2026 is already shaping up to be another big year for the Canadian Open Access Legal Citation Guide – Guide canadien de la référence juridique en accès libre. Read on for recent milestones, new instruction materials, requests for feedback, and ways to get involved.

RJAL Launches

RJAL, the French version of COAL, was released in February 2026! It is now possible to use COAL-RJAL to cite legal materials when writing in both English and French, an important step in serving the legal community in both official languages. Read more on CanLII and Slaw.

Celebrating Our Early Adopters

We’ve been hearing from people across the country about how they are using COAL-RJAL already. We want to take this opportunity to celebrate COAL-RJAL’s early adopters, which include:

• Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan
• Court of King’s Bench for Saskatchewan
• Provincial Court of Saskatchewan
• Thompson Rivers University Law Journal
• Dalhousie Law Journal (accepts submissions using COAL)
• Classes at Queen’s University Law School, Thompson Rivers University Law School, Toronto Metropolitan University Law School, Université du Québec à Montréal, University of British Columbia Law School, University of Ottawa School of Information Studies, and the University of Windsor Law School.

Congratulations to these trailblazing courts, editorial boards, and professors for moving to a regularly updated legal citation guide that is responsive and available to all, with no financial barriers. Let us know if your class, journal, court, or organization is using or considering using COAL-RJAL! Email us at coal.rjal@ubc.ca.

New Interactive Tutorial to Learn and Practise COAL Citation Style

You asked for it, we made it: learn and practise COAL citation style with the brand new interactive tutorial, Practice Legal Citation with the Coal Guide. Like COAL-RJAL itself, it’s of course free and open to all.

Looking for Support in Adopting and Using COAL-RJAL?

You can find the new interactive tutorial, along with videos, PowerPoint slides, and other instructional materials that are, as always, free to use, at http://coal-rjal.ca/. If your organization is using or considering adopting COAL-RJAL and you would like us to give a presentation on the guide or answer any questions, we are happy to help!

Your Feedback Matters!

Your feedback continues to guide COAL-RJAL. Thank you. Please keep sending your feedback and suggestions.

Want to Get Involved?

If you would be interested in helping to add COAL-RJAL citation styles to Zotero and Jurism, we would love to hear from you.

All inquiries, feedback, and volunteer expressions of interest may be sent to coal.rjal@ubc.ca.

The post Exciting News From COAL-RJAL! appeared first on Slaw.

There has been a dramatic shift in our personal lives, schools, and workplaces from buying and owning cultural materials like books, music, movies, and television, to licensing (i.e., subscribing to) these materials. Digital materials should be easier to access and use, however in this new environment activities like copying, sharing, and reusing cultural materials are governed by contracts rather than by the Copyright Act and its users’ rights like fair dealing. Additionally, in the digital age we can no longer separate the object (e.g., a book) from its content (the copyright-protected text) – actions such as lending or reselling a book, which in a physical object don’t affect the intellectual property, now require copies to be made and are therefore restricted by both copyright and licence terms.

In higher education, more than 90% of library acquisitions are now licensed digital materials. Students’ textbooks are increasingly digital-only as well. This shift has impacted many aspects of library work, for example making it extremely complex to advise patrons about whether and how a given resource can be copied and used. Content licences also reduce the ability of libraries to fulfil their traditional roles and responsibilities as stewards and providers of information (see Figure 1). Libraries, along with museums and archives, preserve cultural materials and, more importantly, democratize access by allowing all members of society to “educate themselves and participate in public life.”

Figure 1: Licence terms provided in a Canadian university library catalogue entry for a scholarly database. Note that teaching and research uses, interlibrary loans, and text and data mining may be permitted by exceptions in the Copyright Act

It has been posited that contract terms may not be able to override users’ rights exceptions in the Copyright Act. However, it is not clear in the Copyright Act and has not been directly addressed in case law whether a user of licensed material can take advantage of user rights such as fair dealing if doing so contravenes the terms of the contract. There is a similar lack of clarity in other countries as well. Therefore, many users – and institutions – avoid exercising these rights in order to reduce risk. Libraries and other institutions are left to attempt to negotiate with every publisher and vendor to add clauses to licences that ensure that users’ rights, as codified in the Copyright Act, are explicitly permitted. This case-by-case approach puts libraries at a disadvantage compared to large publishers, and there are often no alternative sources for material if agreement can’t be reached. It also adds to the number of terms that can differ between licences, increasing the complexity of providing access and advising patrons on how they can use library materials.

In addition to licence terms, content providers use technological protection measures (TPMs) to further control access to and use of cultural materials. TPMs include restrictions on access (e.g., passwords, paywalls, expiries with automatic deletion) and restrictions on use (e.g., download blocking and printing page limits). So for example, where fair dealing might allow a user to copy an excerpt for research purposes, TPMs can prevent them from doing so. TPMs typically apply to all users equally and cannot allow for exceptions based on the Copyright Act; they often also restrict access to content that is in the public domain. Circumventing a TPM is explicitly prohibited in Copyright Act section 41.1 except in certain specific and extremely limited circumstances. This further limits the ability of libraries to provide access to materials and preserve their collections.

The users’ rights under copyright that have emerged in the past quarter-century, reinforced both in legislation and in court decisions, were intended to serve the balance of copyright between owners and users. These users’ rights and this balance have been largely negated by the contracts that now govern access to the vast majority of cultural, creative, research, and educational materials. Combined with the 2022 extension of the copyright term and its resulting public domain freeze, as well as the potential for AI panic to cause creators to be less willing to make their work available, the balance of copyright is quickly shifting away from users.

Despite the aims of balance as well as technological neutrality, the Copyright Act is not equipped to combat the contract terms that now govern our uses of cultural materials in our personal and professional lives, and the added layer of technological protection measures allow rightsholders to further lock down content. The Act should be amended to clarify that a contract cannot override users’ rights, and to permit circumvention of TPMs for legitimate uses of copyright-protected material.

The post From Copyright to Contract: How User Rights Are Being Reshaped appeared first on Slaw.

My perception, supported by a good deal of evidence, is that some people and businesses favour, and indeed boast of those assets and competences which they already have and from which they are trying to profit; they sometimes play down the worth of products, services and content which they do not have and through which they cannot trade for potential profit. Therefore, to take an example, they might trumpet the significance of blogging in legal markets, while referencing, to little or no extent, the infinitely more dynamic sources of added value legal authority, viz. the authoritative and learned tomes, with multiple editions honed over decades and centuries, written and edited by the greatest legal minds in their respective fields. Equally, of course, there are others whose hostility to such innovation stems from their fear and ignorance of it; others still just want to be on message and are fearful of betting on the wrong side. These are not questions of electronic versus print, as might have been a long time ago, because, one way or another, everything has to start with committing human knowledge to a visual or audible medium. Expressed otherwise, initially, everything of deep consequence tends to start with actual or metaphorical pen and paper. It is that content medium which predominantly defines law publishing and which delivers the essential component of legal analysis and added-value secondary written material, viz. law books (in print and electronically). Everything else is diminutive by comparison. When an academic lawyer or practitioner wants critical and learned analysis, they hit the books, not the blogs nor the newsletters. Law publishing and legal tomes are synonymous. While I would not want to detract from any other collections of related structured data, I would assert that what matters, to this day, with the countless respected leading works in their many editions, their level of analysis, undertaken by, with some exceptions, the renowned experts, are these foundations of legal research. Printed or electronically, they are what are central to judicial proceedings; they offer practitioners the ability to practice law, to teachers of law and jurisprudence, the ability to teach, and to at least some of their students, many of the bases for conducting rational adult life.

Those greatest minds are most likely not the everyday legal practitioners and academics who maybe are trying to make names for themselves and/or market their firms, for the latter are unlikely to be able to deliver appropriate quality standards. Chances are, the renowned experts are not doing what they do for the money or for marketing purposes, as to think along such lines would be absurd. Rather, it is because their reputations have already been made and they are courted vigourously by specialist publishers and editors and lovingly hounded until they are finally persuaded to deliver their legal analysis in books and journals. Likewise, not all law books and periodicals, again using whatever delivery media are appropriate, are the same. The majority are pedestrian and of little value in terms of major transactions and litigation, supporting only everyday legal matters and related documentation, but are less likely to assist greatly in winning cases and concluding important deals; they might even be at times unacceptable authorities in court.

For a successful law publishing business, having a backlist of many titles and producing many others per year, is probably not much of a measure of its achievement. They have to be the right ones, not even just expertly written but expertly selected for publication, while the rest are rejected. Therefore, to boast access to high numbers of legal works is likely to be misleading, if they are not those which have been specifically curated to serve particular purposes.

With these factors in mind, I am intrigued by the flurry of deals which have been done in recent times, allowing information technology newcomers and outsiders eagerly to gain access to the body of law books, while allowing the (usually) lesser law publishers to claim that they have presence in technology, notably artificial intelligence. A recent one has been between an academic publisher which has a limited legal portfolio, Oxford University Press, as the content supplier, to Clio, now with vLex and Fastcase, as the business seeking depth and quality of legal content. Over the years, what is now the vLex part of Clio, has done many content deals to feed the search software and increase market credibility, so that now, with the OUP content added, the number of available book titles is substantial. However, the question is whether or not they are market leaders or the best ones, not least due to the absence of those from Thomson Reuters and Lexis Nexis, and, in fact, the purpose is to give visibility to obscure, unsuccessful, low value works? Might it be suggested that this is not curation, but aggregation based on small, opportunistic deals by which both parties convince themselves and the other that the benefits are measurable for them, their authors and their customers? I am not yet convinced. Furthermore, all this is in the midst of litigation between Clio, in the guise of Fastcase, being involved in litigation with Alexi Technologies over alleged anticompetitive conduct, somewhat reminiscent of ROSS’s failed spat with Thomson Reuters. I suspect that the proliferation of litigation to confirm, correct and eliminate alleged actions and behaviours of some of those involved in establishing positions in these times will be a key factor in creating a longer-term landscape, and will determine which of them will litigate themselves into oblivion. I find it almost impossible to disagree with House of Butter’s Sean Hocking’s dismissiveness in his recent editorial on these matters.

I understand the problem that the parties in some of the licensing agreements are endeavouring to resolve. Countless commentators continue to make the point that legal technology without good compatible legal content is deeply flawed and unlikely to succeed, even aside from other possible risks. At the same time, the task of turning a law publishing business into a mainstream technology supplier is hugely complicated, expensive and probably undesirable, certainly in terms of short and medium-term likely profitability. Both parties will also need to keep in mind the frailty of their contracts as licenses given can be taken away and they are not exclusive. Nor are they always likely to survive takeovers and mergers and indeed the changing fortunes of each party, not least when it emerges that respective benefits become unequal, or not as originally promised.

I am inclined to view many of such deals not as indicators of strength and confidence but rather, somewhat desperately, suggesting weakness and fear. This contrasts with the likes of Thomson Reuters and Lexis Nexis, for which a combination of historic organic growth, diversification and acquisition has sustained them in their transitions from what and where they used to be. Their market leadership roles have not been diminished and they have the competence and muscle to create coherent, seamless services which are less likely to have uncontrolled weak spots, due to flaky licensing deals in which they might have become the loser party. It may well be a dream worth retaining to see a combination which might genuinely challenge the status quo in terms of all the important measures. Such an entity, would, no doubt, be good for competition and maybe even be in the interests of customers and in the rule of law itself; however, it is not yet the time. Meanwhile, up and down the food chain, the numerous technology provider mergers and acquisitions, such as the recent ones, of Harvey acquiring Hexus and, perhaps, those of RELX’s investment in Orbital, an AI Platform for real estate law and Thomson Reuters’ purchase of Noetica, serve as a reminder that, in the consolidation process, many names will appear and many more will disappear as market realities emerge and consequences follow.

The post Law Publishing and Information Technology Promiscuity and Boastfulness, and Their Consequences appeared first on Slaw.

Given the high value placed on research excellence by legal professionals and consultants, I am surprised that stories continue to be reported about the lack of rigour exercised in the creation of work product by these professional groups. In addition to the ongoing stories of professional sanctions placed on lawyers for including incorrect citations and other issues associated with the use of generative AI, there have been regular stories about the high values for government report contracts and the use of AI to create them. Here are some articles on a report prepared by Deloitte for the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador on health-care worker staffing that was prepared for the price of $1.6 million:

• Matt Barter, “GOV NL Spent Over $1.5 Million on Health Human Resource Plan,” via his blog.
• Justin Brake, “Major N.L. healthcare report contains errors likely generated by A.I.,” via The Independent.
• Justin Brake, “N.L. government pledges ‘strict review’ on AI use after more false citations found in reports,” via The Independent.
• Garrett Barry, “Deloitte breaks silence on N.L. healthcare report,” via CTV.

In the CTV article includes the following:

“AI was not used to write the report; it was selectively used to support a small number of research citations,” a spokesperson for Deloitte said in a statement. “We are revising the report to make a small number of citation corrections, which do not impact the report findings.”

I notice that the quoted text uses the Unicode character “narrow no break space” with the code <0x202f> on either side of the word “write” instead of a regular space. This character, like the em-dash, has been found to be a common artifact of generative AI systems, and, as there is no apparent reason for it to be used there, I infer this indicates that a similar system was used in the drafting of the statement (to see this for yourself, you can copy and paste the section from the site into a text editor such as NotePad or TextEdit). In typesetting, <0x202f> allows for control over how text is displayed by showing a space while forcing applications like web browsers to not allow the text to run to a new line at that spot. It is used in places like before a colon in French. I interpret this to mean that generative AI is used in a widespread way at Deloitte, which conforms to the way they discuss their work processes in their marketing material on their website.

Generative AI systems were trained on human written content, and both <0x202f> and em-dashes are regularly used in text whether human or machine written, which is why these systems insert them, and I don’t mean to imply that it is inappropriate to use them. I recognize that generative AI can be useful, but to me the particular type of situation outlined in the news stories linked above indicates lack of interest in important parts of research and writing non-fiction (using generative AI in writing fiction is another discussion). This is concerning to me, as it seems to indicate that the authors followed one of two processes, either they have written something and then used an AI system to generate citations retroactively. Or they were revising their citations using an AI system. To me this is implicitly saying that the body of the text is important but the citations matter less, which is a problematic perspective for research integrity.

At the risk of mounting one of my hobby horses, citation practice is a core component of writing substantive content like this. It is not put there to be decorative or to give a document the appearance of gravitas. In The Independent, Justin Brake reported that “Those citations reference research articles which don’t exist but were used to support claims related to virtual care, monetary recruitment and retention incentives, recruitment strategies, and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare workers. In at least two cases, the citations also named actual researchers who did not author the fabricated articles.” Though it is time consuming to verify whether citations exist, it is more so to verify if the referenced material actually says what it is asserted to say, especially in a situation where a system has been used that is designed to provide text that seems like the kind of thing it would say.

One of my foundational professional memories is teaching a class on research to first year students at the University of British Columbia Library when I was still a student and having one of the students respond on the evaluation form that the most important thing they learned in the session was “that works cited has a real purpose.” When she read it, my supervisor looked me in the eyes very intently, asking: “What exactly did you say?” My answer as I recall was that it places your writing into a wider dialogue with what others have written, gives credit to others for their ideas, and increases your credibility by showing that you have researched the topic and are not simply writing your own thoughts.

I was recently told that developers of legal information online have been exploring ways to better integrate their content into the emerging environment of AI generated snippets in online search. At the Law Via the Internet Conference in November, Craig Newton, co-director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, said that providing text in a format that is suitable for this use can mean that online reach is significantly inflated over site visits, with a potential audience of millions. However, the information at the bottom of the snippets that references websites as support for the content is misleading: it appears that these are intended to be citations, but in fact they are AI generated lists of sites that include the kind of information included in the snippet. It is impossible to know from this display where the actual text came from.

Breaking down the network of citations and treating it as an afterthought to research and writing is a concerning trend, though it didn’t start with the launch of widely available generative AI platforms. In response to this, I would encourage you to learn and teach others how to use citation management software. These are mature products that work well, and which have many attractive options (my personal favourite is Zotero). These applications will allow you to manage your research for immediate use, but also over time, and they integrate well with word processors to allow you to avoid the chore of manually inserting and updating your references. There are excellent ways to approach how to manage tracking the sources of the ideas, and I encourage you to learn how to use them before you start a big project. I’m sure you can find a library with people who will help you with this if you need it. It can avoid significant difficulties.

— I would like to thank Jen Brubacher, Katarina Daniels, and Annette Demers, who discussed this with me on the Canadian Association of Law Libraries member forum before I wrote this column.

The post Hallucinated References, Government Reports, and Managing Your Citations appeared first on Slaw.

Canadians with disabilities are sure to have improved access to copyrighted works with the release of Accessible Content: A Guide to the Canadian Copyright Act on Searching for Accessible Formats and Producing and Distributing Alternate Formats by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA). Written by Victoria Owen, Alexandra Kohn and Laurie Davidson, and released on September 15, 2025, this comprehensive guide marks a significant milestone in Canada’s pursuit of practical, lawful, and equitable access to copyrighted works for people with perceptual disabilities.

The Accessible Content guide provides a clear and practical explanation of how the Canadian Copyright Act enables the creation and sharing of accessible copies of materials. It demystifies several key provisions that empower practitioners in non-profit organizations, libraries, and educational settings to legally reproduce and distribute copyrighted works in accessible formats. It clarifies how the Copyright Act’s Section 32 Persons with Perceptual Disabilities allows non-profit organizations and individuals with perceptual disabilities to reproduce works in alternate formats under certain conditions. The guide also covers the cross-border provisions introduced through the Marrakesh Treaty, including Section 32.01(1), which allows exporting accessible formats to people with perceptual disabilities in other countries, and Section 32.01(2), which restricts such exports if the accessible format is already reasonably available in the destination country. Lastly, it explains Section 41.16, which permits circumventing technological protection measures (TPMs) when actualizing the aforementioned sections.

