The Blog
Knowing the answer before asking the question...
Posted: 21 June 2013
When a legal tome editor many, many moons ago I used to have to manage a range of editorial boards.
The best editorial teacher I ever had, Carol Tullo, told me this was the chance to pick the best and brightest brains. So no "nit" was left unturned.
I had the delight of meeting some truly wonderful benchers in Lincoln?s Inn and Middle Temple displaying their joy in their specialism.
But I also had some bruising encounters, very bruising.
The penny dropped.
These forums simply curtailed the power of some over-mighty editors (usually barristers or professors) or "experts".
In theory they were there to provide said contributors and experts a "voice" - the perception of involvement/inclusion.
In practice they were "venting shops", often confirming our worst fears about the irrelevance of some noisy, difficult and vainglorious characters.
Well managed they were the genteel dining extravaganzas of "old-school" publishing.
More often tedious, however, they could just as easily descend into pointless arm-wrestles.
After a decade or more they left me with an abiding instinct for spotting bullies, of which there are many in insurance, academia, accounting and law.
The skill you learned was how to control the uncontrollable; this was actually bomb disposal - many, many miles away from HQ. This was the discount tent that a lot of pissing could be done from.
The one thing they never generated were useful commercial options. Not any viable ones at any rate, and certainly none not explored endlessly already.
So when firms like WK establish Insight Leader Councils and advisory councils for librarians and attorneys it is nothing new.
They are not alone; Lexis also have a dizzying range of experts and consultants on tap.
PR departments love to laud the implicitly egalitarian, consensual implications of these approaches. So they do; a lot.
The networkers in the industry love them: they feel like "work"; they widen the circles of contacts; you get to keep up with all the current "group think"; and somebody might even be recruiting...
But ask yourself these questions when you see them:
1. Is it an exercise in obfuscation: "flak" removal? Advertising strategies call this a distraction tactic; it works; depressingly well.
It only takes a couple of difficult senior exits, or institute or "gatekeeper" conference speeches to make difficult ripples spread.
Most earnest pledges to talk, listen and consult are not "kicking the can down the road" - they are picking it up and hiding it on a bus so no-one hears anything ever again.
2. Is it a middle-man staking their claim? Does the gatekeeper need to reinforce their power and threaten passive aggression to do so?
Currently librarians and a host of formerly flavour-of-the-month CxO titles generate the noisiest headlines. Passive aggression always just provokes disintermediation, however.
Commercial imperatives mean that minimising the middle-men in your market improves profitability. Not rocket science; it just takes time, but being "cut out" is always painful.
3. Is it an industry outsider claiming to bring new industrial processes to your market?
Fresh blood has a role, but if it is just a method for disguising industry inexperience and playing catch-up - beware.
All too often these "boards" are gatekeeper control mechanisms, not decision support ones.
Any non-exec worth their salt will help you cut to the chase. You will know what to expect really depending on who you ask:
1. Academics will tell you the blindingly obvious in percentage terms, and dressed up with some even more worthy research projects that need funding too; (ditto management/strategy consultancies, etc);
2. Librarians will say its easy to fix with a few more meetings and tweaks that horrendously complicate everything even more; (ditto institutes and quangos);
3. End users will be too busy to tell you anything useful; (if you can?t guess, "stoopid", you are not "in" the market)
4. Tech and project managers will be able to deliver nirvana when you fund their next replatforming; and
5. CxOs all want More-From-Less; trouble is, they can define ?less? to three decimal places here and now, but they are downright hazy on what ?more? looks like.
There really is no alternative to making decisions and supporting them.
Bad decisions in legal publishing are actually better than ?no? decisions right now.
When an industry, like legal publishing, is in turmoil be Very careful about all the things that look like work, smell like work...
but are actually an excuse for not taking action; repeatedly.
The best editorial teacher I ever had, Carol Tullo, told me this was the chance to pick the best and brightest brains. So no "nit" was left unturned.
I had the delight of meeting some truly wonderful benchers in Lincoln?s Inn and Middle Temple displaying their joy in their specialism.
