…If I were Thompson Reuters. TaxProf Blog and the WSJ have the story. The great legal publisher sold its law school publishing division (West Academic Publishing, Foundation Press, and Gilbert Imprints) to Eureka Growth Capital (what a name!), a Philadelphia private equity firm.
Although LSP is an outstanding business with a long history of serving law school faculty and students, the company has made the decision to focus on growing from its core of subscription-based research and reference products, workflow solutions, software and services.
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“[Law school publishing is] a segment of the market that, longer-term, we didn’t see as within the core of our legal research offerings,” said spokesman John Shaughnessy…
Why doesn’t Thompson Reuters see much longer-term growth in casebooks? I doubt it’s so much prescience over the applicant nosedive as the death of print. Seriously, no one likes hauling those tomes around, and if anything we should wonder why they weren’t digitized earlier. All this talk of the “broken business model” of law schools (how is it broken? They make quite a bit of money on student debt) is belied by law professors and publishers scoring huge copyright rents by requiring their students, whose humps now make them look Richard III, to buy their latest editions. At the end of the semester, campus bookstores then buy them back for a song because “We don’t know if that course will be offered next year” and then resell them next year at near-full price.
The Last Gen X American 