More than a legal commentary, the guide functions as a practitioner-oriented tool that uniquely highlights and reflects on current practices of organizations and individuals already enacting these provisions rather than being purely aspirational. Through such examples, checklists, best practices, and together with a plain-language glossary, the guide makes the law actionable for those producing accessible materials and for rightsholders seeking clarity about accessibility obligations.

Crucially, the Accessible Content guide reframes copyright not as a barrier but as an enabler of access. These statutory provisions facilitate equitable access to collections by ensuring that readers with perceptual or print disabilities can meaningfully engage with creative and scholarly works on equal terms. The Accessible Content guide includes a dedicated section outlining Canada’s commitment to the Marrakesh Treaty. Simply put, the Marrakesh Treaty is an international agreement that facilitates the cross-border exchange and broader availability of accessible materials. It emphasizes human rights principles throughout, and Canada became a signatory in 2016. By situating Canadian copyright law within this human-rights-focused framework, the guide reflects a broader shift toward understanding access to knowledge as a right rather than a market-dependent privilege.

Why the Copyright Act matters for accessibility

Canada’s accessibility legal landscape is multilayered. Federally, the Accessible Canada Act, 2019 (ACA) aims to achieve a barrier-free country by 2040 through the creation, operationalization and reporting on accessibility plans within the federal government. Provincially, however, accessibility requirements vary. Many provinces do have dedicated accessibility legislation, such as the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA) in Ontario, or newer legislation like the Accessible British Columbia Act (2021) in British Columbia, for example. However, the scope of legislation varies widely, with some provinces lacking regulations or the law being narrowly applicable to certain sectors only. Other jurisdictions, including Alberta, Prince Edward Island, and the three territories, do not have dedicated accessibility legislation.

In regions without dedicated accessibility legislation, those fulfilling accessibility obligations rely primarily on human rights law and other statutory tools, such as the Copyright Act, to support the creation and distribution of accessible content for people with disabilities. As such, in this uneven landscape, the Copyright Act remains a vital national tool. The provisions and best practices highlighted in the Accessible Content guide are especially important in jurisdictions without dedicated accessibility laws, providing a consistent legal basis for creating accessible formats and helping ensure equitable access across Canada.

Who’s doing the work?

You may be wondering who is doing the remediation work of inaccessible content in Canada. While librarians serve their populations as needed, in the higher education sector, large-scale remediation falls to the accessibility offices at post-secondary institutions alongside various non-profit organizations to provide accessible formats for people with perceptual disabilities. Organizations tasked with delivering accessible materials, such as the Accessible Content E-Portal (ACE), operated by Scholars Portal and the Ontario Council of University Libraries, create and share accessible formats for college and university users. In the public library sector, the National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS), the Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA), and the Service québécois du livre adapté (SQLA) are key players serving library systems with accessible formats across Canada.

These organizations provide essential services, yet their very necessity highlights a deep structural disconnect: accessibility is divorced from the publishing enterprise itself. Educational services, public libraries, and academic institutions must often intervene after publication to convert materials into usable formats.

What about open access?

It is worth noting that the Accessible Content guide and much of the broader conversation around accessible format creation assume that the underlying work is commercial or distributed with a copyright status of All Rights Reserved. However, even when works are intended for broad circulation, such as openly licensed scholarship, government publications, or educational resources, accessibility is not guaranteed. Availability and accessibility are not synonymous. Digital content routinely fails to meet the technical standards required by readers who rely on assistive technologies.

This is where limitations of open access become apparent. Even when research is freely available, many open access publications remain incompatible with assistive technologies as they lack semantic tagging, alt text, structured headings, or reflowable layouts. Perhaps this is a result of decentralized production practices, resource constraints, and uneven technical expertise of journal teams – conditions particularly common in diamond open access publishing.

There is an opportunity to close this gap that requires coordinated, systemic change. This could include integrating accessibility checks into editorial workflows, adopting accessible file formats as defaults, and ensuring that authors, instructors, and platform providers are trained to design for accessibility from the beginning rather than addressing it only after publication.

Moving beyond remediation

Remediation will always play a role, but it cannot be the centre of the strategy. Librarians and other practitioners know too well the constraints of the limited availability of alternate formats, the perpetual labour related to this work, and reliance on cultural and educational organizations performing this service to correct inaccessible content after publication. For users, dependence on remediation necessitates disclosing their disability, creates barriers not experienced by others, and requires negotiating access rather than receiving it from the outset.

The release of the Accessible Content guide is an important achievement within the current environment in supporting this work. Yet lasting improvement will require sharing the responsibility of a systemic transformation. Publishers, technology providers, educators, and libraries must treat accessibility not as an accommodation but as a foundational design principle. Only when accessibility is built into the publishing process will we close the gap between what is legally permissible, technically possible, and meaningfully accessible.

—

Shelby Thaysen, Scholarly Publishing Librarian
University of Toronto

The post From Exception to Expectation: Advancing Accessible Content in Canada appeared first on Slaw.

Although it is a continuing rather than a new story, I was nevertheless interested to read the recent listing by Publishers Weekly, entitled The World’s Largest Publishers, 2025. For clarity, this is a top 25 of the largest, by revenue, of all publishers in the world and not just those which publish legal information. Nevertheless, first and second on the hierarchy are Thomson Reuters and RELX. The key aspect of the latest report is that after a seven-year run, RELX has been overtaken by Thomson Reuters as the new front-runner in the grouping. In 2024, Thomson Reuters’ revenues rose by 6%, while RELX’s reduced by approximately 1%. In his report of the story in House of Butter, Sean Hocking adds an observation, “Remember it is all due in part from the year in year out support and fleecing of the legal industry”. It is to be expected that artificial intelligence subscriptions should offer continuing and greater opportunities for pricing and billing for updates, versions and enhancement on a regular and never-ending basis.

With my own interest being primarily in legal and professional information publishing, my attention was drawn to those publishers on the list which, to some extent, are involved in those markets. Of the twenty-five, there are six which fall into the category, and among them I have had career experience of one kind or another with four in one guise or another; after the first two, at number five is Wolters Kluwer, despite its greatly diminished market value, at thirteen is Informa (of whose revenues not much comes from law nowadays) and at seventeen and twenty-three are, respectively, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press.

Wolters Kluwer, through its Legal and Regulatory division, has recently acquired Libra Technology, a Berlin-based artificial intelligence solutions’ provider. According to Outsell’s Hugh Logue, Wolters Kluwer hopes to close an innovation gap in legal technology provision; it seems that, watching LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters take steps with generative AI and seeing software providers like Clio purchase vLex, now it has competitive plans. I doubt if their efforts will be meaningful in specifically legal information provision and I would be less surprised if they were to exit that market entirely, under advantageous conditions, having already completed the unloading of its Finance, Risk and Regulatory Reporting unit.

From all twenty-five publishers, their combined revenues for 2024 were approximately US$60b, of which the six which engage in legal and professional markets produced more than US$20b, or, in rough terms, about 35% of the total; Hugh Logue measures the specifically legal and regulatory market at around US$33b. While it must be stressed that the Publishers Weekly stated revenues come from a variety of sources and market sectors, they offer an indication of the size, value and importance of law, tax, accounting and other professional markets. Leaving aside the university presses, CUP and OUP, with their particular characteristics and structures, so much market share among the four others from the relevant six might make competition authorities look negatively at any takeover and merger thoughts among them.

The opinion being proffered here is that the six in question and those other providers which are not quite so strong but are nevertheless well-entrenched and successful around the world, are dominant, powerful and, generally, competent and they will not disappear unless it is in their own interests to do so. Moreover, to the extent that they might see it to their advantage to move in changing strategic directions, as they have done before, they are capable of doing so, where permitted by relevant authorities, by a combination of acquisition, disposal and merger activity, organic growth and innovation, while not losing market leadership. A recent example from the lesser tier is Karnov Group, which has divested its environment, health and safety business-to-business compliance division, as well as its legal training business in Spain. It claims that the legal landscape is undergoing significant transformation, with AI opening new opportunities to serve legal professionals with new solutions. It wants to concentrate its investments on businesses wherein it identifies the best prospects for long-term profitable growth. It is partly for these reasons that I find it difficult to take seriously the notion the market behemoths have several new competitors aiming to dislodge them from their dominant positions, certainly not in the short to medium term. If I am correct to any significant degree, then it might be legitimate to express scepticism about those commentators and participants who choose to convey the impression that small, new entrants into the field are aiming to replace the old guard, notwithstanding the enthusiasm that prevails in many quarters. The longer term is more difficult to assess, partly because of the impossibility of predicting the future but also because history tells us that nothing lasts for ever. In contrast, with regard to consolidation, content aggregator, Mondaq, with its AI enabled intelligence, data and analytics, has been acquired by the legal benchmarking platform, Legal 500. This is another one of a notable handful of combinations of business-to-business publishers focusing on legal and related markets, as they seek to meet the challenges of advertising-driven revenues and technical innovation. It should not be long before we see the next merger or acquisition of this kind.

To that extent, one might be sympathetic to the views expressed in Artificial Lawyer, that the Clio-vLex combination has huge challenges if it hopes to compete meaningfully with Lexis Nexis and Thomson Reuters. It would not surprise me if a measurable quantity of v-Lex’s support thus far has been based on personal and deserved customer admiration and affection for Masoud Gerami, its long-standing but recently retired managing director of global markets. At the same time, there may be those who might be seeking to disguise or minimise some of the negative factors that, perhaps, are being introduced in the rush to gain footholds, notably, for example, some of the inherent dangers of artificial intelligence and the effects on the security of jobs. The market failure at Robin AI, as it is broken up, and the multiple reports of the imminent reversal of artificial intelligence optimism, might be indicative of this. As Joanna Goodman writes in the English and Welsh Law Society Gazette, “it is surely a sign that the legal tech start-up space is becoming crowded, and not every investment is profitable”. With worthy exceptions, an excessive focus on greed-only-driven monetary success, often involving law firm staff cuts, more than on other factors, might be likely to help steer the trend, unless there is clarity and honesty as to purposes, with the primary aim of focusing on greatest needs for the greatest number of people.

The only inevitability is that there will continue to be progressive, regressive and irreversible change, probably evolutionary, to a similar, lesser or greater extent that it has been in the past, while hoping that nothing or no one of value will be seriously injured or destroyed in the process. Almost certainly, there will be successes and failures, and a great deal of consolidation within the market. Nonetheless, with, according to ChatGPT, the term “artificial intelligence” having been coined in 1956 by the computer scientist, John McCarthy, to declare every minor event in those fields to be a revolution is a disservice to actual and somewhat more exhilarating revolutions.

The post Competitively, a Challenging Mountain to Climb appeared first on Slaw.

The recent barrage of copyright lawsuits involving AI companies has revealed the staggering scale of copying undertaken to train large language models (LLMs). In the recently decided Bartz v. Anthropic case, for example, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California notes that the AI firm downloaded millions of books in order to “amass a central library of ‘all the books in the world’” that it could use to develop its AI models and services.

As with the Anthropic case, the majority of these high-profile AI copyright lawsuits are being brought forward by authors and publishers who characterize the threat posed by AI as an existential one. As the Authors Guild puts it, “the market dilution caused by AI-generated works will ultimately result in a shrinking of the [writing] profession as fewer human authors will be able to sustain a living practicing their craft and inevitably shut out important, diverse voices”.

The discourse that has arisen from this framing positions tech giants in the role of user, here conflating user as understood in copyright parlance (e.g. user rights) with that of the more colloquial and derogatory “user”, someone who takes advantage of others. As users, these AI developers are portrayed as bad-faith actors, brazenly disregarding creator rights in favor of a “move fast and break things” approach.

This negatively inflected conception of AI developers as users corresponds to a broader, societal tech and AI backlash that has seen the public discourse around generative AI in particular shift towards one of disillusionment, distrust, and general pessimism.

The problem with such framing is not so much how it portrays the copying activities of tech giants, which, as the Bartz case shows, were often contingent on accessing materials from pirated databases, but how it fails to account for the disadvantages that the vast majority of users face in the modern digital marketplace.

In truth, a more apt representative for users in Canada would be the individual consumer or perhaps the cultural or educational institution, who largely purchases content legally and is increasingly limited in what they can do with their purchased materials by restrictive licensing conditions, digital rights management, and an overall erosion of ownership that has resulted from a shift away from physical formats to digital ones.

Unfortunately, the plight of the library that sees its ability to purchase perpetual access to eBooks disappear almost overnight, or the disappointment of a Netflix subscriber finding their favorite films removed from their online access is not the focus of much media attention, nor does it appear to be of interest to policymakers. Instead, the spotlight remains fixed on the threat of mass infringement enabled by digital technologies. This framing skews the balance of copyright discourse toward punishing bad-faith users, while ignoring how tech and media companies exploit similar technological advancements to restrict access and diminish the user experience.

In response, advocates for a fair and balanced copyright act must push back against the limited and oversimplified depiction of users and creators envisioned in current discussions of copyright infringement. The Billion-dollar tech company is not the average user, nor is the “starving artist” the primary beneficiary of increased copyright protection. If we continue down this current path, the discourse will remain disproportionately influenced by a shrinking cohort of powerful companies and copyright will become a tool they wield to consolidate their position as market incumbents.

The post Don’t Let Recent AI Lawsuits Fool You, Users Are Still Greatly Disadvantaged in a Digital-First Ecosystem appeared first on Slaw.

In pondering upon what interesting and timely topic about which to write, relating to legal information publishing, it occurred to me that what might be appreciated would be to write and repeat the word “artificial” approximately 333 times, followed by the word “intelligence”, the same number of times and finally the same again for the acronym “AI”. I wondered if readers might have found the approximately 1000-word totality of such efforts, or just the repetition of “blah”, to be as captivating as much of the other agenda-driven drivel produced on the topic, including that offered by the gullible journalists who want to join the bandwagon. However, I was not able to convince myself of its wisdom and, therefore, abandoned the idea. As with me, some might have been somewhat bored with the self-serving, endless, pointless and repetitive speculation as to its value, uses and future, in a world in which the practice and study of law, complex and important as they are, need to be protected from whatever might misrepresent, discredit or trivialise them.

Never one to try to predict the future, I was drawn recently to a few related reports, which might point a way to evolutionary trends, some of which, in my view, if real, might be better avoided.

Clearly, legal information publishing, especially for the lesser providers, is not the cash cow that it was many years ago, which might explain current tactics and decisions. For example, an announcement by James Publishing seems somewhat infra dig, in its offer to charge lawyers $6,000 to publish a legal tome in the lawyer’s name, even though it is not the lawyer’s work. The promise would appear to be of 200 pages of AI-generated legal content derived from James Publishing’s portfolio, on the back of a one-hour video call. Not that there is anything especially new or surprising about this, as, for many years law publishers have offered, as marketing tools, branded booklets and suchlike on tax changes, the provisions analysed in house, and offered to practitioners to give to clients. However, the blatantly stated proposition that professional credibility will be boosted and that the purchaser will be able to represent her/himself as a published author, stretches the imagination, at the very least. I expect that most professional lawyers would be embarrassed, if not appalled at any hint of possible or perceived misrepresentation of true expertise. One might hope that, at minimum, the true source of any such published content would be explicitly marked on the books in question.

More usual, as an indicator of profit trends, was the announcement that Centaur Media, based in England, has agreed to sell The Lawyer magazine to Lighthouse Bidco, the parent company of Legal Benchmarking Limited, which is owned by Triple Private Equity. The £43m price achieved was strong, but it leaves Centaur entirely out of legal markets, which probably makes sense in its apparent progression towards corporate oblivion, having also sold several others among its key titles and market positions, but this development comes after The Lawyer was set up in, and has remained with Centaur since 1987. It was interesting to see Centaur’s share price leap significantly on the news, possibly indication the market’s support for its plan to leave the legal business to business sector, with its normally precarious reliance on advertising revenues and profits. The surprise, if anything, is that The Lawyer remained with Centaur for so long, particularly after Centaur disposed of its financial and tax information publications some time ago and the legal magazine’s frequency of publication were reduced from weekly to monthly.

In not-dissimilar markets, comes the announcement that Law Business Research has acquired Legal Geek. According to the Outsell report, the acquisition follows ALM and LBR’s merger earlier in 2025, adding Legal Geek’s four events to an existing event portfolio, which includes Legal Week, Women, Influence & Power in Law, and the IPBC series. I have no doubt that necessary consolidation in these markets will continue.

What seems clear is that if the legacy and somewhat old-fashioned legal information businesses are facing challenging times, the path to artificial intelligence domination seems not to be without significant problems. It was recently announced that the artificial intelligence company, Anthropic, has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors, who allege that the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot. The settlement, if approved, is said potentially to mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers and others who accuse them of copyright infringement. Considering that the case in question deals primarily with a world of fiction writing, in which fact and reality are intentionally intermingled, it might be thought that greater harm would be done where the copyright infringements relate to the serious, factual, opinion and expertise-based world of legal and professional information, which is relied upon by, inter alios, lawyers, students, business, government and the population at large. Maybe closer to home is that the Encyclopaedia Britannica Group has filed a lawsuit against the AI search engine, Perplexity, alleging copyright and trademark infringement. Perplexity is accused of the verbatim copying of Britannica’s content without permission, and misusing its trademarks, potentially misleading users. There have been several such cases over recent times, including that of Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, which seems to go on endlessly, without resolution. It seems to me that many more are both likely and justifiable, in times to come. It would be a tragedy if the ethics, values and respect for the law that should persist especially around legally related matters were to be further diminished. I wonder if the geeks and nerds of legal information technology sufficiently prioritise these criteria?

