Free legal information – the Berring strait
Bob Berring is an eminent Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley who has won significant recognition for teaching and law librarianship.
In his time he’s consulted for West. How closely associated he is I do not know; he plays West up substantially in this YouTube clip. (See also this post and the comments thereto on Thomson Reuters blog Legal Current.)
Bob kicks off his vid by saying “I do believe in the market system”. So, he’s not a commie. But what does he mean by “the market system” – it soon becomes clear.
He believes that government efforts in the provision of free legal information have failed because there are no incentives; and that “volunteer efforts”, worthy as they may be, are unlikely to be sustained. He rightly says that legal information is not easily packaged: we need a map and a compass to navigate it; it needs to be organised and value added. I think we all agree with that. But his conclusion appears to be that only Wexis have sufficient incentive and only they can mobilise the necessary army to add sufficient value for it to be useful. That’s clearly preposterous – the talk of someone living in the past.
For Bob the free legal information that’s out there is “a bunch of goo” and the only thing that can sort out the mess is “the market system”. Well I have to tell Bob that it’s more nuanced than that. Sure, people need incentives, but those incentives are not only to turn a profit for shareholders. We live in a mixed economy Bob and we live by differing values:
- government has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
- the legal profession has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
- various non-profits have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
- citizens have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
- and there are many private enterprises short of Wexis who have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
All these are players in the development of better legal information; all these are making a difference.
