I am delighted to be invited to the AALL Vendor Colloquium next week as a “stakeholder”. I have a growing sense of unease about the relationship between legal information vendors and the law libraries, law students and law schools. This meeting has challenged me to articulate those thoughts. [Read on for more...]
Vendors should provide law schools with deep statistics on student usage of their products.
We have been doing a lot of thinking at CALI about how students use our lessons. We have the capability to track how far students get inside a lesson – literally question by question. Even further, we can put time stamps on this data to see how long it takes students to complete individual questions or to complete entire lessons. We have really only just begun to analyze this data and it represents a treasure-trove of insight that we hope to convert into improvements in the educational quality of CALI lessons.
I believe that legal information providers must have similar analytics on how their customers use their services. This information would be invaluable to law schools, especially librarians and others who teach legal research, so as to understand and improve the nature and quality of their instruction. To improve our educational delivery systems, we have to measure their effect on students and not just at the end of the semester and via the proxy of exams and quizzes.
What happens when law schools start choosing a single-source vendor for their legal research needs in legal education?
Presently, law schools purchase access to two identical legal information services. When the cost cutting gets brutal, someone is going to figure out that they can do just fine with only one service. With more services being made available via alternative or even free services, teaching to a particular vendor's website seems rather quaint. The buttons you click today will not be the buttons you click when you are in practice. If online legal research instruction can be abstracted away from “interface instruction”, the need to purchase two services will decrease and the marketplace will undergo a sea change.
- Will there be a price war?
- Will one vendor defeat the other in the legal education space and so have a mandate to raise prices even more?
- Will services become (even more) unbundled?
- Do law schools that purchase these services have any power whatsoever or are we entirely at the whim of the two market leaders?
The access law schools provide to the vendors' future customers (students) is sold entirely too cheaply.
About a year ago, I read a great quote about Facebook...
"...you are not the customer, you are the product that Facebook sells to advertisers..."
In a somewhat similar way, although law schools pay legal information providers money for access to their service, law schools are not the (only) customer. The high-value customer is the law student who will create demand for the legal research product when they enter practice where they pay full-price for online legal research. Law schools get access to online legal research at a considerable discount compared to the prices paid by lawyers and law firms. For that discount, they hand over their students to the legal information vendors and, in my opinion, entirely too cheaply.
Every company has a business metric of what it costs to acquire a new customer. In the case of legal research vendors, it is probably less expensive to acquire a customer when they are law students than when they are lawyers. In the old days, when online legal research used dedicated terminals and modems, the cost of access was not trivial. Today, the access is done via the Internet and the cost of adding capacity for every law student in the country is small. Furthermore, law schools pay vendors to let law students learn, use and become dependent on their service, so the cost of customer acquisition is turned on its head in the legal education sector.
I am looking forward to the Colloquium and plan to tweet and blog, so follow me on Twitter @johnpmayer and watch this space for updates.