Amid the chaos, RELX’s Lexis Nexis announced the launch of Protégé General AI, to deliver what it defines as “courtroom-grade AI” to the legal profession, and about which its relevant executive comments that hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in the development. It is described as “the biggest technology spending cycle in the history of business”; I wonder if that statement is verifiable? It is wise to be conscious that we inhabit a world in which quantity increasingly appears to be considered by some to be more impressive than quality. Nevertheless, RELX (and Thomson Reuters) have the investment funds and the expertise to create and deliver the all-embracing technology, which is being promoted and promised, linked to content, documents and workflow tools which are unrivalled elsewhere, making their boast seem more credible than those of others. As established, international public companies, which are strongly regulated, and rely upon trust and goodwill created over centuries, they exist to a different extent than hedge funds to make money over everything else, but they also have long-term goals. Personally, I do not admire, like or trust these corporations and their apologists, but I might be prepared to believe that they offer the better chance for safe, responsible, efficient, effective, high quality functional resources to support the practice and study of law. If, in the course of this project, they sweep up or wipe out some of their private equity-funded challengers, so be it, and a handful of probably undeserving people will be greatly enriched, but the future of law, democracy and society might be very slightly better protected.

On all such matters, at this time, I think of my friend and former colleague, Gary Rodrigues, a Slaw law publishing columnist who caused me to begin writing these pieces for Slaw, who died recently, and what would be his opinions. Always offering encouraging, insightful and wise words, I shall miss hearing from him.

The post Added-Value Legal Information Publishing: What Seems Artificial and What Seems Intelligent appeared first on Slaw.

Editor’s Note: I learned of Gary Rodrigues’ passing this morning. As one of our longstanding Slaw writers, Gary will be remembered for his incredible knowledge and stories behind Canadian legal publishing. Our ‘Legal Publishing’ group here at Slaw have always been well connected to each other. As such, I asked Robert McKay if he might be willing to compose some thoughts. Thankfully he agreed and crafted the kind tribute below. RIP Gary. :( .. Steve M.

Slaw readers and many others, among them lawyers, law librarians, legal information publishers and legal academics, in many parts of the world, will mourn the untimely death, on September 24, 2025, of Gary Peter Rodrigues.

Gary was a qualified Canadian lawyer, who spent much of his working life holding senior directorial posts, initially at Carswell (Thomson Reuters Canada) and, subsequently, at Butterworths Canada (Lexis Nexis Canada). He will be fondly remembered and greatly missed by his countless friends and former colleagues in those organisations, as well as by their authors, editors, suppliers and customers, in Canada and globally.

Between October 2008 and November 2021, Gary wrote nearly 100 insightful and enormously informed columns for Slaw, each of which demonstrated his great knowledge, expertise and authority on matters related to law publishing. These writings strongly reflected his interest and deep involvement in, and love of, the law itself, but also of the business and related aspects of the legal information publishing world. His understanding and interpretation of activities and events were second to none.

For many years, I regarded Gary Rodrigues, as I hope he did me, as a dear friend and valued law publishing colleague. Although separated by the Atlantic Ocean, we were quite regularly in touch, exchanging information and opinions related to our trade, and we would meet, both socially and professionally in London (England), Toronto and around the world, when we attended conferences and the like. During a period of a few weeks while I worked in Toronto, by then for Gary’s key competitor, it was still he on whom I relied, to help me navigate the unusual and puzzling aspects of the issues which I was encountering in a strange professional and social environment. Later, after we were both no longer working full-time, I had the privilege of being invited by Gary to join him and another expert colleague, Jason Wilson, now of Bloomberg Law in the USA and also a former Slaw law publishing columnist, jointly to give presentations at an annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Librarians / Association Canadienne Des Bibliothèques de Droit in Monkton, New Brunswick. Somewhat recoiling with personal embarrassment, I watched and listened to the unquestionable mastery of their subject matter, as my two learned colleagues addressed our distinguished audience, and I squirmed at the comparative generalities contained in my own. It was clear that Gary, as our trio’s lead, had a considerable existing fanbase among the law librarian conference delegates at the event. After our work was completed, he also took the time to show us around the wild and beautiful New Brunswick coastal scenery, which was one of the high points of the visit.

It was he also who recommended me to become a regular law publishing columnist at Slaw, for which I still write regularly, after some fifteen years. Once or twice over the years, he contacted me, suggesting a topic on which I might choose to write, and I was extremely grateful for his advice and guidance. Gary and I were of like mind on the dynamics, history and possible future of law publishing, as well as on other related matters, which I valued enormously.

Away from work, particularly during Gary’s frequent visits to London, we would get together for dinner or, as I recall once, at Matthew Bourne’s radical and innovative performance of Swan Lake, but primarily just to catch up and exchange news about each other’s exploits, not the least of which were Gary’s work on election monitoring. I enjoyed the fact that he was a modern, forward-looking man and proud Canadian, who was politically progressive and tolerant, yet at the same time an upholder of strong values and commitment in relation to his family members and friends. I shall miss his holiday greetings cards, emails about legal information publishing and even occasional notifications about prospective travels to or through London. He was, most certainly, one of the good guys of our trade.

The post Gary Peter Rodrigues (1946-2025) appeared first on Slaw.

It has happened again; once more, v-Lex has changed hands, this time from Oakley Capital to the Canadian software company, Clio (Themis Solutions Inc.), for around US$1bn. Clio/Themis sits within the portfolio of New Enterprise Associates (NEA) venture capital firm, which previously shared in the funding of Ravel Law. Ravel, in 2017, was sold to RELX, which might indicate the future directional path of Clio/v-Lex. Harvey AI had been linked to rumours that it considered acquiring the much more established competitor, v-Lex, the alleged purpose being for the former to exploit the latter, to assist growth. That notion must be firmly off the table, as dramatic events have unfolded. The price paid by Clio is huge and probably disproportionately high, compared to v-Lex’s true value, set against Thomson Reuters market capital of $125bn and RELX’s of $100bn, or thereabouts. The two market leaders are probably more stirred than shaken by the news, but, more than likely, are anxious to retain and gain as much business as they can, perhaps using bundling and price incentives. It might be an opportune time for customers to exploit this.

Of the deal, Outsell’s Hugh Logue, describing AI without content as “hollow”, comments that it “proves [that] AI is empty without exclusive content, growth now sits in the underserved long tail, and point solutions risk fading if they lack specialist data and AI depth that clients can’t easily replicate with today’s low-code tools”. He sees the Clio/v-Lex combination appealing to small and mid-sized law firms, though, I would imagine, primarily serving N. American rules and traditions of legal practice.

The transaction has been applauded widely for its potential to enhance Clio’s practice management platform with the integration of v-Lex’s legal research capabilities and access to such v-Lex content as it maintains, either proprietary or under license, for such time as such exclusive or non-exclusive licences remain in place. There are, at the same time, sceptics who will be pleasantly surprised if it all works out.

I would imagine that the worlds of venture capitalism, private equity, hedge fund management and gambling (are they all the same?) are confusing, or regarded as dark arts, by many others, as they are to me. Still, having regard to the changing world of law publishing, legal information and electronic legal research tools, they are very much in evidence and must, therefore, be extremely important. To semi-outsiders like me, it is always intriguing how recent start-ups and unprofitable businesses can acquire such high valuations derived from what appears to be very little. But then, what is puzzling to one person is everyday stuff to another, so I am not too troubled by my own relative ignorance, in this particular case.

Having recently but erroneously opined that Lexis Nexis and their corporate peers were too rich and well-established to descend to the depths of having to collaborate with market minnows, and that California-based Harvey AI was just another financially-backed, and highly valued, young hopeful, I was taken aback at the news that the two have entered into a strategic alliance to integrate AI technology and legal content and develop advanced workflows. The apparent intention is to offer primary law content and established case citations within the Harvey platform and jointly develop advanced legal workflows. I would assume that secondary law content is, wisely, not included. As Outsell’s Tatiana Khayrullina writes in relation to standards publishing, which might be considered analogous to primary law, “Standards publishers face growing uncertainty as legal shifts and tech disruption challenge traditional subscription models. Monetization is under pressure, prompting a shift toward value-added products that offer integration, usability, and digital delivery to meet evolving user needs”. The plan is for the alliance to combine LexisNexis AI technology and content with what users expect in Harvey, for the benefit of Harvey customers.

Regarding the deal, Hugh Logue describes it as Lexis Nexis having armed Harvey, as he views artificial intelligence without proprietary data as obsolete. It is difficult to disagree with that. He writes that the “LexisNexis and Harvey deal removes Harvey’s biggest weakness – the lack of access to proprietary legal content – by baking LexisNexis’s cases and statutes into Harvey’s AI app. The result is a powerful combination of a legacy content giant and a startup innovator that puts competitors on notice”. I am not clear, though, about what is the notification, other than that there are opportunities for acquisitions to be done by the behemoths. I doubt if it greatly affects Thomson Reuters, which dealt with its minor challenger, ROSS Intelligence, using different strategies, while making significant strides in both artificial intelligence and deep research capabilities. I am not certain as to who are the other competitors to which reference is made. For some time, observers had expressed the view that Harvey was going to have to obtain data, particularly caselaw, from outside sources, in order to be able to flourish. If that is the case, Harvey attaching itself to Lexis Nexis looks like a smart move, certainly for the newcomer.

The importance of quality secondary legal content cannot be understated. Legal publisher, Kevin O’Keefe, correctly, in my opinion, stresses that “in the age of AI search, law firms must focus on legal publishing that gets their lawyers sourced and cited—not on chasing clicks and website traffic”. He encourages practising lawyers to be published and cited, in order to thrive.

It is notable that some commentators are almost invariably focused on improving the obvious weaknesses of the recent startups, while forgetting to point out the sheer brilliance of the sophisticated, integrated, tested and trusted products and services, with their constant large and small capability tweaks and enhancements, from the market leaders. Their true, ever redeemable, shortcomings might be in customer care and pricing, but not so much in the fundamentals.

Credible and impressive deals are those which bring quantifiable benefits to both parties, so they must be substantial for Lexis Nexis. One reason might be that it is taking steps to protect and grow its investments. LexisNexis’ parent company, RELX, is a significant investor in Harvey AI, thanks to REV Venture Partners, RELX’s venture capital arm. With Harvey presently included within REV’s portfolio, where, until 2016, sat Intelligize, a provider of content, news collections, regulatory insights and analytics tools for compliance, transactional and financial reporting professionals, which was acquired outright by RELX and now forms part of Lexis Nexis, it must be somewhat likely that Harvey AI is being nurtured for outright acquisition by Lexis Nexis. That would make simple and unremarkable sense of recent events and developments. It was in 1994, that Lexis Nexis itself was purchased by Reed Elsevier, though, by then, LN’s reputation and credentials were historically well-established. Reed Elsevier’s Butterworth’s had already been a licensee of Lexis Nexis.

Another option might be that, at some time, Harvey finds itself owned by Wolters Kluwer, as the two have announced a collaborative set of licensing agreements by which Harvey has access to primary content from Wolters Kluwer’s German and US businesses, and the two will explore other such opportunities. Maybe the time has come to reignite the old question, from 1998, of a RELX and Wolters Kluwer merger, especially with significant changes currently under way at Wolters Kluwer, the significantly smaller of the two. Meanwhile, we might anticipate a content license from Thomson Reuters to Harvey, just to achieve a hat trick.

If anything, even vaguely along those lines, becomes an eventual outcome, the result too might be the predictable one, as happens when a huge and rich but non-innovative one swallows a small, fast and extremely smart entrepreneurial one. One of the two, before too long, will be invisible, which might not be a bad idea, its founders having given the baby the appellation of Harvey, named, it would seem, not after a giant, invisible, imaginary white rabbit, nor a notorious American sex offender, but an unpleasant-sounding character from a television drama series.

With the news about both v-Lex and Harvey, it would not be surprising to hear about other not-dissimilar deals being done over the mid-term, the transactions and arrangements becoming progressively larger in scale and value. The need to combine content with documentation workflow and to gain access to greater and more quality markets remains, for smaller businesses seeking security and wealth and for the large ones to maintain and steadily increase their standing. The market positioning that exists in-between the young entrepreneurs and the two leaders might seem somewhat uncomfortable, perhaps encouraging further reorganisation and/or consolidation. It might be appropriate to launch a speculative “Fantasy Folly”, to imagine where the law publishing, information and solutions activities of Wolters Kluwer (which has agreed to divest its Finance, Risk and Regulatory Reporting unit, from its Financial & Corporate Compliance division, to the Regnology Group), Bloomberg, Karnov, Informa, Bloomsbury and indeed, Clio and others will be (or not) within the next few years. On a distantly related topic, serving to remind that all actions have consequences, perhaps as a result of Canada’s Irwin Law having been acquired by University of Toronto Press, Australia’s Federation Press has entered into an agreement with AI-enabled services company, EBSCO Information Service to distribute Federation Press’ catalogue of legal scholarship through the EBSCO eBooks platform. Irwin Law was the North American agent for the Australian law publisher prior to its own acquisition. Perhaps the new arrangement will highlight the Australian law content, making it too more visible to content-hungry predators. On all such issues, of course, I am obliged and happy to recognise that wholly opposing views are expressed by many other extremely knowledgeable experts. That said, no one can accurately predict the future, including time, scale and financial metrics.

The post Law Publishing Road to Perdition? Probably Not appeared first on Slaw.

Welcome to my 100th and final column for Slaw. It all started innocently enough at the outset of 2008 when the late Simon Fodden, innovative founder of this venue, invited me to contribute a column on scholarly publishing issues. I first wrote of how the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) was now requiring those it funded to make the resulting research freely available, if after a 12-month delay (to appease publisher pushback). I called it at the time a “tipping point” in the growing efforts to secure public or open access to all research worldwide.

Now, some seventeen years later, it’s fair to ask what has changed? Well, first off, publishers no longer object to open access. They recognize it to be the very best thing for research, while also embracing its profit potential in the Article Processing Fees that authors pay. And as for that 12-month delay to access, CIHR is finally giving serious consideration to dropping it. But then moving to worldwide access to all research is proving to be a remarkably slow tip. While gains have been made in every area, a substantial proportion of journals, especially in the Global North, have yet to make their research open.

So, clearly there’s still much to be done. And in that regard, I can say that Simon Fraser University’s Public Knowledge Project (PKP) will certainly continue coming up with the sort of technical, economic, legal, and integrity initiatives that I’ve introduced in Slaw over the years. And it’s fortunate, as well, that many other inspired initiatives worldwide are also pursuing this goal of greater access.

So while much remains to be achieved on this front, there also comes a time for fresh voices. This is why Slaw’s tireless Editor and Publisher, Steve Matthews and I, are delighted to announce that Stephanie Savage, UBC’s Scholarly Communications and Copyright Services Librarian, will be taking up the scholarly publishing beat at Slaw. In fact, Stephanie plans to assemble a Canadian university copyright librarian collective to collaborate with her in covering intellectual property issues in higher education.

With that important step in place, I’d like to conclude my run by returning to an earlier legal issue that has only grown more vexed over the last year. Following a 2024 SFU Faculty Association vote to boycott Israel, I set out in a Slaw column my reasons for voting against it. It had to do with academic freedom principles that included PKP’s support for Israeli journals, which offer Israeli and Palestinian scholars the chance to publish dissenting research and critiques that seemed much needed at this point.

More than one of my respected colleagues objected to my placing academic freedom ahead of the inordinate suffering of Gazan faculty, families, and children at the hands of Netanyahu’s government, which seemed to exceed what its war against Hamas could justify. I take their point. And indeed, according to one of academic freedom’s founding statements, “to speak freely as a citizen” is no less an aspect than the right to engage in research free of outside interference. Any defense of Israel’s, as well as Gaza’s, use of PKP’s scholarly publishing platform need not overshadow my responsibilities as a citizen of the world in witnessing what is taking place in Gaza.

Thus, in the legal context of Slaw, I would add my voice to those supporting the International Court of Justice’s pursuit of the cases involving this war, including the charge that Israel is failing to meet its obligations to the civilian population living in Gaza, as well as the pending hearing on Israel’s failure to prevent and prosecute “the crime of genocide in the Gaza strip.”

In the ICJ obligations case currently being heard, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’ testimony attests to Israel’s responsibilities for “the utterly inhumane conditions of life imposed on [Gaza’s] people who are… deprived of lifesaving relief.” As conditions continue to worsen, we need to heed the calls for lifesaving relief coming from Gaza, with increasing support from dissenting voices in Israel, as well as from the world at large. It is encouraging to see, for example, Prime Minister Carey announce that Canada would not only increase aid but recognize the State of Palestine – if with potentially insurmountable conditions to be met – at the United Nations General Assembly this September. The message should be clear that nothing is more pressing at this point than for the Israeli government to find a way to alleviate the intolerable harm experienced by Gaza’s civilian population.

If this seems a somewhat dispiriting note on which to end my time at Slaw, let me add that I can’t imagine a better way of expressing my appreciation of what “Canada’s online law magazine” and its readers have afforded me since 2008 than to offer this correction of the record.

