Bloomberg Law App fails to include law blogs?
Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg BNA’s flagship legal and business intelligence, news, and research platform, announced Friday the release of its law app which will provide seamless access to personalized legal content.
From Joe Breda, Executive Vice President, Product, at Bloomberg BNA:
From meetings with clients to arguments in court, our clients need to access their Bloomberg Law content no matter where they are. This new app brings not only an added mobility to their service, but was designed to specifically deliver actionable, personalized content, seamlessly from the app to desktop and back again.
What’s in the app, free for subscribers?
- View news and analysis targeted to their interests
- Follow news, litigation, and market performance of clients, prospects, and other companies on their Watchlists
- Read BNA Law Reports and get email notifications
- Receive the latest Bloomberg Law alerts for legal and news searches
- Access legal documents and news articles within their reading Queue – online or offline – and maximize workflow efficiency with documents seamlessly synched between desktop and mobile app
- Easily track dockets, opinions or bills in their interest areas
- Share legal documents and news with other Bloomberg Law subscribers
What’s missing from the app?
Blogs (as best I can tell). Law blogs published by practicing lawyers offering keen insight and commentary not available elsewhere.
Blogs are covering niche areas of the law not covered by traditional legal publishers such as BNA. Without including blogs there are significant gaps in legal coverage with this app.
Blogs also offer learning and collaboration for lawyers in a fashion not offered before. From Attorney Daniel Schwartz (@danielschwartz) publisher of the Connecticut Employment Law Blog, in the Connecticut Law Tribune on the value of following law blogs.
It helps me. think if you look at blogs as a way to collaborate with other attorneys, they have become a modern day equivalent of a specialized bar association.
We’re far beyond the day where lawyers look at blogs as having minimal value. Good lawyers are also moving beyond a law blogs as merely a marketing tool used to garner website traffic. Lawyers, themselves, are publishing good legal information on blogs to the tune of hundreds (or thousands) of posts a day.
Law blogs offer unsurpassed insight and commentary. I am not sure how you can exclude law blogs in what’s described as complete and seamless access to personalized legal information.
It’ll be interesting to see how traditional publishers such as Bloomberg BNA address the issue and inclusion of law blogs in their offerings.