Online legal services - a revolution that failed?

In the late 1990s a number of law firms and other organisations beganto market online products which &quotpackage&quot legal knowledge. Unlikespreadsheets, word processing software and email, these products arenot designed to provide efficiency improvements. Rather, online legalknowledge products, which package and apply the law, were and areviewed by many as having the potential to make major changes to legalpractice. Many used the term &quitrevolution&quot to describe the anticipatedimpact.Like any new technology development, many intersecting factorscontributed to their development. In many ways they built on existinguses of technology in legal practice. The various information technologyparadigms which underpin them - text retrieval, expert systems/artificialintelligence, document automation, computer aided instruction (CAI)and hypertext - were already a part of the &quotcomputerisation of law&quot.What is new about online legal knowledge products is that as well asusing technology paradigms such as expert systems or documentautomation to package and apply the law, they are developed usingbrowser-based technologies. In this way they leverage the comparativeease of development and distribution capabilities of the Internet (and/orintranets).There has been particular interest in the impact of online legalknowledge products on the legal services provided to large commercialorganisations. With the increasing burden of corporate compliance,expanding role of the in-house lawyer and pressure to curb costs, onlinelegal knowledge products should flourish in commercial organisationsand many have been adamant that they will. However, there is noconvincing evidence that anything like a &quotrevolution&quot has taken place.Success stories are few and far between. Surprisingly few have askedwhether this &quotrevolution&quot has failed, or seriously analysed whether it liesahead. If it does lie ahead, what factors, if any, need to taken intoaccount in order for it to take place? If there is to be no revolution, whatvalue should be placed on online legal knowledge products?In this dissertation I use the findings of my own empirical work,supported by a literature survey, to demonstrate that the impact ofonline legal knowledge products has been modest. I argue that in orderto build successful online legal knowledge products it is necessary toappreciate that a complex system of interacting factors underpins theirdevelopment and use,and address those factors. I propose a schematicrepresentation of the relationships involved in producing an online legalknowledge product and use the findings of some empirical work,together with a review the literature in related fields, to identify thefactors relevant to the various components of this framework. Whilethere are many interacting factors at play, four sets of considerationsemerge from my research as particularly important: integrating differenttechnology paradigms, knowledge acquisition, usability, andimplementation. As a practical matter, the implication of these findingsis that some online legal knowledge products are more likely to besuccessful than others, and that there are other technology applicationsthat may represent a better investment of the limited in-housetechnology budget than many online legal knowledge products.I also argue that while most of the challenges involved in integratingdifferent technology paradigms, improving usability, and effectiveimplementation can be addressed with varying levels of effort, theproblem of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck is intractable. Newapproaches to knowledge acquisition are required to overcome theknowledge acquisition bottleneck. I identify some potential approachesthat emerge from my research: automation, collaboration and coalition,phasing and simple solutions