The post A Time for Change and Correction appeared first on Slaw.

It is normally frowned upon to suggest that experiences from the past might be indicators of outcomes in the future. The problem is that invariably to follow that line runs a significant risk of naivety, for want of understanding that history does indeed frequently repeat itself, and humans are inclined to repeat their own mistakes, as they search to replicate their successes from the past. It was, therefore, noteworthy that the global US-based law firm, Cleary Gottlieb, has acquired the small London-based AI-focused startup, Springbok AI, the latter described in The Lawyer as “a challenger to the Harvey hype”, begging the question as to Harvey’s own potential success or otherwise. Of the acquisition, Outsell’s Hugh Logue generalises somewhat, in my view, that the acquisition “signifies a landmark move when legal services stopped consuming technology and started competing on it”. It might be so, but it would be a surprise, certainly to me; we have been here before.

In Germany, there has been the announcement that a legal technology startup, Xayn (soon to be Noxtua SE), has raised approximately €80.7 million of investment funds from C.H.Beck, Germany’s leading legal publisher, as the leading investor, but also from law firms, CMS and Dentons. C.H. Beck’s head of legal technology comments that “In the future, we will offer our customers not only high-quality content and research capabilities, but also comprehensive productivity solutions for their legal work”. There is good reason for healthy scepticism, when it comes to the PR pronouncements of law publishers.

The logic of law firms investing along the supply chain to acquire the tools of their trade is not new; equally so is the reverse notion that legal information providers should “cut out the middleman” and embrace legal advice-giving. Things do not always work out as planned, it would seem, or rather, the status quo of the more powerful party tends quickly to be re-established.

For many years, the French-based law and tax publishing business of Editions Francis Lefebvre had, alongside its core business, a similarly-branded law firm and an accountancy firm. Their subsequent expansion has been on the professional information and software side, as the advice businesses were abandoned. In Britain, in 2013, Jordan’s, a long-standing law publishing and corporate services business, established, out of its corporate side, a law firm called Jordans Law. It was an innovative step, the logic of which could be understood. By 2015, Jordan Publishing had been sold to Lexis Nexis, thereby separating law publishing from legal services and in 2016 the rest of Jordans was sold to Vistra, later to be renamed Vistra; again, the status quo was established.

The purpose of a law firm, at its most basic, as with other commercial entities, is, more than likely, I would imagine, to make as much money as it can, so it will inevitably try whatever is possible and lawful to achieve that objective. Perhaps, the enviable challenge for the giant firms is that they can be hugely profitable from advice services, so that other activities are not so attractive in the long run, not least because the firms are run by lawyer-partners who think like lawyers and prioritise what they know best. Hence, peripheral activities tend not to match up as profit generators and are relegated to back-office functions, where entrepreneurship is often sent to die, rather than to operate as profit centres.

Of course, a niche acquisition target can be extremely appealing if it has succeeded in gathering, in consequence of innovative products, optimum pricing and service standards, a clutch of appealing customers which its acquirer would like to have, in order to grow revenue and margin, but might, in other circumstances, might find it difficult to do so. Buying the customer base might be a cost-effective way of achieving growth for the core business. Within a short time, the acquired business can become invisible, and things go on as before.

Another possible barrier in such a scenario might be that if the succulent new customer base comprises competitors, for example, in the case of law publishers, other providers, or for law firms, other firms, it may be the case that those customers will not want to trade with a competitor, both to enrich them and to reveal information, data and secrets that should not be shared. The risk is that the customer base which comes with the plucky little acquisition quickly disappears, rendering the acquisition redundant and disappointing.

As to the acquisition deal to which reference is made, I know little of the parties concerned or the rationale and logic that lies behind it; it may well be inspired, and any support or criticism from me is a complete irrelevancy. However, I have witnessed many acquisitions by large entities in and around law practice and legal information provision, so as to observe that they do not always succeed, as, perhaps, Thomson Reuters’ recent disposal of FindLaw suggests. In the case of the acquirees, indeed, the people who lead them may be enriched, or they might even secure executive positions within the acquiror businesses, but this is less likely to be the case, in the long run, further down the hierarchy. From my own disinterested experience, I wish that law firms did better jobs of advising on the law and that law publishers and legal information tools’ providers did likewise in their respective fields. Mixing it all together successfully must certainly be quite a challenge.

Yet, with all the provisos and qualifications in place, as I see it, the likes of Thomson Reuters and RELX, however evil and avaricious they both are, will be the winners in the present jostling for standing in their particular markets. In that context, it will be interesting to observe the battle for market share between RELX’s Decisis and vLex Fastcase, in the US market. Particularly if vLex’s Dan Hobson is correct, that the future of legal technology will centre on integration and collaboration among vendors, rather than law firms trying to be technicians and technicians trying to be law publishers, the existing legal information and software behemoths, however evolved, seem to be perfectly positioned to triumph, warts and all, once the calculations are done. On the law publishing side, at the level and scale of Thomson Reuters and Microsoft collaborating over professional workflow, issues of reputation, market share and reach serve to reinforce the logic. At lower levels, it is certainly intriguing to watch the extent to which, even after many years, the software providers have a continued need to collaborate with and feed off the specialist legal publishers in order to attempt to flourish. We see another of several content deals by vLex, the latest being to host legal content from Informa’s Taylor & Francis. I wonder if this is some of the same content that that was already licensed to Maritime Insights and Intelligence Ltd., when i-Law was sold by Informa? It might be noted that Lexis Nexis/RELX and Thomson Reuters seem not to have the same need to generate licensing fees by letting their legal content be hosted by lesser would-be competitors; their coffers are full from even more lucrative sources. Love them or hate them, their more than two centuries of sustained success is not by accident. Professional publishing historic profits derive from the fact that the market leaders were judged by customers on quality, features and the benefits derived from using their products and services, rather than on price, which is enviable. The more commoditised legal content becomes, the less it will be valued. Still, I think that they will be around for so long as it suits them, maybe even deservedly.

The post The Prospect of Law Firms Acquiring Their Information and Software Suppliers: Collaboration and Integration (Almost) Everywhere appeared first on Slaw.

The number one issue facing scholarly publishing today is research integrity. The crisis is associated with paper mills selling authorships to fabricated papers; reviewer cabals colluding with special issue guest editors; predatory journals, sans reviewers and editors, acting as auto-publish clubs; and papers rife with image and data manipulation. In response, publishers and editors are scrambling to retract thousands of corrupted papers, close complicit journals, and cease special issues. The publish-or-perish culture, often backed by cash incentives (now banned in China), can be blamed, as can publishers pushing papers through to capture open access fees. It all reflects how, in making this historic transition to online publishing on a global scale, scholarly publishing has yet to establish the additional checks and balances, policing and penalties, by which this new system can reassert its reliability and trustworthiness.

The scale of the problem has only become apparent due to a remarkable group of research fraud sleuths who see the need for a better means of dealing with it. Our efforts at the Public Knowledge Project involve developing for the industry a standardized article label for displaying adherence to scholarly standards. But at this point, more needs to be done.

Consider, for example, how one of the largest publishers, Wiley, concluded its investigation of the thousands of articles it had to retract and the journals it shuttered: “We have since sent sanction letters to several hundred [unnamed researchers serving as] Guest Editors notifying them that they can no longer take on an editorial role in our journals or publish with us in future.” That only leaves the sanctioned to publish everywhere else. Yet even where the names are known, a UK research integrity study found, the number of papers offering “evidence suggestive of falsification” was four times greater than the number of institutions investigating this evidence. But when universities go after faculty fraud – as with Harvard’s recent revoking of Francesca Gino’s tenure for falsifying research data – they face years of committee work, as well as the accused’s counter-suits.

Given how publishers and institutions are struggling to address this issue, it may well be time to consider whether legal measures could be introduced to address research integrity. To that end, I’d like to introduce a proposal for legislative reform, while asking, dear Slaw readers, for your (free) legal advice on its reasonableness, while perhaps provoking a better approach.

For a number of reasons, I believe that copyright reform may offer the best path for supporting research integrity. Scholarly publishing is in need of a digital-era update, which pretty well every other culture industry – be it music, video games, telecommunications – has had to protect their interests in this new era. These legislative changes have typically begun in one jurisdiction and through international trade agreements and local legislative initiatives, have spread internationally.

Research’s digital-era developments, both encouraging with open access and worrisome over integrity, set it apart from the other industries in ways that the Copyright Act has yet to recognize. It is time to make “research publications” a category of work, alongside architectural, choreographic, dramatic, literary, and musical works, among others. This will enable the law to support and protect research publications, distinguished by experts attesting to its adherence to the field’s standards for advancing knowledge.

Addressing both open access and research integrity offers an increase in efficiency and impact that might garner greater support, even as both issues represent a stakeholder consensus among authors, libraries, publishers, and funders on their value for advancing the public good. In the case of open access, and despite this consensus, we have yet to find in a timely manner a sustainable path at a fair price. This market failure, I have argued at some length, is best addressed by the typical legal remedy for such failures, namely, statutory licensing. Briefly, the law could require publishers of research publications to be fairly compensated by research institutions and funders for providing immediate open access to their publications.

I now propose adding a research integrity section to Copyright. It would state that to willfully deceive the public about a work’s research status for reasons of financial gain is to infringe on research’s statutory licensing. Those responsible for this deception, whether authors, editors, publishers, or others, would be subject to criminal prosecution and substantial fines, much as holds for copyright infringement generally. After all, such fraudulent claims can endanger human life and well-being, represent misuse of public funds, and undermine the research system that copyright is intended to advance.

This new publishing medium has shown itself to be in need of some minimal level of regulation on behalf of the public and the profession. Editors and authors would still be able to post research publication “corrections” and “retractions” that reflect honest mistakes and substantial reconsiderations of work conducted in good faith (without infringing on research’s statutory licensing).

At a time when the public’s trust in science is in need of a boost and autocratic regimes are feeding off this Age of Misinformation, I think it is time to explore bold legislative initiatives that can increase access to, while improving trust in, all that research has to offer. Your thoughts, please.

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I have the impression, no more than that, and in no sense verifiable nor measurable, that among the eminent experts and commentators, there seems to exist a possibly small number of self-interested and obsessive nerds, primarily in North America, on the periphery of that part of the law publishing industry which actually has paying customers, who spend much of their time pretentiously telling us that the major players are about to go under and be overtaken by minnows. I understand that similar but different paranoia extends also to legal practice; it seems, to me at least, to be a baffling generational phenomenon and/or the prevailing power of “stupid”. As with some conspiracy theories, there may be a degree of truth and realism in them, but the successes consistently enjoyed by RELX, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer and others, with their massive and valuable databases of primary, secondary and importantly-related content, are not indicative of impending doom. Their continued growth and profitability show that they are exceptionally successful and, certainly their shareholders and senior directors, must, I imagine, be delighted. Thomson Reuters’ win in court against ROSS Intelligence, at least for the present, as a further appeal is allowed, amid its own recent developments and launch in support of its artificial intelligence initiatives, as with those of RELX and Wolters Kluwer, highlight the point forcefully.

In some cases, whatever doom-laden prediction is being peddled, that deep, wide and hugely successful legal information provision and solutions are being subsumed by blogging, or that a tiny, AI (possibly in name only) start-up is sounding the imminent death knell for the established giants, or that the proliferation of new entrants has some major collective effect, the purpose of the predictions are almost certainly just to eke out some visibility amid the crowded mess which exists. It is understandable why and how this is done, and it plays, possibly, to the requirements of private equity gamblers, who have much to gain or lose, so general scepticism about it might also be understandable.

Of course, law publishing, as it was known in the past, has been in steady decline for some time and it might be argued that, as a stand-alone business proposition, it is finished. The inevitability of consolidation to reduce costs and retain market share is recently in evidence in the business-to business sector of legal information, with the announcement of the merger of Law Business Research and ALM, both owned by private equity funds, although ALM’s business and finance division will be “carved out”, rebranded and retained by EagleTree Capital; the merger is the latest move in a convoluted process, over many years, of takeovers and mergers of these businesses. The opinion of Hugh Logue, of Outsell, is that “the LBR-ALM merger combines global scale with niche expertise, creating a powerful new platform that will reshape how legal professionals access, utilize, and integrate critical information across markets”. I wonder if it is truly so significant, or instead, somewhat desperate? Perhaps even more dramatic, if the information is correct, is that the market for legal directories is in sharp decline, although this has been predictable for a long time. However, that says little or nothing about the major parent corporations, whose ability to evolve, however clumsily, slowly and deviously, is impressive, hence their continued successes and growth. No doubt, as time goes on, they will acquire, amalgamate and dispose, as they assess themselves and their markets, but I imagine that they do not suffer much lack of sleep, in consequence. Indeed, their frequent and recent disposals and product closures probably in part underpin their financial successes and evolution.

What seems to me to be the case at present, is that the sector, be it considered to be about publishing, information provision technology, research, artificial intelligence, workflow solutions and/or whatever else, is in a state of flux and uncertainty, an effect of which is proliferation, short-termism, “suck it and see” strategy and, of course, litigation, as those concerned argue over the spoils. It resembles, in some ways, the automotive industry, both now and in the early years of the twentieth century, when new business and products were being launched daily, all with new claims, but only very few resulting in market acceptance, as the majority failed and were forgotten. I am certain that only a notable excellent few of the, as yet, unpronounceable electronic vehicle brands from China will succeed in Western markets, and the reasons for success and failure, when they come to be analysed historically, will be clear. I imagine that the same will be said of the legal information markets and its new and established participants, though some will realise their dreams by being acquired, rather than fail.

It should go without saying that innovation and risk-taking is laudable and the best of those who do it are to be praised. It is usually immensely difficult to enter new and existing markets, particularly those which are conservative and cautious in nature, notably the legal one. At the same time, there is no right to success and castigating customers for their incorrect attitudes, and established competitors for continuing to enjoy the benefits of their success is probably unwise. Customers do not want to be told that they are not quite good enough; the normal and established tradition is that they are told that they are always right.

It would be a relief to see and hear the boastful, immoderate and, to some, boring noise around artificial intelligence calmed down somewhat and to put it into perspective, although serious, unbiased and disinterested reviews of quality, functionality, service and value are almost always to be welcomed. Not every deal done, nor investment of seed money, nor technical tweak, nor exchange of opinion expressed in litigation, is interesting, important or life-altering. Life tells us about things that come and go, and that success and failure are rarely easy to interpret in simplistic ways. Depth, value and longevity might be considered to be better measures, as all the overtaken technologies, once-fascinating devices and tools of recent times tend to indicate. How we shall laugh and be embarrassed at the primitiveness and pointlessness of some of that which we applaud today, as present innovations find themselves abandoned alongside looseleaf services, laser disks, cassettes, cds, dvds and more, which the law market, in their time, embraced. The passage of time cannot and should not be reversed, and things invented cannot be un-invented, so mature and reasoned acceptance is, some might argue, the way forward, as we continue to learn, repair and replace that which is of now. As an example of recent disfunctionality, despite its impressive financial and technical gains over several years, the recent announcement that Wolters Kluwer’s CEO would be retiring a year thereafter, caused an immediate, illogical and significant drop (other reasons aside) in its share price. Inevitably, emotion and fear of the future can be powerful, however irrational, drivers of action, which can be observed everywhere.

Perhaps in contrast, or even competition, roll on the ever-escalating extent and value of artificial intelligence in diagnosis, treatment and cure in medical research and practice. That, surely, deserves to be limitless and unchallengeable. Of course, the innovation and initiatives in legal and related matters are inevitable and often valuable, but probably, unlike in medicine, the benefits are intended for the few rather than the many.

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This is a case of not closing the barn door after the horse is out, to use a pre-twentieth-century expression for a twenty-first-century issue. But, more precisely, I want to argue for propping the barn door open to enable the rest of the horses to run free after a good number have been questionably sold off.

Let me explain. Think of those sold-off horses as the research studies that at least three major research publishers – Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Oxford University Press with more deals pending – have rented out to AI giants, such as Microsoft, for the purposes of training Large Language Models (LLMs). It’s a publisher windfall, having already sold access to libraries or charged authors for providing open access. Researchers are understandably outraged over neither being asked nor compensated. It also drives up AI costs, while offering a partial set of research. If publishers have let these researchers’ horses out of the barn (in the traditional sense of to let as in rent out), what is to be done?

I come at this as a researcher who has explored how academic work constitutes – and thus should be legally regarded as – a different order of intellectual property (even as such work is at the origins of the intellectual property concept). The distinction between academic work and other forms of intellectual property lies in the work’s value not being served by restricting access to it. Rather, researchers create value by contributing, as widely as possible, to the work of others and the wellbeing of the world. This does result in those institutions that value research and teaching compensating researchers, with this transaction influenced by, while operating at a remove from, the circulation of the work.

So researchers have every reason to prop the barn door open. They have the means to set their horse free, pretty well anywhere they choose to publish their work (that being an important right in itself). While they can pay publishers article processing charges (APCs) to open the work, the vast majority of publishers also allow researchers to post a peer-reviewed draft of their studies at no charge in preprint servers and repositories prior to publication.

In exercising this right to free their work, researchers are taking a stand, in effect, with the democratization of knowledge, especially in light of the current U.S. presidency busily deleting vast troves of public health information, constricting support for research more generally, and showing, as one columnist puts it, “that it considers knowledge production worthless.” With court challenges now underway in defense of academic freedom in Canada and the U.S., making one’s work publicly available amounts to a good faith demonstration of what such freedom offers. Giving the public free rein to use their research on health, climate, economics, education, and the list goes on, not only contributes to the global circulation of research, but to the broader realm of public discourse. But, yes, public access means that such research will increasingly serve as training data for LLMs.

