Legal services, for this SWOT, will include publishing, online services and providers. The ever-expanding world of legal services is an area all information professionals, analysts and managers are dealing with every work day. Let's look at the industry in terms of SWOT terminology.
1. Strengthens- Many major online legal service providers ("OLSP") grew from strong print brands resulting from years in this medium. West Publishing alone has been in the print legal business for over 100 years.
As a result, OLSPs have established markets- US Legal, Law School and Government /Business sectors with unique customer offerings.
2. Weaknesses- Sometimes a failure to see change and innovation and act quickly. Can be driven by "old school" business concepts such as exclusive licensing agreements and numerous restrictions, long term agreements or variations there of...i.e. LMA (Library Maintenance Agreements)
How many years went into developing competing products, West KM and Lexis Search Advantage?
In the meantime, other business intelligence vendors have move onto "big data" analytical tools which are working to cut across disciplines and industries to provide ease of use and competitive pricing models for future customers including those in legal markets.
3. Opportunities- Technology has been the OSLPs' lighting rod from dedicated red Lexis terminals (anyone remember those?) to CD towers to E Books and wireless access. Publishers have used these emerging technologies to attempt to gain ground with their customers over the years.
LexisNexis, Westlaw and Wolters Kluwer and now BNA/Bloomberg continue to partner with new companies offering specialization product lines.
4. Threats- These very unconventional start up service companies continue to gain acceptance within legal consumer markets. As referenced in the Weakness section of this SWOT, these cutting edge vendors are gaining ground.
Who and what are these new online legal services providers?? Names like Justia.com, FastCase and Legal Zoom represent this new crop of BI vendors. In an interesting article from the Information Today website dated September 1, 2011, "Upstate legal services gain traction", by Paula J. Hane ; the author paints several interesting current and future scenarios for the legal services online markets.
This is a very broad analysis on the legal services industry.....granted, SWOTs have been criticized for being too simple, too general in focus..... and there were probably many factors left out but I just wanted to illustrate this type of analysis and how competitive factors are always in play.
Comments are welcomed.
