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As I sit here in a hotel room editing this post, and going over my notes for the four presentations I am giving at AALL this year, I realized that I’m taking to heart some of the perspectives we gather on this week’s Elephant Post. There were many good suggestions on not just the logistics of getting prepared for a public speaking engagement, but also on how you psychologically prepare to give the presentations. Thanks to everyone that contributed, and don’t forget that we do this every week, so skip on down below this week’s perspectives and see if you can physically and psychologically answer next week’s question on how things have changed in your job since the onset of The Great Recession.

Sarah Glassmeyer
Academic Law Librarian

It depends on what sort of presentation I’m doing…if it’s a straight, “60 Tools in 60 minutes” type presentation where I’m demonstrating a service or explaining how to use something (and when I teach), I generally try to have that information down cold and write a script beforehand.  It starts with the slide preparation…I write out exactly what I want to say with each slide – including my lame jokes that sound off the cuff – and practice, practice, practice until I can go into autopilot with it.  That allows me – I hope, anyway – to then concentrate on the presentation style when I am speaking so that it’s interesting for the audience.  On the other hand, if it’s more a “discussion” like a podcast or panel – basically me spouting my opinions about something – then I write a rough outline of the points I want to hit, but how I get from point A to point B I leave up to the last minute and ad lib it.   I think of it like playing jazz, in a way.   I don’t mind speaking publicly, but I always try to coffee up so I have a little more bounce and personality.  Unfortunately, this has the negative result of me speaking 1000 words per minute (and I’m a pretty fast talker anyway.)  So I constantly have to remind myself to slow down and enunciate.

Steven B. Levy
Author of Legal Project Management
Author, speaker, consultant

First I get as clear as I can on what I want to communicate, what combination of information, mindset, and action plans I want the audience to come away with, based on the organizers’ goals. Next I try and understand where the audience is coming from, their starting points and likely biases.* Now I can put together an outline sketching how to get from B to A, based on what I’ve learned and what I’m capable of doing effectively. That outline may be on a whiteboard, in OneNote, in PowerPoint, or in some combination of the three.   From that outline, I can build my slides (which are usually graphics/images that bolster the points I’m making, with few or no words), while at the same time visualizing the presentation as if there were no slides. Over time, I refine, practice (often aloud), and modify until I have something I think will be coherent, entertaining, and achieve both my goals and the organizers’ goals.  ——- *In an ideal world I’d figure out the audience’s starting point first. The reality is that I often don’t have sufficient information on that starting point early enough in the process. I speak regularly — e.g., keynotes — and I believe I owe it to audiences and hosts to prepare thoroughly and well in advance.

John Gillies
KM lawyer

I try to do three things. First, I constantly ask myself whether what I’ll be talking will actually be useful (however much I might be tempted to tell “fascinating” war stories that really are only of interest to me). Second (and it’s related), I focus on paring away the extraneous content.  Last, I try only to do visual presentations that are useful. I hate PowerPoint presentations that are really nothing more than a formal paper converted to bullet points. I recently used Prezi (http://prezi.com/) and found that it offered an interesting alternative because it allows you to move back and forth and around your content (after coping with the learning curve on another new tool, of course!)

Lihsa
Online Marketing

I read a lot. Every day, I have tons of newsletters. Whenever I see anything interesting, I save it in a folder system that is based on topics. This is especially helpful when I need examples or stats.  Then, if I am partnering with someone, we usually meet at least once to set up the outline. Usually, one of us has made a first pass. Then we fill it out and start breaking out assigned speakers, understanding that we can jump into each other’s topic at any time. But this way, we have a clear road map during the presentation and no one person is hogging the floor (I won’t mention any names here šŸ˜‰ )  Lastly, for the powerpoint presentation, I like to spend a lot of time on this. But I like pretty pictures and decorating. I don’t use the powerpoint to give a blow-by-blow guideline of my speech. Instead, I treat them as backdrops to highlight my point. I love creative, beautiful art so I treat to bring that into my presentations.  Then, I relax and enjoy myself. I know I gotta sing for my supper so I better be, at the least, mildly entertaining!