For researchers who object to LLMs freely feeding on their research, let me make an appeal to how this is, in fact, what distinguishes research in purpose and economy. Whether you consider specific instances, such as AI’s instrumental role in drug discovery, or more generally, as Google’s Gemini AI is now being consulted 10 million times a day, such uses seem closely aligned with what we want for our research, especially compared to the alternative of exposing the public to research-free artificial intelligence or the research that AI hallucinates in the absence of the real thing. As to research’s particular economy of recognition, AI systems are now crediting the sources consulted in its responses. For example, on asking Google search what proportion of research is now open access, its AI companion Gemini pops up with “50 percent,” while offering links to five sources behind its response, of which only one is a research publication (itself open access).

As for the economics and wealth-making of AI companies, which trouble some researchers, I’d point to how these companies’ business practices are areas of research investigation (around exploitative labor practices, for example), as are issues of representation, use, environmental impact, and metaphysics (see my earlier column), among other matters. Yet I’d also note that researchers have a professional interest in increased collegial, professional, and public use of research that AI is capable of providing. And, as such, we need to ensure that public access to AI resources remains a condition of our contribution. What better way is there, we might ask, of reminding people that public support for research continues to benefit them than to see such work repeatedly cited in responses to their queries.

And if anyone still finds it hard to let go of the research publishers’ windfall – especially as that windfall is not offsetting library subscription and author open access expenses – then consider this: if and when researchers do finally set their research free, then publishers will have nothing more to sell to AI companies. Once the horses are out of the barn, the research is there to pull for everyone.

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In the world of research, journal publishers are occasionally compelled to “retract” a published article. It may contain errors that posting a “correction” won’t sufficiently address, may utilize falsified data, may have been published elsewhere, may have been plagiarized, or may have been otherwise compromised. Yet the retracted paper does not disappear. It retains its place in the journal, while being stamped “Retracted” on page after page, along with an explanation. This reflects how the act of publication, when it comes to research, constitutes the official record. Publication is “performative,” according to speech act theory, like naming a ship or pronouncing a couple married. Publication doesn’t report; it constitutes science and scholarship.

The retraction, then, is a healthy self-correcting means of maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record. Mistakes happen and peer reviewers miss them on occasion. Twenty-two Nobel Prize winners have retracted papers. It can be at the author’s request, but is more often through the diligence of careful readers. Honest errors account for a fifth of the retractions according to one study, while almost half are attributed to data manipulation and plagiarism.

Retractions exemplify the academic profession’s long-term policing and responsible maintenance of the scholarly record. Yet, I wish to raise a couple of recent turns that suggest it may be time to consider a measure of legal oversight around research misconduct that comes to light through retractions. I am already on record for advocating copyright reforms that support open access to research, given how that will promote the progress of science (to borrow the US constitutional phrasing “warranting copyright”). This would be a related initiative, also geared to digital-era pursuit of open science that would also begin with a legal recognition of “research publications” as a distinct category of work. In Canadian copyright law, for example, works in the “scientific domain” fall within the “literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work.” This does the academy and the public a disservice.

What first concerned me about the state of research integrity and retractions came last year when it became clear that in 2023, over 10,000 papers were retracted, far exceeding the total of any previous year. The biggest source of retractions was the publisher Hindawi. A good portion of those retractions involved the journals’ “special issues” handled by “guest editors,” that enabled the publisher to increase publication rates and profitability due to the author fees required for open access, leading to its acquisition by the giant publisher WIley.

The guest editors appear to have accepted papers without peer review from “paper mills” that sell authorship positions on fabricated papers, often with the help of AI. The publisher had its eyes on the wrong goals. It has now lost $35-40 million (USD) in revenue and will, as a result, ban “several hundred” of the offending guest editors from Wiley journals, with no consequences for the so-called “authors.” This, to me, speaks to the need to explore federal regulation and other legal measures designed to protect the scholarly record, as well as the public and professions, from being exposed to such flagrant abuse and inattention in the quality of research publications.

After all, public oversight is applied to other research-related areas, such as Canada Health’s drug approval process or the Canada’s Drug Agency which provides “Canada’s health system leaders with independent evidence and advice” based on research. And Canada’s Food and Drugs Act (1984) protects consumers by, for example, forbidding advertising of “any food, drug, cosmetic or device to the general public as a treatment, preventative or cure.” The digital era has brought about a level of public and professional access to research that now includes a majority of the recent literature. The public interest in research integrity may now warrant a new level of scrutiny and protection.

A second instance involves the infamous 1998 Lancet study (open to see a retracted paper) of 12 children, by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues, linking autism and childhood vaccines. It took ten years for the journal to retract this deeply flawed case study. Another decade and a half later, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in the process of being confirmed as Secretary of Health for the United States, held up a paper published a week earlier on January 23, 2025, that again attempts to affirm the autism-vaccine link. The study was funded by an anti-vax organization and appeared in a “journal” that the National Library of Medicine’s Medline and other respected indexes do not index. This is work that could well end up endangering childrens’ lives in its reinforcement of Kennedy’s policies.

This is neither a freedom of speech nor an academic freedom issue. The issue is using the scholarly record to knowingly publish – or profit from the publishing of – junk science. It places the state of knowledge and the human benefits derived from it at risk. It strikes me as time for the scientific community, policymakers, and public interest groups to consider how they might work together to develop model legislation that specifies reasonable legal and professional processes and consequences for protecting the scholarly record, as well as the public, from research malfeasance.

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It may seem somewhat removed and distant from the narrow world of legal information publishing, but I was concerned to read that Williams Lea, within which sits TSO (formerly The Stationery Office in the UK) has been sold to R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company (RRD), in which Chatham Asset Management has a controlling stake; RRD’s interest in acquiring TSO appears to go back many years. TSO is the result of the then Conservative Government’s privatisation of HMSO, which, prior to that, was similar in character to the GPO in the USA and equivalent official printing and publishing entities around the world. RRD is a US and International business which, before it was acquired by the hedge fund, had, as members of the boards of some of its companies, certain key TSO senior board members.

It was as long ago as in October 1996, after over 200 years of operating at HMSO, that the Stationery Office became a limited company, with National Publishing as its publishing division. Its shift from the public to the private sector was a notable event, and with it was created one of the UK’s largest and most diverse commercial information publishing businesses.

I took on the role of the first-ever managing director of National Publishing. At that time, the internal view was that, based on size and scale, TSO could become a publishing market leader in more than ten sectors, including business and professional, science, education, culture and heritage and government. Although it was obvious that such an objective was absurd, shamefully, it seemed not a time and place to make my heroic protest. During my time there, I wrote an article entitled “It’s Spelt with an ‘e’” for the BIALL’s journal, then called The Law Librarian (now Legal Information Management), vol. 28, no.3, September 1997, 157, on how the new business might work with the legal library community. Although the content of the article was mine, it was approved for publication at the time by TSO and, therefore, on message. I thought it might be of interest review the extent to which reality took it along different paths.

Since its inception, a history of co-operation and a mutually beneficial and dependent relationship between law librarians and what had been HMSO had been nurtured. It had served to create a body of legal and other documentation and the basis for a future in electronically delivered information, although, in truth, it was not a value-adding publisher, with the internal expertise or power to generate and alter authored, technical legal content. A feature of the relationship, and perhaps one that served to sustain it, was that there was, nevertheless, a degree of trust and reliance placed by law librarians, legal academics and practising lawyers, in their many guises, on The Stationery Office. This was in contrast to their perceived attitudes to commercial law publishers. There was a justifiable expectation of optimum standards of accuracy, authenticity and service derived from being the contracted provider of official sources of regulatory and other information. Still, the privatisation must inevitably have been of concern to law librarians and legal information specialists as to what would be the implications for them in doing their jobs, as a consequence of the establishment of the new company. The obvious promise was of the same as before – but more, and better.

The business was set up on the basis of a number of contractual commitments with government. What this meant was that, under controlled and monitored conditions, it would continue to publish key government and Parliamentary documents (e.g., all, bills, statutes and statutory instruments, Hansard and other Parliamentary papers and the Belfast, Edinburgh and London Gazettes). In addition, it would continue to work in partnership with government departments, agencies and others to publish their official information. Certain contracts were for periods of a few years, and under scrutiny, and could be terminated if performance were not sustained at required standards. Others were for shorter periods or for individual projects. They were often subjected to market-testing and were, again, monitored. The future was not taken for granted, and The Stationery Office was aware that its long-term survival and success were dependent on performance and customer satisfaction.

A unique aspect of how The Stationery Office publishing business worked was its mutual dependence on other publishing partners. At that time and subsequently, these partners were, for the most part, connected with national or local government, but were not exclusively so. The historical base of the business had allowed it to create skills in working with partners such as professional and trade bodies, academic institutions, non-governmental organisations and other publishers, to create products, both print and electronic, which might otherwise not exist. It was very much an intention to expand the already large number of publishing partnerships. A stated priority was a resolve to develop partnerships whose purpose would be to increase dramatically the range of products and services, in response to the information needs of the legal community.

As to those information requirements of the legal community, law librarians, their colleagues and their internal clients, as they were among the most important customers of The Stationery Office, they were said to be paramount. The breadth of subject matter of the company’s portfolio was great, particularly bearing in mind its statutory publishing output. Additionally, it supplied regulatory and other information, much of it law-based in character, in a number of specialist areas. Among these were transport, the environment, health, medicine and social welfare, education, employment, the regulatory control of business and the professions. One of the features, however, which distinguished The Stationery Office from others, insofar as it perceived law librarians and the legal community as core customers, was its ability to satisfy total, rather than narrowly defined information needs. Lawyers do not just need to know about law. They must have information also on a whole range of topics, such as business, social, financial and other statistics and trends, commercial and industry practice, medical, health, education and environmental developments. They need to know about local, national and international government policy and plans. All this, along with the essential regulatory information and guidance, is what was claimed to be on offer from the new business, as it then was.

The stated objective for the future of The Stationery Office’s publishing business was, first and foremost, to be a leading supplier of information from, for and about the public sector; this represented its core base. It is what gave it its competitive edge and reflected its greatest area of skills. But in a fast-changing world, further development was both inevitable and necessary, driven by new opportunities, market demands and technological innovation. These factors and others were intended to ensure that existing products, services and methodologies would continue to evolve. Good market research and continuous contact and communication with customers would ensure that such developments were the right ones. With such an enormous portfolio of products and services already in existence, future opportunities to grow new products, to link important bodies of data and to add further value, were considered to be great.

With those historical roots in the public service sector and through working with others in that sector, TSO ought to have had an understanding of the problems of and constraints on people working in law librarianship and information. Budgets are rarely adequate, and creative solutions would always be required to do the job more effectively, even with reduced resources. Regular contact with BIALL and its individual members as well as with other organisations and committees would, it was hoped, be a key feature of how business would be done. In this way, needs, wishes and growth initiatives could be discussed in a creative way. There would be efforts to improve customer service – again in consequence of hearing directly what the customers had to say.

That was then, a generation or more ago, when an aim was to turn the business from a previously non-profit environment into one of market leading margins built around radical business re-engineering, product management and development. However, in my personal opinion, it was inappropriate to privatise the UK government’s official printer and publisher. Perhaps the pillar-to-post path which TSO has found itself taking, further enriching a few unworthy and undeserving people, might support the view. For now, TSO is owned by Williams Lea Group, which, prior to being sold, was owned by Advent International, a private equity investor. But many more changes have happened since privatisation; The Stationery Office was initially purchased with two-thirds of it being held by Electra Fleming, an investment trust co-owned by Electra Investment and the investment bank, Robert Fleming & Company. The controversial former deputy governor of the Bank of England, Rupert Pennant-Rea, together with Bob Thian, who had multiple business interests in earlier denationalised sectors, built on an allegedly autocratic and combative reputation which preceded him, and one other, purchased significant shareholdings in the business. In 1999, Electra Fleming sold TSO to its existing management team and Apax, a private equity firm. It was sold in 2006 to the business process outsourcing company Williams Lea, of which a majority stake had been acquired by logistics company Deutsche Post DHL earlier that year. Then, in 2017, Deutsche Post sold Williams Lea to Advent International.

Nowadays, TSO, as it has evolved, targets organisations which create guidance, standards and regulation to make it easier to use and understand them. It deals with content management for authoritative information, so that it is structured, accurate and up-to-date, to help users perform better, whether by complying with regulations, adopting best practice or improving safety. To this, perhaps narrow, extent, law and legal compliance would seem still to be in focus. Of course, self-described as a “publishing partner”, it would be wrong, in my view, to see it now as a law publisher.

The past is long since gone and largely forgotten but I would hope that the legacy of The Stationery Office survives its evolution from the UK government to a New Jersey-based hedge fund in present-day USA. RRD is a large operation, generating $5.4 billion annual revenue; maybe it will all turn out fine.

The post Right and Wrong Reasons for Privatisation, Especially When Legal Information Is Concerned appeared first on Slaw.

Regular readers of this column (thank you) will recognize copyright reform is a common interest of mine, especially as such reform might lead to greater public access to research. Still, I only took up the copyright torch after a very loose consensus – among researchers, publishers, librarians and funders – around open access’ scientific value began to emerge. Such consensus has been called the iron law of copyright reform. Could such reform address, I dared to hope, reduce such impediments to open access as publishers dragging their heels, while holding on to subscription arrangements, even as they introduced rampant price increases for author charges and the so-called “transformative agreements” meant to bring about open access.

So inspired by the possibilities of reform, I came up with a statutory licensing proposal for research publications (shared here and here). I soon discovered, however, that I needed to learn more about allies in this reform, namely, university librarians. To remedy that I joined forces with Stephanie Savage, a Scholarly Communications and Copyright Services Librarian at the University of British Columbia, to conduct a survey of university librarians on copyright reform, whose views are definitely worth sharing here, even as the full study is about to be published in College & Research Libraries.

Of the 196 librarians who responded to our survey, little more than a third worked at Canadian institutions, with lesser proportions from the U.S., Australian, UK, and other countries. Just short of a majority of the librarians were satisfied with open access’ growth and progress. Among those feeling less so, six librarians referred to publishers taking undue advantage of open access: “We need to leverage our collective power and push back against publishers’ rent-seeking, exploitative practices.”

Where support was strongest was in fully 90% of the participants keen to see copyright reform in support of “sustainable open access.” Their comments reflected a general sense that “copyright legislation [in Australia] is fairly out-of-date.” By comparison, I would add, every other cultural enterprise, be it video, music, gaming, etc., has seen one or more reforms since the early 1990s onset of the internet. On the other hand, science has not seen copyright changes since permission to photocopy an article was granted in the 1970s. In addition to this interest in seeing reform, the majority of librarians (65%) were not deterred by the likelihood that publishers would, as one put it, “have much more lobbying power” nor the fear, as another noted, that this would “open up the chance for it to be worse.”

When asked about current copyright reform initiatives, the librarians expressed the strongest support (with 88% in favor) for Secondary Publishing Rights (or rights retention), which eight European countries to date have legislated. This enables authors can always post open access copies of their final drafts for government financed research, if after an embargo period in some cases: “A good step to bring the rights back to where they belong – the author, not the publisher.” Some librarians felt this was being achieved through publisher contracts – “we’re on this path now” – suggesting copyright reform might not be needed for such rights.

The second most popular initiative was to strengthen copyright exceptions for research (with 77% support): “The law certainly needs to be more favorable to fair use for research purposes.” Still, the question of AI was raised as an exception: “What about feeding data to large language models?” Not ones to miss out on financial opportunities, I might interject, Elsevier and other publishers are offering researchers’ publications for just such purposes. And while raising ChaptGPT’s research quotient may have its appeal, especially if credited as is now common, I’d like to ask that publishers redirect such windfall profits toward reducing subscription and article processing charges. It seems only fair.

The least favored reform among librarians was, alas, my statutory rights for research publications initiative. It was sobering to see it attract the barest of majority support (52%) and among the strongest of objections: “Oh boy no thank you; this is a recipe for disaster.” It did apply to all research publications and offered price controls (following the music industry example), leading at least one librarian saw it “as the most likely scenario.” Still, others did not desitater to object to requiring libraries and funders to fairly compensate publishers for universal open access. It was seen to “solidify the positions of the major publishers,” who were likely to “hijack” the process.

Librarians’ fundamental lack of trust in commercial publishing appeared across the survey. The distrust may well be earned, but it poses a serious challenge to what the survey affirmed, to wit, university librarians think it’s time for the law to support a wider circulation of research.

Now, if there’s one hopeful sign of librarians and publishers gathering around this common cause of open access, it’s with the relatively new “subscribe to open” publishing model (first discussed here). S2O, as it is known, represents a more cooperative and trusting relationship, with libraries supporting publishers’ conversion of journals to open access (without author fees). Some 28 publishers – soon to exceed 50 – are now using it to offer open access to hundreds of journals. Could this approach offer a path for turning an open access consensus into the cooperative effort needed to bring copyright for research publications into the twenty-first century?

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[Une version française suit]

On January 13, 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada issued its landmark decision in Arsenault-Cameron v. Prince Edward Island, 2000 SCC 1 (CanLII), [2000] 1 SCR 3, a case significant for its impact on minority language educational rights in Canada. This decision was also the Court’s first to adopt the Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law, a pivotal innovation introduced in 1999 by the Canadian Citation Committee. Neutral citations have since become a cornerstone of Canadian legal practice, providing a standardized, vendor-neutral method for referring to judicial decisions, as reported many times here on Slaw (see here and here for instance).

