Law library discussions are dominated by format discussions. They tend to revolve around print, licensed databases, and discrete electronic files (ebooks). I have been wondering what an audio format might look like for a legal text, and whether it has a place in our information delivery.

If it sounds painful, I admit that it might be. In fact, this post may need to come with some sort of reader warning! Wait until you hear me read about contractual performance! There be vacuity in these waters!

But that’s no reason not to consider it, and how law libraries would help advocate for an audio option. In the end, I think it’s a niche option. There’s not a lot of audio in the legal information world. Some thoughts as to why:

  • legal publishers are deep in print and print-replica information. Audio is different and there is no precedent they can rely on for profits.
  • Audio has new and different costs, which would be additional to the cost if you’re creating a text-based object. I’m not sure that the choice to pay those costs for an digital ebook instead of digital audio makes sense. But the costs are real.
  • legal professionals use text and are taught to use text in a way that makes audio – as it’s currently delivered, as a single chunk – difficult to manipulate as a research output.

Audio options in legal information are long standing. The Oyez project has been capturing oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court and providing highlighted transcripts as the audio plays. Here’s an example – the 2Live Crew v. Roy Orbison “Pretty Woman” case – from 1993/1994.

Screenshot from the Oyez project’s site showing the court oral argument transcript from 1993. The yellow bar covers the text currently being heard on the audio. The photos at the top also change as each justice speaks.

It’s not a format that we collect regularly, though. Nor is it commonly provided by legal publishers, as far as I can tell. Audio tends to be more temporary, to be listened to in the moment. I was enlisted on a series of about 40 law practice technology podcasts – that still live despite being long in the tooth – but they are very of-the-moment. If it is syndicated, people will listen to it as it is released. I’m not confident that as many people return to an audio source a second time.

The Road to Audio

So you can find audio in use in other places in the legal information world. So what? In a sense, that’s where I started.

This is the path that I followed:

  • legal texts are rarely read cover to cover outside of a law school. Whether an annotated code, a nutshell or hornbook, a handbook, a multi-volume treatise, researchers are usually focused on a portion of the text. We provide access to information chunks.
  • formats matter. Some formats like ebooks have struggled in the legal world because they have applied commercial fiction publisher approaches to a very different type of information. To be fair, ebooks are struggling in many other information domains.
  • If we are dealing with content that is not used in a linear fashion (cover to cover), how do expose the chunks effectively? This is where ebooks fail, with weak search and a chapter-based finding approach that is insufficiently granular.
  • What other media use a chunk-based approach to information delivery and should we be looking at it, if it is widely adopted in other information domains?

I looked at audio because it is a text analog. We could attempt to deliver legal information using video but it raises a lot of issues. For one, the equipment needed to create video would add to the cost.

However, the chunk approach to video is already common. If you upload a video to YouTube, you can add chapters to it. Here is the YouTube Creator’s channel explanation of how to do it. Meta.

YouTube videos can have chapters. This segments the content. This video shows how to do it.

So the end goal, such as it is, uses audio but it has some ability to chop the information so that the researcher can dig into the specific chunk they need. This is something that is already very common in the audio world. You need only look at podcasts for this, so I did.

A Segmented Legal Text

I’ll pull back the curtain a bit and reveal that I was particularly fond of contracts law in law school. It was not as fond of me, but there you go. I pulled out my old Farnsworth on Contracts (autographed for a fanboy by Bill Young, who co-authored for awhile) and recorded myself reading the section of Order of Performance. Scintillating.

One of the interesting things about the text is that it has lots of internal markers. I started at a section header (Chapter 8, Section 11) but there are footnotes and there are margin notes to flag key concepts. As I recorded the file in Audacity, I applied label markers to show each of these. When I was finished, I exported the MP3 file and exported the labels into a label file. You can see them below as they’re shown after I imported them into WordPress and the Podlove plugin.

A screenshot of the Podlove template in WordPress, showing the audio labels (called chapters) imported from Audacity’s export file

Even the best table of contents in a book would not have the same elements. Tables and indices can’t handle that detail. A print legal publisher would probably shift margin headings into the body text, since digital files don’t tend to maintain margins. (No, that’s not an economics joke.)

But you can imagine, I think, why having these chunks clearly designated might be helpful. If I’m already familiar with the overall topic (Order of Performance) and just need to dig into a subsection, I can do so. In a book, I’d just flip forward to it (hopefully after finding it in a finding tool like a table or index).

This is still about audio, though. Podcasting is having a moment. Is there a place for audio formats in the legal information world? I think there probably is. But it can’t just be a linear file. If it can be chopped into chunks – chapters in this case – then it becomes substantially more useful.

In chapters, an audio legal text can:

  • be listened to by an expert, a legal professional, who can skip forward over known information
  • be shared with a link to someone who doesn’t need to wade through a whole chapter to get to the key part of the text

Audio that is separated into chunks can replicate the print-format-like experience of being able to move backwards and forwards. It’s information access that is different from a normal commercial audiobook or ebook, which provide a linear delivery (usually front to back). Chunked audio can provide the granular access a researcher needs.

Audio has the additional benefit of being something you can syndicate. It can be shared on RSS feeds. It can be placed into iTunes and other podcasting stores. Audio can be presented and digested differently from a text equivalent, print or digital. If we worry about our legal information being submerged and hidden on web sites, audio can provide an alternative to text web sites.

Wrap It Up

All that’s left really is to determine what the pickup might be. I think a law library could find a couple of simple items to try this on. Perhaps a government document or a short guide that they’re creating in a linear print-like digital format.

The software and technology seems pretty easy to use. I used the open source Audacity to record the audio. I’m using the PodLove publishing plugin to expose the audio on my WordPress site. The audio can reside on its own page or can be embedded. You can see the final result below. If there was any money to invest, it would be on a voice actor!

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If databases dominate legal information, then I would anticipate audio would be a niche market like ebooks. It could work for any content and, in fact, the longer the content, the more likely I think it would work. But whether there’s a market for it, and whether there’s a paying audience, I’m not sure.

Audio is going to stick with me for a bit, though. I think there are use cases out there. If we’re looking for different formats, and to extend our service delivery out beyond the hours we can staff, I don’t see why audio wouldn’t be part of that.