Is there room in the UK market for a Legalzoom or is the consumer/SME legal documents sector just too compacted? Surely everyone needs easily accessible legal documents?
The US has been having a speculative frenzy around the value of LegalZoom for some time, fed no doubt by their VC backers. And to the uninitiated, cheap web-based legal documents feels like a no-brainer for legal services deregulation. But - like we keep saying in legal services and compliance - "there are no green fields".
In the UK we have a civil service that genuinely thinks every time it publishes a web site it is saving us all money (sigh). We are not short of entrepreneurs trying to make legal documents widely available - the most successful being "those guys who do shrink wrap leases and wills in Staples" (LawPack). Jordans, IQ, Judicium, Compact Law and a vast amount of free stuff from institutes and insurers all play a part. Much of it is good stuff, much of it is kept up to date well, and much of it never gets out of the actual or web based metaphorical shrink wrap.
The core issue remains: documents are only part of the "process", and the process is complicated and carries penalties for being amateurish. So professionals use their own, industrial strength sources, while end-users get hand holding elsewhere. The dominant players in legal documents (for SMEs anyway) now are the regulatory compliance consultancies, especially employment and safety based ones. This is not odd. Publishers, and even professional publishers have been underperforming the wider stock markets for some time now, while technology and professional services firms out-perform the market. This macro trend is being retold at a micro level by the "free" content inherent in the regulatory consultancy packages.
So will Thomson Reuters make much headway in the UK with their recent acquisition of Cleardocs - a successful player in Australia? If they keep it in the accountancy solutions sector - yes. If they hope to use it to radicalise the legal services sector, frankly - no. In the UK they came out of the SME documents market when they sold Gee to Croner back in '08; a shrewd side step. And frankly, until the government stops drowning the market in free web sites it will remain an intriguing but fringe activity.
Meanwhile, a highly respected UK legal publisher expressly charged with "providing free or inexpensive public access to legal texts and commentaries of all kinds" has just seen exceptionally strong sales growth from 09-10 of 27.5%. Bailii, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, has just seen sales rise to £178k pa.