This 25th anniversary is an important milestone, marking the evolution of legal citation practices in Canada and the ongoing efforts to enhance accessibility of Canadian jurisprudence.

[Version française]

Le 13 janvier 2000, la Cour suprême du Canada rendait sa décision dans Arsenault-Cameron c. Île-du-Prince-Édouard, 2000 CSC 1 (CanLII), [2000] 1 RCS 3, une affaire importante pour les droits des minorités linguistiques en matière d’éducation au Canada. Cette décision fut également la première de la Cour à adopter la la Norme de référence neutre pour la jurisprudence, une innovation décisive introduite par le Comité canadien de la référence en 1999. Depuis, les références neutres sont devenues courantes de la pratique juridique canadienne, offrant une méthode normalisée et indépendante des éditeurs juridiques pour référer aux décisions judiciaires, tel que mentionné à plusieurs reprises sur Slaw (ici et ici par exemple).

Ce 25e anniversaire est une étape importante, marquant l’évolution des pratiques de références juridiques au Canada et les efforts constants pour améliorer l’accessibilité de la jurisprudence canadienne.

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Whether or not there is truth in the rumours that upstart, Harvey, has been keen to acquire the much-admired vLex, it was interesting to read the analysis by Isha Marathe, of Legaltech News, on the topic, as reported via legal market heroes, House of Butter. The HoB report concludes, “If Harvey wants to make true on the third item in its tech offerings—workflow automation; an AI assistant, and legal research—it’s going to have to find the data. The story of Harvey and vLex underscores the market barriers to a startup becoming a substantial legal research mainstay in an industry where quality case law is being stockpiled by a few major companies.” As court cases, based on alleged misuse of content, proliferate, a recent one being CanLII v. Caseway, this seems to me to be a critical area of concern, not just for the businesses in question but more generally around both the established providers and those who want some of the action, in other words, “the haves and the have nots” of valuable, deep and research-based legal information. Among the cases being litigated of late, claims and counterclaims have been flying in every direction, while, at the same time, we witness mergers and content licensing agreements to allow the information-weak to derive some benefit from those who have worked and invested to achieve their information strength, occasionally over centuries. I am bound to wonder, however, if anyone thinks that this should indeed be a simple, inexpensive and deserved challenge to overcome. While not pretending to have any expertise on questions of copyright, especially across multiple legal jurisdictions, I suspect it is reasonably safe to generalise that access to primary statutory content and the texts of decided cases is, at most, a matter of drudgery, but more so of cost and expertise, for those who want to source it. This content is normally, at base, in the public domain, making it low in added-value. The high value is added by intelligence, context, integration, annotations and commentary, as well as headnotes to reported cases; in other words, that which competent, established and successful law publishers have been doing for hundreds of years. Now delivered in modern-day media, the books, journals, law reports and bodies of regularly updated, annotated and cross-referenced statutory materials remain the treasure troves of legal research, litigation support, offering the ability of practising lawyers and others to do their jobs and make claims to expertise and professionalism. Much of the rest, perhaps depending, to a degree, on jurisdictional practice requirements is, arguably, froth. If this is the case, on the basis that most challenges can be overcome by throwing money at them, then there is no reason why those who want it cannot acquire it in one way or another from the so-called stockpilers; the assumption should be that every business and asset is for sale at the right price. However, there is also no reason to think that it can be done cheaply, easily or in ways that might breach competition laws in any jurisdiction in question. Even so, the best content and indeed power and resources, tend to be held by those at the very top of the pyramid; others below them, however visible and attractive themselves, rely on others for licences to content that they can only dream of owning. Licenses, contractually granted, can be similarly withdrawn, leaving some licensee providers, curators and aggregators weak and vulnerable. By the relevant metrics, it would seem that Thomson Reuters, RELX/Lexis Nexis and the more significant among their competitors have been doing, mostly, all the right things and can probably remain as market leaders for so long as it suits them. That is even though, having regard to Lexis+ AI, their product quality, if allegations are to be believed, would seem to be distinctly sub-optimal, but not sufficiently so as to prevent Lexis Nexis from securing a long-term contract with the US Federal Judiciary; the recent negative comments about the product in question have been challenged by Lexis Nexis (see, however, Mastering AI Prompts for Legal Professionals Practical Strategies and Tools). These front runners set many of the standards, are copied and are looked upon enviably by the self-styled, yet ever-envious disrupters below them, who are often desperately keen to be acquired by them. At the same time, when it comes to setting good examples and maintaining the highest behavioural standards, the market leaders, depending on how one chooses to view them, can look remarkably grubby and low-rent. Recently, disturbing reports were published about RELX/Lexis Nexis’s tactics and ways of dealing with its recognised trade union members at Law360. Perhaps only because the members took strike action, the dispute was settled, but subsequent news might indicate the true beliefs of the Lexis Nexis management as they have unilaterally derecognised the National Union of Journalists (of which I am a member) in their businesses in the British Isles. This was, conveniently, just ahead of their decision to close RELX’s Estates Gazette magazine and information service. No doubt, some will think these to be examples of fine management, in the latter case, just before the December holidays, yet to give a boost to 2024 director bonuses and to their 2025 budgets, but I hope that many of their customers and even shareholders will believe the opposite. They will note, however, that RELX’s lofty statements about its caring for its people, as published on its web site, chooses to omit its preference to drive out union membership among them. If only the rhetoric were matched by action, to dispel any accusations of hypocrisy. These signs of the times, some might worry, will be emboldened by the turn of political events and prevalent toxic attitudes in the USA and elsewhere. Indeed, as they seem to have taken to making up rules and standards as they go along, they might not have much use for a system of laws there at all, from now on. The corrupt, criminal and fascist governments which are on the increase in many parts of the world ought to be, in my view, obvious enemies of those who respect the rule of law and good government, supported by responsible and ethical law publishing, however much some of the publishers and their customers might profit from those régimes. A lesson which I learned from law publishing was that it was not our role to express opinion or give advice, leaving that to professional advisers, but merely to ensure accuracy, expertise and relevance. I hope that this remains the mantra.

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The week of October 7th this year was quite something for Artificial Intelligence (AI). It was the object of two consecutive Nobel Prizes, awarded just days apart. The first, in Physics, went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton (a British Canadian) for laying the foundations of machine learning. The second in Chemistry, won by Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker, was for utilizing AI to predict millions of intricate protein structures that are key to understanding molecular interactions. In stark contrast to this double triumph are some 20 copyright infringement suits filed against OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Anthropic, and other AI companies. Among those suing are the New York Times and seven other newspapers; various authors, including notables Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Sarah Silverman and others; open source software coders; and Scarlett Johansson (over the use of her voice). The software coder case Doe v. GitHub has been the first to be heard. U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in Northern California dismissed most of the charges on June 24, 2024, noting that GitHub’s Copilot was not producing identical code to that of the plaintiffs, and the case is now under appeal. With that first ruling in place, I’d like to weigh in, with special consideration, as always, to the scholarly publishing angle (and thus with little to add, alas, to Johansson’s case). While these suits have all been filed in the U.S. their impact is bound to be felt in Canada, as always. The first thing to note is that Judge Tigar’s ruling on GitHub has general applicability. Large Language Models (LLM) don’t as a rule cite more than excerpts from the texts to which they refer. It’s true, and incriminating, that the New York Times has examples of ChatGPT generating a number of its articles verbatim, but I suspect that’s an exception among those who’ve filed. While this may reflect more recent engineering updates, when I asked ChatGPT, for purposes of this column, to show me the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” it responded, “Sorry, I can’t provide the lyrics to that song, but I can summarize its themes or discuss its meaning if you’d like!” When I asked about the out-of-copyright “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, it presented eleven lines from the opening as a key excerpt, along with a brief commentary that begins “this is just a small portion of the 52 sections…” The Sarah Silverman joke it provided — by no means among her best — was accompanied by analysis bringing it within the scope of fair use’s review and commentary allowances. So while LLMs ingest the entirety of texts, they’re employed to both guide their language use and to inform their responses to prompts, without generally reproducing the works. The LLM also strikes me as offering an excellent instance of “transformative use,” among fair use defenses. The LLM uses the works, as well, in ways that promote, rather than compete with, the original, or as ChatGPT put it: “‘Hallelujah’ deals with love, loss, and spirituality, intertwining biblical references with personal reflection.” So when it comes to the copyright principle to be applied to AI, I believe it is misguided to hold that insofar as OpenAI will profit from its use of authors’ copyrighted works, those authors deserve a cut of the take. That would make all of us teachers liable for every work we’ve read that now informs our teaching (if for a different sort of profit). Copyright exists to promote cultural and learned contributions to the benefit of all (see Nobel Prize #2 above in chemistry). It is not intended to monetize every transaction by which humans (and now machines) learn from each other. This does mean that AI companies should pay for access to the original works, rather than rely on pirate websites. Certainly, it is very much in the spirit of research and scholarship to contribute to the promise of LLMs. Whereas, to have LLMs informed by everything online except academic work is not an encouraging prospect (while leaving LLMs to hallucinate the research references they cannot access). Still when the scholarly publisher Taylor & Francis signed a $10 million non-exclusive “data access” agreement with Microsoft, it caught researchers by surprise, having forgotten how willingly they signed over their copyright to publishers in exchange for publication. Still, it is only fair for researchers to be credited for this AI use of their work. Credit is, indeed, required in utilizing open access research with Creative Commons attribution licensing (CC-BY). Google search, for example, now features its LLM “Gemini,” which offers a link to a source for each point made (along with a concluding caution “generative AI is experimental”). For my part, let me conclude with a request to the scholarly publishers contemplating these AI windfalls, and the AI companies willing to pay for this access. If the agreement was to use this new revenue source to reduce journals subscription prices and Article Processing Charges (for open access), every dollar saved, they can be assured, will result in more research. This would perfectly suit, for example, OpenAI’s declared intent to become a “public benefit corporation,” which commits it to balancing business interests with societal and planetary gains. This would make for a noble cause, well aligned with AI’s recent awards.

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From the reassuring distance of not relying significantly on the professional information industry to pay my creditors, I can permit myself to comment, on or off message at whim, on the requirement, for some others, to remain on it, and always promote the party line. The obvious result, if this is the case, is that much of what we read and hear is likely to be public relations nonsense, and even lies. I would also admit that, particularly over the period during which I have been writing and pondering on law publishing, and reflecting on the totality of the endeavour thus far, my leanings have even increased in the directions of a healthy degree of both cynicism and scepticism. By the former, I mean my inclination, with many obvious exceptions, not necessarily to trust the sincerity and expressions of goodness of law publishing businesses and other entities; by the latter, it is acquired from empathy with jurisprudential reasoning, that is moved to reject that which is not supported by strong and reliable evidence. Such an attitude can cause the proponent to be met with occasional accusations of bitterness and lack of optimism, as indeed this article perhaps might, to some, indicate. By way of defence, it would be argued that it reflects harsh truth and honesty, rather than the opposites of both. By way of example, only recently, we read of the allegedly unlawful tactics of the ostensibly high-minded and principled Lexis Nexis/RELX, in its ways of conducting trade union negotiations; it seems a far cry from the pillar of the legal establishment stance that is generally communicated by and about it. Currently, and for some considerable time, it is impossible to avoid how artificial intelligence tools and systems are lauded as an optimistic future for legal and other professional advice and research worlds; this is underpinned by the immensity of investment into AI start-ups, primarily in N. America, and into existing businesses. Failure and/or disappointment are not options to consider, despite the frequent evidence of it. Furthermore, we have all seen many innovations and startups come and go. Personally, I am happy to be disinterested and indifferent either way; yet it is difficult to interpret, from vague, metaphoric and cliched rhetoric, just where the AI benefits are directed to have effect. In certain fields, such as medical research and diagnosis, clearly there is at least the possibility of positive outcomes to help patients, even if the biggest winners will be the technical companies and others of that ilk, as well as their shareholders. In other fields, arguably including law, purposes might be somewhat more nuanced. Again, where there is success, the producer and exploiter sides have everything to gain; for lawyers and other professional advisers in areas such as tax and accountancy, there is the possibility of lowering costs while retaining revenues, as jobs are cut among researchers, librarians (who have been progressively sidelined and devalued for years), support staff and others. The point is, when we speak about “benefits”, we should make it clear who are the beneficiaries and who might be the victims. The language used to describe the bright future tends to be obscure as to what precisely is meant by it; after all, partially automated contract and other document drafting is hardly new or especially revolutionary. That which is good for RELX, Thomson Reuters and others, as well as for my lawyer, accountant or tax adviser, is not necessarily of tangible benefit for me. The fees will not reduce and a machine, rather than an expert, will by my adviser, if the notion were to be taken to an extreme. Surely, the onus is on the proponents and resellers of AI technology to prove, at least on the balance of probability, that every development will genuinely, visibly, measurably and globally, be in the interests of clients, citizens, taxpayers, voters, society in general, and equally in the interests of law and justice; if not, they deserve to be viewed with cynicism and scepticism. In a world which increasingly favours “haves” over “have-nots”, profiting a growing number of Lex Luthoran, sociopathic, weird, billionaire fascists, there is no need of more of the same. Anyone with a modicum of integrity knows that trickle-down economics are a fraud, so why should we relish increasing profits and cost savings only for the benefit of those at the top? I suspect that most people in workplaces remain publicly on message, towing the party line and chanting the same mantras, because they are obliged so to do for fear of losing their jobs. It was cheering, therefore, to read one informed insider recently writing to me: “This is how the much-vaunted AI seems to work – sucking up the work of actual creators and passing it off as something it has come up with itself. AI seems to me just a clever packaging tool – clever, but not actual intelligence or creativity – just repackaging other people’s work. But the tech bosses get richer, so that’s okay”; I wonder if that view is more prevalent in reality? The Pandemic, “working from home” and the emergence of a new style of younger employees seems to be breaking the myth of employee loyalty and conformity, as they learned to join video conferences with formal shirts visible above the waist and pyjama bottoms below it. I would like to think that their actual experience increasingly encourages the idea that they can reject the traditional warnings by their predecessors of career risks in speaking off-message. They might be less inclined than their elders, at training courses and workplace meetings, for example, to believe that work and career are not about the salary, benefits and prospects, but rather the camaraderie (which is surely reduced since WFH), their love of customers, financial success of their company, etc. They probably can calculate that they would not stay in their jobs if they were not paid and that there is little personal pride in being defined primarily by one’s job title. At the same time, obviously, people rarely want to be fired at a time and in a way that is not of their choosing. Of course, I might be wrong, but I think that the evidence exists, at least in part, that because the behaviours of employers and providers of goods and services tend not to achieve the standards required and recognised to earn respect from employees and consumers, the era of singing the company song may be over. This might be the case for the employees of FindLaw, with its extensive body of free content, as Thomson Reuters agrees to discard that business. Regarding the transaction, Hugh Logue, of Outsell, opines, “in divesting FindLaw, Thomson Reuters is streamlining its portfolio for higher growth areas but is also severing links to the growing small law firm market – just as the market is showing signs of growth”. However, for so long as, and to the extent that it is obligatory, on-message utterances are what can be expected, serving in part to denigrate the significance and importance of law publishing. I share the guilt, remembering a time when it became expedient not even to refer publicly to it as law or legal publishing but rather as the likes of “professional information provision” or, worse “workflow solutions”, for fear that any reminders might be given to others of the printed word, paper, learned authors, diligent and well-trained legal editors and suchlike. Just as the victors in armed conflict see the need to eradicate memories of their conquests’ past, the party line has to be that the new dawn must mean the eradication of the previous one. Therefore, being on message means that open access, workflow tools and regulated artificial intelligence are good for everyone, and that saving paper is about saving the planet rather than saving money. It seems, and indeed sounds good, to be told that learned law books, journals and legal dictionaries are not useful after all, that blogging does the same thing, at little cost, and, controversially, that the use of plain English somehow delivers the intricacies of judicial and legislative thinking better than legalese, thanks to its lack of precision and failure to be held accountable through intentionally woolly language, particularly by those not well-schooled in such matters. The apparent need to seek to compete simply by trying, unsuccessfully, to trash works of quality and value, is prevalent, and somewhat risible. At the same time, one has to question whether or not, in the interests of democratic societies based on laws, it has been considered appropriate, certainly in developed jurisdictions, to have available several competing learned tomes, each several hundred pages or more, to explain, analyse, challenge, contextualise and evolve massive bodies of case and statute law, together with an interminable body of secondary and other sources, in each of the countless fields of law, we can set them aside. Without law books and the authors and editors to write and edit them, as research shows that scholarly book authorship is in decline, they will not appear, by magic, through AI tools, blogs and journal articles alone. The existing volumes have not, in my opinion, lost their purpose in training and sustaining lawyers and in separating mediocrity in advice from billable excellence, so, by implication, if they have served a useful purpose in contract, tort, criminal law, revenue law, equity and trusts and every other field, how can the major legal disciplines of the future be presented and analysed? Yet, the research article to which reference is made above cites Lord Burrows, in his 2021 Lionel Cohen lecture, commenting that “The sad truth is that the sort of practical legal scholarship that I am describing – which can directly help a judge in deciding a case – is now regarded by many in academia as old-fashioned and dull”. It seems to me that there needs to be a framework and means by which to initiate such work, regardless of the ways in which it might be presented. I do not regard this as an example of crude Luddism, and recognise that complex ideas, once effected, cannot, realistically, be suppressed, but rather of the common-sense view that if something is done, better that it be for the greater good rather than for the lesser one. Perhaps it would be on somewhat more thoughtful messaging to suggest that high quality and learned written research has value and that artificial intelligence should not be too disconnected from actual intelligence.

