I came across a post on Lexblog over the weekend titled "Niche bloggers could threaten legal publishers" which I found pretty interesting. The post referred to another post by Ron Friedmann where he pointed out that publishing tools like blogs, wikis and podcasts enable law firms and other publishers to publish legal content very easily and potentially to a pretty big audience, thus potentially threatening legal publishers.

This is pretty much what the Open Law Project is - an initiative to harness the knowledge of the community and publish legal content using these publishing tools. This is a threat to the legal publishers who tend to publish their content behind a walled garden. Of course they have quite a bit of legal content at their disposal but as independent publishers start to publish content of a similar quality and perhaps even quantity, legal publishers will start to lose their grip in the market, especially if the independently produced content is free.