But I also had some bruising encounters, very bruising.
The penny dropped.
These forums simply curtailed the power of some over-mighty editors (usually barristers or professors) or "experts".
In theory they were there to provide said contributors and experts a "voice" - the perception of involvement/inclusion.
In practice they were "venting shops", often confirming our worst fears about the irrelevance of some noisy, difficult and vainglorious characters.
Well managed they were the genteel dining extravaganzas of "old-school" publishing.
More often tedious, however, they could just as easily descend into pointless arm-wrestles.
After a decade or more they left me with an abiding instinct for spotting bullies, of which there are many in insurance, academia, accounting and law.
The skill you learned was how to control the uncontrollable; this was actually bomb disposal - many, many miles away from HQ. This was the discount tent that a lot of pissing could be done from.
The one thing they never generated were useful commercial options. Not any viable ones at any rate, and certainly none not explored endlessly already.
So when firms like WK establish Insight Leader Councils and advisory councils for librarians and attorneys it is nothing new.
They are not alone; Lexis also have a dizzying range of experts and consultants on tap.
PR departments love to laud the implicitly egalitarian, consensual implications of these approaches. So they do; a lot.
The networkers in the industry love them: they feel like "work"; they widen the circles of contacts; you get to keep up with all the current "group think"; and somebody might even be recruiting...
But ask yourself these questions when you see them:
1. Is it an exercise in obfuscation: "flak" removal? Advertising strategies call this a distraction tactic; it works; depressingly well.
It only takes a couple of difficult senior exits, or institute or "gatekeeper" conference speeches to make difficult ripples spread.
Most earnest pledges to talk, listen and consult are not "kicking the can down the road" - they are picking it up and hiding it on a bus so no-one hears anything ever again.
2. Is it a middle-man staking their claim? Does the gatekeeper need to reinforce their power and threaten passive aggression to do so?
Currently librarians and a host of formerly flavour-of-the-month CxO titles generate the noisiest headlines. Passive aggression always just provokes disintermediation, however.
Commercial imperatives mean that minimising the middle-men in your market improves profitability. Not rocket science; it just takes time, but being "cut out" is always painful.
3. Is it an industry outsider claiming to bring new industrial processes to your market?
Fresh blood has a role, but if it is just a method for disguising industry inexperience and playing catch-up - beware.
All too often these "boards" are gatekeeper control mechanisms, not decision support ones.
Any non-exec worth their salt will help you cut to the chase. You will know what to expect really depending on who you ask:
1. Academics will tell you the blindingly obvious in percentage terms, and dressed up with some even more worthy research projects that need funding too; (ditto management/strategy consultancies, etc);
2. Librarians will say its easy to fix with a few more meetings and tweaks that horrendously complicate everything even more; (ditto institutes and quangos);
3. End users will be too busy to tell you anything useful; (if you can?t guess, "stoopid", you are not "in" the market)
4. Tech and project managers will be able to deliver nirvana when you fund their next replatforming; and
5. CxOs all want More-From-Less; trouble is, they can define ?less? to three decimal places here and now, but they are downright hazy on what ?more? looks like.
There really is no alternative to making decisions and supporting them.
Bad decisions in legal publishing are actually better than ?no? decisions right now.
When an industry, like legal publishing, is in turmoil be Very careful about all the things that look like work, smell like work...
but are actually an excuse for not taking action; repeatedly.
Lexis UK
The "big blue" of UK legal information services, historically mainly in publishing services, but with a presence in all sectors notably legal IT and tax publishing.
Legal Information Suppliers 1995-2015
The definitive review and analysis of the legal information suppliers markets in the UK.
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This is the only analysis to take such a definitive and comparative long term approach. It projects potential performance based on the financial character of every player in the market - this is the core data on which all professional plans are built.
Designed and used as a practical and authoritative strategic planning and budgeting tool, the precision, benchmarks and insights are used by many leading players in the market to test their plans and aspirations.
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