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In July of last year, Canada’s three research-funding agencies set out to improve public and academic access to the studies they sponsor. Open access to research and scholarship is proving to be the digital era’s great gift to science, and all the more so, following open access’ contributions to Covid vaccine development during the pandemic. The plan for Canada’s Tri-Agency, as it is known, was to review and revise its Open Access Policy by identifying “the key features of an effective, comprehensive, sustainable and equitable immediate OA Policy for peer-reviewed articles, and the incentives and supports required for the Policy’s successful implementation.” To this end, the Tri-Agency engaged in a consultation of researchers, library organizations, Indigenous advisors, and publishers, both large and small. For my part, I responded to the call with an “open letter,” which I shared in my January 12, 2024 Slaw column. A year later, on August 7, 2024, the Tri-Agency issued “What We Heard,” a document summarizing the results of these consultations. I can attest, for example, that my recommendations for reforming copyright to achieve the Tri-Agency’s goals for open access were heard. In this column, however, I want to consider what the Tri-Agency heard from others. At the top of the list is researcher, librarian and funder unhappiness over the cost of open access. There is “widespread concern” over “(increasing) Article Processing Charges (APCs).” These are the fees that the large corporate publishers require of authors to enable open access publication of their work. These publishers also offer libraries a combination of library subscriptions to their closed content, along with open access publishing options, that is proving a profitable but slow path to making research widely available. Now, in complaining about the APCs, it’s not that researchers can’t use their Tri-Agency grants to pay these charges, nor is it that there’s no alternate route to open access publication. Thousands of non-commercial journals are providing authors with open access free of APCs (diamond OA) thanks to institutional and library support. But these APC-free journals may not (yet) be the leaders in their field, which largely come from corporate publishers (think of Nature at the top: APC $12,290 USD per open access article). So researchers feel compelled to pay APCs at the expense of their studies (with references made to reduced student support). There is an open access alternative for these journals, thanks to the Tri-Agency policy, with authors depositing their unpublished (if still peer-reviewed) final draft in a library repository. For the academic community, open access with the large corporate publishers is proving to be either a financial burden or a second-class path to circulating their work. So what, then, did the Tri-Agency hear from the corporate publishers when it was their turn to speak? It was rather the opposite of all that went before. The publishers declared APCs “key enablers” of open access (where libraries and researchers challenged their sustainability). The publishers questioned whether open access journals without APCs could survive (where others held that Diamond OA is “the preferred model by the research community” if still “viewed as an aspirational goal”). And the publishers held that APCs are “key to maintaining the integrity of the publishing system” (where others called APCs a questionable incentive to increase publication, with 2023, I would add, a record year for 10,000 article retractions and the closing of 19 journals based on research fraud mostly associated with Wiley from the corporate sector). In the face of these contradictory differences, what is the Tri-Agency likely to do with its current policy? It is most likely to take a small incremental policy step. Following the example set by the White House’s 2022 Nelson Memo, the Tri-Agency will probably end the embargo period it has allowed publishers to impose on authors before they are allowed to freely share the final draft of federally funded work. Now, this is still a significant gain for a small proportion of work, given the first 12 months following publication are the most vital for biomedical research, if not so much for historical scholarship and philosophical inquiry. Yet if the Tri-Agency does no more than eliminate the embargo, it will be a disappointing outcome of a year-long listening exercise. It does nothing to address the publishers’ monopoly pricing of access to research and the threats APCs pose to research integrity. It continues to make open access, for those publishing in corporate journals, a financial burden or a secondary path for unpublished work. Having feared that this might be the outcome, in light of the influential Nelson Memo, my proposal to the Tri-Agency included a request (as its report notes) that it use its convening powers to hold talks among academic, funder, and publishing communities on how to implement and sustain universal open access as a global standard. Now that there’s widespread agreement that open access is what’s best for humankind, it’s time for something more than an incremental improvement of a decade-old policy.

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The news, from a distance, that the assets of Canada’s Irwin Law publishing business have been sold is nevertheless interesting and, one might hope, a positive step that will allow its portfolio to be developed in concert with that of the asset acquirer, the renowned University of Toronto Press. It is also hoped that the vendors have the same sense of satisfaction as my fellow owners and I had, at Dunedin Academic Press, having recently passed its assets to Liverpool University Press, and that the customer bases of and suppliers to both Irwin and UTP are the beneficiaries of the transaction. It is satisfying, perhaps because of its modest size, that Irwin has not fallen into the hands of venture capitalists. Irwin Law was established in 1996 and initially was affiliated with the Stoddart Publishing Group, the latter of which collapsed in 2002. In 1999, Irwin Law was purchased by Quicklaw, but when that was acquired by LexisNexis in 2002, Irwin Law was repurchased by a group led by Irwin Law’s founding publisher, Jeffrey Miller. That period, around 1996-2002, may have been a disruptive one for Irwin but its legal information publishing activities have survived until recently, and changes, perhaps protective ones, have occurred. In 2019, Irwin Law launched Delve Books, a trade imprint which seeks to provide analysis into laws and law cases that have particular relevance to Canadian society. Irwin also served as the North American agent for The Federation Press, an independent Australian legal information publisher. Perhaps most importantly, in 2021, vLex agreed to collaborate with, and acquire a minority shareholding in Irwin Law, allowing the investor to provide a collection of Irwin Law’s books and journals to its customers. Information issued does not indicate what effect the asset purchase has on Delve Books, The Federation Press, the relationship with vLex, any components not included in the asset sale, and, of course, employees and/or freelancers. V-Lex itself has been rumoured to be a venture capital-backed acquisition target for Harvey.ai, apparently in order to use v-Lex to “train” Harvey. Despite the positive and optimistic comments by both UTP and Irwin, only time will tell if the arrangement will be proven to be successful; the rest is speculation. At one level, it is difficult not to be sceptical and pessimistic on the news that a small Canadian legal information publisher carrying its own particular baggage will succeed in a university press environment, even one which does produce a modest portfolio of legal information publications. However, UTP’s focus has been on what might be considered to be the academic periphery of legal scholarship, in areas such as constitutional, indigenous and international law, legal history, philosophy of law, criminology and suchlike. Irwin’s portfolio is much broader, though not in all cases strategically aimed at university audiences and, perhaps, it has tried to stretch its competencies and credibility too far in terms of market appeal. Arguably, of course, this might be what UTP has envied, including Irwin’s E-library, peer-reviewed portfolio and capabilities. My instincts, no more than that, lead me to think that such a combination is a challenge in commercial terms, which may not be a significant issue for University of Toronto Press, whose total existing portfolio has substantial breadth and depth. Yet, no doubt, a priority will be on sustaining quality standards appropriate to target markets, as well as other factors which would be appropriate for a greatly respected university press. Conversely, to the extent that Irwin Law had a competitive reputation in practitioner and similar markets, this might become diminished. That is not to suggest that a university press cannot serve non-university markets, for clearly many of them do. However, their ambitions, it seems to me, need to be at the elusive, lucrative and enviable top end of the legal market where the need for scholarship and quality have few limits and where price is not a significant constraint. The markets will decide, in the context of formidable existing and established competition, if a small acquisition of publishing assets can deliver optimally. The challenge of meeting all the necessary market satisfaction criteria is great in an ever more hostile competitive environment. It might be argued that it makes somewhat more sense for university presses to free themselves of publishing commitments that are not measurably targeted on core markets and leave it to the commercial operators to battle it out competitively. Many of them have legal information publishing assets which are envied by their commercial rivals and for which they are sometimes obliged to seek licenses, and might thrive better in that world. The Canadian academic and practitioner legal information and solutions markets are as developed and sophisticated as any in the world, meaning that, whether or not we are in “the final agonising death throes of legal publishing at the hands of the moneymen”, creating and delivering analytical, learned, high-quality contented is a more sophisticated exercise than it was in the past. Competition is fierce and from varied and often surprising directions, yet the risk of failure is high. That said, Irwin Law has not survived good and bad times since 1996 by accident, and the reputation of University of Toronto Press, after nearly 125 years, rather speaks for itself. One factor perhaps for continued success is committed people who are highly competent and who care greatly about their tasks in hand. No doubt they are ready for the next phase of this story. One might wonder, as I have been advised has been happening in mainland Europe, if any trend is increasing in university presses and perhaps even other not-dissimilar respected bodies mopping up legal information publishers to help satisfy the needs of their audiences; yet I very much doubt it. Still, if it were the case, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and more than twenty others would have little difficulty in identifying suitable targets in Britain, to enhance existing presence or acquire a new one in law. No doubt the same would apply in North America, throughout Europe and in other regions in which there are opportunities for consolidation. Meanwhile, as the acquisition by Lexis Nexis of Belgium-based Henchman is completed, the purpose being to advance the position of both in the field of generative artificial intelligence, it emerges that London-based Informa, a publisher of a substantial range of scholarly law publications, has also been taking steps in AI. It is reported that Taylor & Francis, Informa’s academic publishing business unit which owns Routledge, has surprised many of its authors by selling access to their research, for around £8m, to Microsoft AI, without seeking permission from, and being specific about financial benefits to authors. With another deal of a similar kind, income generated is said to be about £58m in 2024; clearly, Informa has to be able stump up £1.16bn for its purchase of Ascential. Maybe the T&F authors will be inspired by the response of the New York Times on related matters. This, along with some of the negative aspects for academic authors of open access, is likely to give further cause for anxiety. Another thought is that perhaps it is time for Informa, having made a large new acquisition in its core business to business territory, to step away from its publishing activities, find a buyer, though certainly not a university press, for its high margin but low growth cash cow, Taylor & Francis, and leave commercial academic publishing to commercial academic publishers. Of course, the potential loss of steady publishing subscription revenues might be a disincentive for that.

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The Canadian Open Access Legal (COAL) Citation Guide/Guide canadien de la référence juridique en accès libre (RJAL) is now available: https://canlii.ca/t/7nc6q Over the course of two years, law librarians from across Canada worked together to create the COAL-RJAL Guide. The English version of the Guide is now freely available and hosted on CanLII (2024 CanLIIDocs 830), and the French version is in progress. The Guide is intended to be used throughout the legal field and incorporates feedback contributed by reviewers from Canadian courts, law firms, law journals, law societies, and law schools. The COAL-RJAL Guide originated with two primary drivers: the belief that we could create a citation guide that better meets the needs of Canadian legal writers and researchers, and the goal of creating a citation guide that will be accessible to everyone, via an open access publishing model. The idea for the Guide began with the Canadian Association of Law Libraries’ Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Group, where members voiced their frustrations over Canada’s lack of an open access legal citation guide. Citation is a language of law that must be learned in order to participate in the legal system and in legal scholarship. Librarians are often their institution’s experts on legal citation and are often responsible not only for ensuring access to resources on the subject, but also for teaching it. Librarians hold a special expertise in legal citation that has been utilized by traditional publishers, but has until now not been organized by members of the profession into a resource of our own. This has meant using our skills to promote systems that are not necessarily compatible with our professional values, especially access to justice. This has also resulted in a major expense for libraries attempting to provide their patrons with the citation tools they need to learn about and engage with the legal system and legal scholarship. Being open access and created by law librarians, the Guide remedies these problems. The idea of creating a Canada-wide open access legal citation guide was not new, but we were successful where others were not, primarily for several reasons: we had permission to use the University of British Columbia Law Library Legal Citation Guide as a nucleus from which we could work, the shock of recent price hikes for citation materials commonly held by law libraries, a dedicated team willing to put in lots of time and effort, and good project management. The ability for us to meet via Zoom also aided in the success of the project. While developing the guide, we were conscious of balancing the needs of its user groups, from judges and judicial assistants to self-represented litigants. We included clear rule explanations and numerous examples that will make sense to all user groups. After the English version of the Guide was drafted, we had 45+ external reviewers from various user groups, jurisdictions, and types of Canadian legal settings review the guide and provide their feedback. (The only user group we didn’t get feedback from was self-represented litigants.) We went through the feedback line by line and spent many hours discussing all the suggestions we received. Sometimes we made changes due to the feedback, and sometimes we realized that we had already thought of the option presented and had, for various reasons, decided against it. All the feedback we received, whether ultimately incorporated or not, was very much appreciated. Now freely available, the Guide will reduce the financial burden on law students, new lawyers, and sole practitioners, among others, and will also support self-represented litigants, libraries, and other organizations with an access to justice mission. The Editorial Board of COAL-RJAL is a national, bilingual, and bijural group, committed to continuity of the Guide and continuous knowledge building. Regular updates to the Guide will centre the needs of the legal community by incorporating user feedback and responding to emerging developments, while maintaining long-term consistency. Besides publishing a French version in the near future, we plan to expand the Guide to cover citing additional types of sources. We realize that some user groups will require training on the Guide, so a training webinar will be offered this fall. We’re also happy to provide custom training sessions for institutions and organizations that want to adopt the Guide and train their staff. If this is something you’re interested in, please get in touch with us. The legal community’s support and expertise is the foundation for COAL-RJAL’s success. Explore the Guide on CanLII for writing, editing, or teaching, and give us your feedback. The Guide will be enriched by contributions from a diverse group of people sharing their knowledge. Connect with the Editorial Board at coal.rjal@ubc.ca for feedback, volunteer inquiries, and more. —– Much thanks to the rest of the COAL-RJAL Editorial Group for contributing to this post.

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Karnov Group, the legal and professional information business based in Sweden, looked somewhat courageous and heroic when around the end of 2021, in one swoop, it agreed to buy significant legal publishing assets both from Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer in Spain and France. Now with offices in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Spain and Portugal, Karnov Group employs more than 1,200 people. The Spanish-French conquest helped to turn Karnov from a Nordic entity to a leading European one and, perhaps, set the scene for expansion of Napoleonic scale; that may yet be the plan. After a short time, however, in May 2024, it was reported that a bid, for which competition clearance had been received, was made by existing shareholders, Greenoaks Capital Partners LLC and Long Path Partners, for an $833.3m takeover bid for all the shares in Karnov. The bid was unanimously recommended and supported by the board of Karnov but not, it seems, by at least 12% of Karnov Group stock owners, who publicly rejected the takeover approach, stating that the offer was too low. Blackmoor Investment Partners Ltd, a London-based company owning about 1% of Karnov’s shares, believed that the valuation offer did not reflect the company’s true potential. The opinion from Blackmoor was that “…it’s rare in Europe to have a software-oriented company of this quality and this competitive positioning. Most of them are listed in the United States and for a reason; their cashflows are valued much more highly there”. The view was shared by other investors, including England-based Janus Henderson, US-based Anabranch Capital Management LP and Sweden’s Didner & Gerge Fonder AB, which similarly rejected the cash offer. That effectively blocked the proposed buyout, given that the bidders must acquire more than 90% of Karnov shares for the bid to succeed. The Blackmoor and others’ argument was that they have high expectations that Karnov will continue to grow in its core markets and increase synergies from its acquisitions in Southern Europe. Further, it was added that peer multiples suggest a higher share price valuation. The would seem to be consistent with recent research, if it is to be believed, that the European legal publishing market is likely to grow substantially over the next several years https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/5883381. The usual suspects, including Karnov, are cited as potential beneficiaries. The global legal and regulatory solutions segment is projected by Outsell to grow to $37bn by 2026. Of course, little of this speaks to the intrinsic qualities of what Karnov does, its products, authors, staff, suppliers and customers; The Association of Danish Law Firms has certainly expressed its disappointment about the acquisition of Schultz (below). It is rather about the scale of the monetary returns which can be achieved by and for shareholders. No doubt these opinions and ambitions are legitimate but have probably little to do with the fundamentals of being in legal and professional publishing. Still, on the basis that every action has consequences, the position after any deal is done, if that were to have been the outcome, would almost certainly bring changes. Experience indicates that where money is the only motive for a change, something of real value will be lost. Or, maybe I am just deeply jealous not to be lucky enough to have a slice of what might have been $833.3m (or more). It is difficult not to be a little disappointed when good law publishing businesses are used and passed around among the money-men, never finding the protection of metaphorical safe, responsible and loving homes and families. It seems different, and less appealing than the scenario in which smaller publishers are acquired and integrated into larger ones, giving the acquirees access to better funding, technology and expertise, albeit amid the inevitable dark, maybe Skandi-Noir aspects of integrations of that kind as well; perhaps, with occasional exceptions, such as Lexis Nexis’ (RELX) recent acquisition of Belgian-founded contract drafting company, Henchman https://legaltechnology.com/2024/06/03/breaking-news-lexis-acquires-henchman-to-meet-one-of-customers-top-requests-searchable-internal-data/, that era is simply over. Still, I look forward to seeing at least the occasional rising star, of which Karnov might still be one, as their acquisition, for up to 447m Swedish krona, of the IP rights to Denmark’s J.H. Schultz legal content, as well as related customer obligations would indicate, https://news.cision.com/karnov-group/r/karnov-group-acquires-carved-out-legal-information-business-of-schultz-in-denmark,c3999407, as well as vLex and one or two others expanding by way or merger and acquisition. They might even put their hedge fund, majority gambler-owned days behind them, perhaps as public, or better still, employee-owned companies. However, a month or so after the bid was made, the investors in question decided to to withdraw their bid, causing Karnov’s share price to tumble. It would seem that no change might be Karnov’s status, for now. These things have a tendency, though, not to disappear, so it may be one for another day.

