THE LAWYERS WEEKLY
February 10, 2012 | 23
BUSINESS
CAREERS
LUIGI
BENETTON
Anybody who doubts the
arrival of electronic books need
only check out a stunning five-minute TED Talk in which the
presenter blows on a tablet screen
to make a windmill on the screen
spin. Legal e-books might not
need such bells and whistles, but
they are garnering interest — perhaps enough to change lawyers’
research habits.
For years, electronically available information has led lawyers
to move paper-based activities to
desktops, laptops, netbooks and
tablets. Might e-books lead lawyers to adopt dedicated e-readers
like the Kobo, Amazon’s Kindle
or Sony’s Reader?
No — and yes. Anecdotally,
tablets outnumber e-readers
among lawyers. Shaunna Mireau
surveyed her firm’s lawyers last
May and found seven of them
had Apple iPads, two toted BlackBerry PlayBooks and nine owned
various makes of e-readers. Tablets have been gaining share since
then, according to Mireau, the
Edmonton-based director of
knowledge management and
libraries for Field Law.
Expectations are high for such
devices. “I purchased the first-generation Apple iPad instead of
an e-reader since the iPad is more
versatile,” says Ted Tjaden,
national director of knowledge
management for McMillan LLP.
He lists web surfing, email, calendars, games and music among
the activities he wants to perform
on his device.
But foregoing a physical
e-reader doesn’t mean you can’t
access its bookstore. Tjaden, for
instance, buys books to read on
his tablet using the Amazon Kindle app. Add apps such as Kobo
and Apple’s iBookstore to the mix,
and the selection of books for a
dedicated e-reader can’t compare.
Tablets also skirt the issue of
which e-book format works on
which type of reader, an issue that
will persist à la Blu-ray versus HD
DVD unless the industry settles
on one universal e-book format.
The Web browser may be the
“killer app” most e-readers don’t
have, a tool that lawyers such as
Donna Neff use to access research
subscriptions. “If I want to do
research related to my legal work,
I go to my iPad. I can download a
lengthy piece off the web to read
later. I can take it on a train or
plane to read locally,” says the
Stittsville, Ont.-based lawyer.
Indeed, for research, she
bypasses her desktop PC, laptop
and netbook—as well as paper,
since Neff’s office has dropped
ON THE
E-SHELVES
Here’s a sampling of what’s
available from legal publishers.
American Bar Association:
It seems a natural fit, releasing
a book called iPad in One Hour
for Lawyers, via Apple’s iBookstore,
but the ABA claims it will use
Apple’s bookselling operation
to distribute other materials.
Carswell:
Thomson Reuters Proview, Carswell’s
forthcoming dedicated reader app,
will enable customers to access a
selection of its e-books.
Regardless of who pays for
them, technology departments
will want to make e-reader
devices secure, since lawyers
likely will use them to view client
information as well as legal
research material.
You can forgive legal publishers if they secretly yearn for a
return to the simplicity of the
days of print. Websites to maintain, e-reader formats to choose,
new licensing strategies to
develop— the degree of evolution
being forced on publishers by
lawyers hungry for digital alternatives makes them seem a little
slow on the uptake.
“The various offerings from
legal publishers are still in their
infancy,” Tjaden says. “The main
limitation is the lack of easy
hyperlinking. Most substantive
legal treatises in print or on a
commercial online database have
clickable links to case or legisla-
tive citations, but that function-
ality is not yet available on
e-books.”
Publishers seem to be taking
their time not just on developing
features for their e-books but on
migrating titles to digital for-
mats. “Right now, they seem to be
publishing things as e-books that
people would want a personal
copy of,” Mireau says.
“Currently, if you buy the print
version then you also get access
to the e-book,” she adds. n
E-BOOK BY TOMMASO79 / DREAMSTIME.COM, IPAD COURTESY OF APPLE, SHELVES BY ARZTSAMUI / DREAMSTIME.COM
The main limitation is the lack of easy
hyperlinking. Most substantive legal treatises in
print or on a commercial online database have
clickable links to case or legislative citations, but
that functionality is not yet available on e-books.
“
Irwin Law:
Irwin partnered with e-book-reading
application developer Nubook to
create a reader for both its front
and back list. Irwin claims the
application was to be available
by the end of 2011.
Ted Tjaden, national director of knowledge management, McMillan LLP
every “paper subscription” it had.
Tablets also support apps that
let people both annotate documents and store their work
online. In a pinch, tablets also let
users perform that most common
research task: copy material from
research documents to their work
documents.
Low price, long battery life and
easy-on-the-eyes screens may
continue to attract buyers interested only in pleasure reading,
but in business environments
dedicated e-readers compare
about as favourably to tablets as
nineties-era Palm devices compare with today’s smartphones.
When I called her, Mireau was
researching costs for e-books she
wanted to add to Field Law’s
library. While individual copies
were slightly discounted for
e-reader versions, “in the law-firm-library world, electronic
costs more,” she said.
Why? For one thing, today’s
tablet-toting lawyers want e-book
copies on their devices. That
drives up licensing costs compared with those for hard copies,
which lawyers leave in the library
instead of carrying around.
E-book sharing could keep
costs down, but it’s difficult to
enable. Law firm libraries may
need to use tools such as OverDrive, a system used by many
public libraries to handle both
digital material checkouts and
automate check-ins.
Devices themselves can be difficult to cost-justify. Muddying
the monetary waters further,
large firms may need to decide
which department — IT, the
library, or another—takes the
budgetary hit.
“I hope people get things for
Christmas and then I’ll help
them use their gifts,” Mireau said
with chuckle.
LexisNexis Canada:
A selection of e-books are
compatible with Apple’s iPad as well
as the BlackBerry PlayBook and Android
devices. (LexisNexis Canada owns
The Lawyers Weekly.)
Wilson & Lafleur Ltée:
Readers can access the Québec-
based legal publisher’s collection in
a custom iPad app.
Law firms:
Why should legal publishers have all
the fun? U.S. firm Latham & Watkins
published three editions of The
Book of Jargon as smartphone apps
to assist members of the financial
community (i.e. its clients) with the
“talk” of banking, capital markets
and project finance. The concept of
e-book publishing as business
development may induce other
firms to follow suit.
