribe to Lawtel and 87 to Westlaw and Lawtel is popular throughout the top 500. Westlaw is also available to the judiciary and government legal services through LION, which is the DCA's internal network.
• Plans for future content
For analytical law there are plans to have all the Common Law Library titles available by mid-2008. There will continue to be licensing agreements set up with other legal publishers such as Cambridge and Oxford University Presses and older material will continue to be added to the database.
• Federated search
Although progress has been made on the question of access via federated search systems using RSS feeds, and systems such as those offered by Solcara, the solution has not yet been found but remains a priority for 2008.
The market
The main competitor is LexisNexis, a Reed Elsevier company, which includes the famous Butterworths name in this country. Other smaller companies also have a place in the market, including Oxford University Press which has been growing fast over recent years and now has a healthy share of the student textbook market, and is moving into the international market with its acquisition of Oceana. Other niche competitors include Jordans for family and company law, Complinet for online financial services and regulatory material and PLC for precedents and specialist legal information. Tottel has also been increasing its coverage of the market having taken over much of Butterworths textbook stable. There is always a place for small and nimble new publishers to come in and bite at the heels of the established players like Sweet & Maxwell, who may not be able to move as quickly in introducing innovative new products.
In the US in 2006, market share was Thomson 41.5%; Reed 23% and Wolters Kluwer 20%. In this country, Thomson and Reed have a pretty equal share of the legal market at around 35%, whilst Reed and Wolters Kluwer are the main tax publishers.
It was recently stated in the AALL Spectrum that since 1979 in the US there has been an oligopoly in the legal publishing market with new rivals being candidates for acquisition. When asked whether this statement could describe the situation here, the response was that the two leading publishers in the UK had traditionally held a large share of the print marketplace and this was being translated into a similar situation in the online environment.
Pricing
When asked whether he considered that the pricing for online products was transparent, Peter responded that the terms of any licence agreement between Sweet & Maxwell and the customer were confidential and this had always been the case.
On the question of whether the acquisition of Lawtel had led to a lowering of prices, he said that Lawtel had been kept separate in the marketplace as a product aimed at providing simple and low cost access to daily legal developments.
Thomson acquisition of Reuters
This acquisition has now been cleared by the Competition Authorities in Europe and the US and it is seen as an opportunity for Sweet & Maxwell to integrate Reuters' very sophisticated news and business information services into their online services and a method will be developed to feed through information pertinent to the legal community.
The customer
Is customer feedback considered?
There are currently six customer focus groups comprising in all about 400 customers and a meeting of 140 customers had been held recently in London. The company was concerned to take account of the customers' views. Usability labs were used extensively before the launch of the new Westlaw platform.
There was also a customer “think tank” which consisted of law firm librarians who dealt with specific questions on content, features and usability of online products and a group had met recently to consider how the online White Book would be structured in 2008. Obviously the company could not respond to all user requests but they did try hard. One example of this was the launch of daily legislation feeds following pressure from customers. The online product manager and her team spend much time visiting customers and getting their feedback.
Customer services
Each year research is carried out on the performance of the customer services department and before the implementation of SAP (the invoicing and accounts system) it stood at a high 88% satisfaction. Following the implementation it plummeted but is now back up to 86%. Customers have been hugely tolerant of the impact made by introducing the new system, but there is still more to be done to improve the customer experience.
The legal profession
The legal marketplace has been very healthy for the past few years with the huge legal firms riding on the expansion of the capital markets, the growth in private equity and venture capital investments in the corporate sector and much mergers and acquisitions work. However, current market conditions, particularly within the banking sector, mean that there is a slowing down in this type of work. There has also been a considerable growth in the legal academic sector with more and more students studying for law degrees.
Future developments
The legal profession
There are likely to be considerable changes in the legal profession over the next few years, beginning with the Carter reforms affecting the provision of legal aid, which mean that many firms are no longer able to afford to provide legal aid services. The new Legal Services Act, allowing for the introduction of alternative business structures, may also affect the future shape of the profession. Richard Susskind is due to publish his latest book entitled An End to Lawyers? in June this year and he wonders just how much of a lawyer's work will need to be undertaken by the lawyer himself in the future, as opposed to an IT system or a less highly qualified non-lawyer.
Government
The growth of government-funded access to legal materials is a positive development. The appearance of the Statute Law Database, together with the Direct Government initiatives, aiming to make the law more accessible to the ordinary citizen is to be welcomed. Government will continue to attempt to make primary legal materials more accessible and Sweet & Maxwell's role is adding value by interpreting them and adding metadata to make them more comprehensible.
Web 2.0
The advent of new methods of dissemination of information, such as the Web 2.0 applications gives authors a good choice of methods of publication and there will be a movement towards the Creative CommonsFootnote 1 type of licensing situation. The emergence of such technologies is not seen as a threat to the business, but rather as an opportunity for it to consider how it can harness them to add value to its own products. Wikis will be used as a tool within the business to enable more sophisticated collaborative working.
Technology
There will be an ongoing commoditisation of legal services by the introduction of more technology. The major legal publishers have recognised this and are themselves acquiring legal technology companies to help them to integrate their traditional publishing and online services into a law firms own systems. For example, Butterworths acquired Visualfiles and Axxia and Thomson acquired Elite.
The market place – is there a future for small publishers?
Peter believes that there will always be a place for the entrepreneur who can spot a gap in the marketplace and move quickly to exploit it.
Open access publishing – is it a threat?
This is more of an issue for the scientific, technical and medical sectors. We will continue to see the development of alternative and competing business models within the legal environment. This to be welcomed and leads to a healthy and sustainable market.
Outsourcing
The organisation had considered outsourcing both back office and editorial functions. Much of the processing work for the online services was carried out offshore and Thomson currently employs over 2,000 people in India, mostly dealing with accounts payable and other back office functions. Some pilots have been conducted on outsourcing headnoting and abstracting, but indexing has not proved to be suitable for outsourcing.
E-books
Sweet & Maxwell ran a trial using an e-book reader to access an arbitration title but with mixed success. At the moment the search features are not sufficiently sophisticated. The readers are portable and the readability is improving. As the technology improves there will be a proliferation of devices aimed at the e-book market, but the commercial exploitation of such products within the notoriously conservative legal community may be more of a tough nut to crack.
The information industry
A recent Outsell report forecasts that there will be a growth in the industry between 2007 and 2010 followed by a gradual slowdown. It predicts that growth will be driven by integrating information into the workflow of organisations. Peter believes that this is already happening in the legal market and vendors who offer the ability to cross-search external and internal information will be the way forward. Within Thomson, the software development is carried out in the North American companies by, for example, Thomson Elite and West KM and, where appropriate, joint product plans for the UK market will be drawn up.