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Aspen Publishing, until the end of 2021, was part of Wolters Kluwer’s Legal & Regulatory information publishing business unit. Around that time, it was sold, for $88m, to Transom Capital Group, a private equity firm. A mere two years later, it has been moved on again, this time to UWorld, a US-based online learning business, which was established in 2003, by a medical doctor. UWorld’s existing learning resources and methods are offered in certain undergraduate, graduate and professional environments, such as accounting, finance, medical, pharmacy and nursing, as well as for some aspects of US legal training. In 2023, UWorld acquired Wiley Efficient Learning, in 2020, Themis Bar Review and RxPrep, and in 2019, Roger CPA Review. Presumably, the acquisition of Aspen Publishing, for an undisclosed price, is to enhance the scale and importance of the operations in US legal markets and to acquire the valuable portfolio of law publishing within Aspen. To the disinterested outsider, a period of no more than two years appears to be an extremely short one in which to fulfil the growth objectives of the acquiring venture capitalists. However, in September 2023, the University of Arizona’s law school licensed the administration of its alternative law school admission program to Aspen Publishing, which may have been a significant and appealing coup. At the time of Transom’s purchase, its managing partner declared that Transom looked forward to

“putting Transom’s financial and operating resources to work in partnership with the team to grow and continue its innovation and market leadership in the legal education market”, while Aspen’s CEO expressed the opinion that she and her colleagues were “committed to continuing our tradition of providing high-quality content and the latest thinking from the brightest minds in the legal industry. Our vision for the future includes embracing learning science and technology to improve learning outcomes. We are thrilled to work with the Transom team to further invest in innovation, accelerating our ability to help our customers make a positive impact in the world”.

Perhaps this, and related thrills, have all been achieved in a short time, with sales, profits, market share and value increasing with almost immediate effect. Upon the announcement of the sale to UWorld, the thrills were not abated, as she opined that

“We are thrilled to join UWorld and round out the company’s premier educational resources in the legal space.….Our shared passion for developing and delivering the highest quality educational content enables us to make a more significant impact in helping law students reach their dreams”.

It would seem that the hopes of the first acquisition became those of the second one, or maybe PR pronouncements are better regarded as fictional. On the other hand, it may be the case that things did not work out as well as might be expected for Aspen and/or Transom in the partnership which was formed in 2021. Presumably Wolters Kluwer and others which have exited professional training markets in recent years, did so as there were better ways to make money. Perhaps the arrival of Covid in 2020, with its lessening effects more recently, has altered the attractiveness of online learning businesses. Whatever the reasons for the recent developments, the indications seem to be that Transom is in the process of reviewing its choices and priorities for the future; within a short time of selling Aspen, it also disposed of Locano, a mapping technology company and Mackie, an audio business. Around the same time, it acquired Bose Professional, Webasto Charging Solutions and Galleher, a flooring products business. Transom does not appear to have other learning or academic and professional information businesses under its control. Perhaps, with hindsight, these markets were a step too far. In the past few years, several professional information businesses have been sold by established corporates to venture capitalists, allowing vendors to focus on core and more profitable markets, at the same time as opportunities for trade sales to competitors and aspirants have been harder to secure and values reduce. Yet there is sufficient and consistent evidence to be wary of the newer owners’ propositions. Crude, vulgar money tends to be their primary interest and, despite the many businesses and the people within them who have done well under the wings of venture capitalists and their like, the latter are inclined to get what they want, or get out, as the Truth Social saga is likely to demonstrate. It must be hoped that for Aspen Publishing’s employees and their families, as well as their suppliers and customers, the new home within UWorld brings benefits and security. Yet I am inclined to think that the story is not yet over, either for Aspen or UWorld. I imagine that, before too long, but ideally not in less than two years’ time, we shall be reading more about it. Of course, some likely or even predictable suitors might favour a matrix approach to professional training while others will steer clear, wishing to focus only on training for legal practice. In pleasing contrast, closer to my home, an established academic publishing business of which I was, until recently, an owner and director, was recently acquired, to my great satisfaction, not by venture capitalists but by a respected university press. Dunedin Academic Press’s portfolio now sits, in appropriate company, within the esteemed Liverpool University Press, where I have high hopes for it, its customers, authors and other suppliers. In my quite subjective opinion, even in a generally declining market, greater potential success lies in the provision of added-value content and access to research tools for practitioners rather than for trainee lawyers. Indeed, there is much evidence to support this. Academic law publishers understand it, which explains why so many of them are continuously trying to evolve from the less to the more profitable markets. Not the least of these endeavours is seen from the recent announcement by vLex of the establishment of a new advanced research initiative dedicated to the exploration and integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in legal technology, initially focusing on partnerships with large law, enterprise and corporate firms in North America and the UK. In the past, much of the targeting of that business was on legal academic institutions. According to Bloomberg Law, if it is to be believed, specifically in the USA, for legal work in practice, legal research heads the list of uses of generative artificial intelligence. In my consultancy work, I perceive the shifts in market direction; for example, only recently, another UK legal scholarly publishing business which sought my advice on such matters, has been canvassing practitioners, but not students and trainees, for their opinions on preferred ways to access legal content. The analysis by Hugh Logue of Outsell, on 2023 legal & regulatory technology and information services mergers and acquisitions, again, if it is to be believed, highlights the trend towards larger, strategic deals, with a growing focus on generative artificial intelligence, increased interest in European markets and a shift towards more mature companies with lower multiples, apparently signalling a shift in industry dynamics. Of course, it makes sense to nurture the new entrants to exploit their future loyalty and career-long value, but I believe that the real money comes from the grown-ups, who are not unhappy to pay fair prices for optimum quality and service, provided that these can be guaranteed.

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“This is the largest theft in the United States, period.” Such is the judgment of author and scriptwriter Justine Bateman who has complained to the US Copyright Office that the AI industry has scraped her work, much as it has everything else, having exhausted Wikipedia and Reddit it is moving on YouTube transcripts and Google docs. This is what it takes to assemble the trillions of words needed to expand the training of ever-more-powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). As a result, Bateman’s complaint has become a common charge. Authors (notably Sarah Silverman and John Grisham), publishers (Universal Music), and newspapers (New York Times) are lining up to sue OpenAI, Microsoft, and other firms for violating their copyright. In the United States, where this legal action is largely taking place, copyright’s fair use exception is bound to be the first line of defense by the companies sued. In US law, four factors are considered in judging what qualifies for a fair use exception. As I and others see it, the workings of LLMs is so well served by the first factor, involving the character of the use, that it nullifies the other three. The LLMs are arguably engaged in what the courts refer to as transformative use. That is, LLMs “know” not to reproduce Bateman’s texts because of copyright (if still imperfectly). Yet as it has been informed by these texts, among a great many others, it can refer to or summarize them. This transformative use reduces the relevance of the other fair use factors. These entail how much was copied and whether that copying is being used in a commercial way (but there is no presence of a copy). The fourth involves whether the copying enables a LLM to compete with Bateman’s work or harm her market. It’s likely just the opposite, as it can increase attention to her books. But more than that, just as Justine Bateman likely consumed hundreds of (complete) books and thousands of other sources in creating her own original works, the LLMs are computationally following in the footsteps of this longstanding cultural tradition. It is a given that every writer owes much to those who wrote before them. This cultural indebtedness is not something copyright is intended to correct. Nor is copyright meant to rectify how some writers (and now machines) will make far more money than those whose work they consume or to which they refer. Copyright was instituted, after all, “for the encouragement of learning,” as the title of a recent history of Canadian copyright by Myra Tafik puts front and center. Let me then apply this theme to scholarly publishing, which is my intellectual property beat in this column. Here what’s noteworthy is how this field’s largest publisher Elsevier is offering to sell for “AI and digital transformation” the complete texts published in its 2,500 journals, as well as abstracts from the 7,000 publishers that it indexes in its Scopus, and 11 million conference papers that it also happens to possess. I can appreciate that establishing this business model is an excellent strategy for cutting off the fair use claim that LLM use does not interfere, for example, with Bateman’s sales. Yet Elsevier’s re-selling this body of work could undermine the interests of the authors, which is to say, researchers. They turned over our copyright to the publishers long before such secondary sales were a prospect, and did so only to give the publishers an incentive to widely circulate the work. The researchers’ interest is not in protecting their work’s commercial value, but in maximizing its contribution to learning and humankind. The principle has long been realized through the university library, where faculty and students access vast quantities of texts to underwrite their research (without paying royalties at least to the journal authors). The principle has been expanded in the digital era with the move to open access to research, which I’ve often discussed in this column. And now, we are seeing how LLMs can act as a further resource for pursuing research goals. Among a number of ongoing initiatives, there’s the success of AlphaFold, an AI system developed by Google’s DeepMind, in solving the protein-folding puzzle for over 200 million protein structures involving amino acid sequences, which will greatly speed up drug discovery and treatment. The research community, then, has a special interest in facilitating the development of LLMs that can support research in the public interest. What is encouraging, in this regard, are the growing number of open source LLMs that can be freely used, as is the expansion of open access to research which is, in effect, helping to enrich LLMs’ knowledge base and the factual grounding of these systems’ output. By the same token, this community should be no less concerned about how Elsevier, if not yet other publishers, is seeking to re-sell its publications to AI companies. Such moves to further commercialize research and scholarship, largely created at public expense, is bound to restrict researcher and public access to the resulting LLMs (see the Right to Research movement). So when Bateman, Silverman, Grisham and others have their day in court, I see a need for something of a “public defender” to speak out on behalf of both the cultural traditions by which older works are transformed into new sources of knowledge through, in this case, publicly accessible LLMs. As LLMs continue to demonstrate extraordinary powers, their growth needs to be guided by the public benefits they can serve, which is very much in the original spirit of copyright law.

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For those of us raised in Canada and who studied law here, it can be easy to forget that the way we practise law is very… Canadian. While we’re all aware that there are substantive differences between Canadian law and the law of other jurisdictions, it’s much easier to forget that the practice of law varies just as much from nation to nation. There’s more than one way to do almost anything, and the Canadian legal system is founded on a very specific set of choices, norms, and traditions. Upon arriving in Canada from her native Australia, and despite her background as an academic from another common law system, Dr. Kellinde Wrightson – now Executive Director of the Foreign Trained Lawyers Program at the Faculty of Law, University of Calgary – felt a surprising measure of culture shock. With the help of mentors and colleagues within the Alberta legal community, she found her feet; but she wasn’t willing to simply forget the barriers and biases she observed along the way. Now an associate Professor of Law, Wrightson decided to write the very text she would have found helpful during her own adjustment period. As her publisher, when we first agreed to publish Decoding Canadian Legal Research, Writing, and Conventions, we thought of it as merely a supplement to our existing legal research text The Comprehensive Guide to Legal Research, Writing & Analysis. But as we became more familiar with the manuscript, we realized we’d be publishing something much more important. Decoding would grow, before our eyes, into a code-breaking guide to the eccentricities of the Canadian legal system as seen through the eyes of a recent outsider. How is our system eccentric? Well, for starters, we have articling, unknown in most of the legal world. We have the concept of parallel systems of law and equity. Our lawyers must pass both a barrister and a solicitor exam to be called to the bar. But these are just some of the well-known “big things”. To get a sense of the mysterious small things, imagine this: you’ve been a lawyer in India for decades, but you wake up one morning as an associate in a Canadian law firm. Your first meeting of the workday is a Zoom gathering of your county law association, and it starts with someone reciting an Indigenous land acknowledgment. The implications make your head spin, but no time to think about all that – it’s off to court to set a date for a trial. You scramble into your robes and rush to the courtroom – where nobody is robed (but will be, come afternoon, when you return in your street clothes). Then it’s back to the office to draft some pleadings which will be dropped right back on your desk, with half of the content – the best parts! – crossed out. The most unlikely part of this story, of course, is the part about waking up as an associate in a Canadian law firm. THAT doesn’t just happen. Instead there are years spent requalifying, competing with local graduates for opportunities, and often despite years of practice experience, fighting a continual battle to defend your credentials. Internationally-trained lawyers face huge obstacles in their quest to earn the right to practise here. It’s on all of us to do what we can to improve the welcome that we extend to them. By demystifying critical aspects of the system that most of us take for granted, Decoding Canadian Legal Research, Writing, and Conventions is Dr. Wrightson’s gift to those who follow her onto our shores. We at Emond Publishing are so proud to be its publisher.

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In the 1920s, Jackie Coogan became one of Hollywood’s first child stars after playing the titular role of “The Kid” alongside Charlie Chaplin. Having starred in several box office successes, Coogan’s childhood career had earned him an estimated $4 million (roughly $62 million today). When Coogan tried to access his earnings in his 20’s, however, he discovered that his mother had spent nearly his entire fortune. In response to public outcry, California passed the Coogan Act, which aimed to safeguard a portion of child actors’ earnings until they reached adulthood and to protect them from abuse and exploitation. The Coogan Act contained several loopholes that permitted continued exploitation (see the money troubles of Shirley Temple, Macaulay Culkin and Gary Coleman), which were partially addressed by revisions made in 2000. While there are laws in both Canada and the United States that aim to prevent the financial exploitation of child actors, little has been done to protect their privacy or prevent other forms of abuse. And in the context of children in the emerging online entertainment industry, there are almost no protections offered.

Making Children Earn Their Keep (And Then Some…)

Children have become increasingly present—and popular—in online content. According to Forbes, two out of the top ten highest paid YouTubers in 2021 were under the age of 13 (10-year-old Nastya earned $28 million, while 12-year-old Ryan earned a paltry $27 million). But given the fact that most large social media platforms (including TikTok, YouTube and Instagram) prohibit children under 13 from making an account, how are young children making it big online? In most cases, these accounts are run by their parents. Such accounts create content that usually falls under two major categories: “Kidfluencing” and “Sharenting”. In general, kidfluencing videos star children and are targeted towards other children. Such videos can feature toy reviews, unboxing gifts, or playing games. “Sharenting” videos, on the other hand, are usually centered on the parent (called a “mommy vlogger” or “family vlogger”) while still featuring their children and are geared towards a broader audience. These videos focus more on parenting advice, recipes, and documenting the family’s daily life.

Ryan’s World, “Christmas Morning 2015 Opening Presents Surprise Toys Ryan ToysReview” (25 December 2015). Ryan, now 12, has been making YouTube videos since he was 3. Note that I blurred the child’s face from the original thumbnail.

An Industry Based on Exploitation

If you think this kind of manager-talent relationship between parents and children sounds ripe for abuse, you would be correct. While abuse is a broad term, it usually takes one of four main forms: emotional, physical, sexual or economic. Now, I think that it’s important to more clearly define emotional abuse before throwing the term around willy nilly. While the definitions of other forms of abuse may seem more clear cut, emotional abuse can seem nebulous to some. The Canadian government specifically recognizes acts that would take away an individual’s self-respect (including humiliation and name calling) as a form of emotional abuse. Child influencers are particularly vulnerable to this type of emotional abuse by their parents, who have complete control over their lives. One former kidfluencer whose entire childhood was made into content, shared how humiliated she felt when her mother forced her to do sponsored posts for sanitary pads when she reached puberty and began menstruating. In another example, a former family vlogger was seen in a since-deleted video coaching her already distressed child on how to cry for the thumbnail after learning their puppy was dying. In some cases, emotionally abusive or otherwise exploitative behavior online can be indicative of physical abuse behind the camera. In February of 2024, former family vlogger Ruby Franke was sentenced up to 60 years based on four counts of aggravated child abuse. While her strict parenting style on camera led some to believe Franke was abusive (e.g., threatening to destroy her children’s toys, withholding food, etc.) she was not arrested until her 12-year-old son escaped to request aid from neighbors. Upon investigation, the police found her children had severe signs of malnourishment and abuse.

Today, “YouTube mom Ruby Franke and counselor Jodi Hildebrandt sentenced to 4-30 years for child abuse” Ruby Franke, left, in a video on her YouTube channel, and appearing in court in December on child abuse charges.

Removing the Financial Incentives

Just as in the case of child actors, child influencers can make big money. Through brand deals, ad revenue, merchandising, and donations, children with larger accounts can rake in huge earnings—for their parents. Throughout all of Canada and most of the US, child influencers are afforded no protection from the financial exploitation of their parents. In other words, it is up to the parents to decide whether they want to save for their child’s future education or follow in the footsteps of Jackie Coogan’s mom and blow it all on diamonds and fur coats. In August 2024, Illinois became the first North American jurisdiction to pass a law specifically requiring adults who use a child’s likeness, name or photograph in paid online content to set aside a portion of those earnings in a trust. This law represents a positive step in legislative progression. Illinois has recognized the changing face of children’s labour in entertainment and has taken action to address the real ongoing harms in the online content industry. While protecting a child from certain forms of exploitation may be difficult to legislate (though the Canadian government has recently recognized the need to protect children online in the Online Harms Bill), there is a clear path forward to preventing financial exploitation. Canadian provinces should follow the lead of Illinois and adopt legislation to protect children’s earnings from online content. Currently, Ontario’s Protecting Child Performers Act, 2015 requires 25% of a child performer’s earnings to be held in trust if they earn over $2000. These protections are not extended to child performers in online content. Other provinces have similar legislation. Canadian labour law must be updated to meet the realities of the modern entertainment industry and address the challenges therein. And who knows, maybe Canadian provinces could even let children keep an even greater percentage of their earnings. 25% sounds a little meager to me. Let’s allow the kids to enjoy the fruits of their labour and raise it to say…50%. And if you’re a former child performer reading this 10 years in the future and your provincial government took my advice… I have PayPal and am currently awaiting your generous donation.

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