Ayelette Robinson
Knowledge Management

Much of my process is similar to what others have noted above, so I won’t repeat those aspects.  What I’ll add, or elaborate on, is how I figure out how to frame my presentation in the first place. This is usually the most difficult part for me because once I have the framework, the content almost completes itself. So identifying and setting that framework is both the most challenging, but also the most useful, part of the preparation process for me.  My first step (and I’m echoing Steve here) is to try to figure out what the audience will hope to get from the session. Since I can’t poll the audience ahead of time, I look at how the session is being marketed and imagine: (1) who would be attracted to attend this session? and (2) what kind of content would I be happy to walk away with if I were attending?  Once I have the answers to those questions, I take a hard look at my experience — mentally walking through projects, interactions, my own professional aha moments, and the like — and pick out those pieces that match the session’s topic. Once I have those points and moments selected, I weed through them to make sure I’m not repeating points that I’ve heard many times before (and therefore can assume the audience has too), and I try to take a fresh look at them to see what might be a new perspective I can add.  This self-reflection can definitely be a challenging and time-consuming process, but my hope is that it makes my presentations better.

Next Elephant Post Question:

How Did “The Great Recession” Change the Way You Do Your Job?

I’m sure that many initial reactions will contain the phrase “do more with less,” but I’m sure there are other ways that you’ve changed the way you conduct work because of the changes that occurred after the markets collapsed in 2008. Share your perspective of some of the ways your job or profession has changed, and if you think that the changes are permanent or temporary. As always we try to make this easy on you, so just go ahead and fill out the embedded form below!

The Association has no purpose. The Association is being sneaky. What has the Association done for me? Why should I be a member in the Association? Thereā€™s a litany of woe (is me) posts/emails burning up the internet regarding AALL.
With the AALL Annual Meeting close at hand (and the Antitrust Policy floating around), I think this is an excellent opportunity for us to catch our collective breath and think some deep thoughts. First, in with the good air, out with the bad. Repeat. Now, isnā€™t that better?
Now, what is an association? No, Iā€™m not being silly. Most of the communication I have seen indicates that people seem to have lost sight of this basic concept. Simply put, associations provide an opportunity for like-minded people to meet, share ideas, advocate their principles in the halls of government and provide a face to the world at large to explain just who they are. What value do these functions have? Well, letā€™s focus on AALL.
In the 10+ years that I have been a member, AALL has been an unrelenting advocate for open government. The potential closing of the EPA libraries and making federal filings available to county law libraries are just a couple of examples of the fine work our Association has done in this area. I canā€™t think of a law librarian who wouldnā€™t need to access a government document at some point in their career. These documents and resources remain accessible due to the hard work of the association and its members.
The connections I have made have been worth the price of membership. Need a document from a court in Cook County? I just called a Librarian I met in St Louis and got it in minutes. Looking to start a support group for librarians doing CI? Spoke to a friend who introduced me to the PLL Chair who set it up with Headquarters. We had the CI group up and running in no time. Did I mention my co-founders were from Minneapolis and St Louis, not to mention the members of our Caucus are from all over the US? How else would I have made these connections if it werenā€™t for the association?
Vendor relations have never been the responsibility of the Association other than to pair vendors with customers. Vendor sponsorships just allow the vendors to sell their products to the Associationā€™s members. There is no obligation, duty or any other requirement for the Association to do more than that. In fact, there are good legal reasons for the Association or members not to collude to affect prices. Just as it would be harmful to consumers for Wolters Kluwer, BNA, ThomsonReuters and Lexis to share information about our contracts with each other, the members of the Association as well as the Association as a whole are precluded from sharing that same information. References to the Association as a sweetheart who has done you wrong by not standing up for you miss this crucial point.
It is the responsibility of every librarian to do whatā€™s best for their organization (i.e., Firm, Company, School or Government Library) when it comes to vendor relations. If you donā€™t like something the vendor does, tell them. If they donā€™t do anything about it, take your business elsewhere. It is up to the librarian to make sure their organization is aware of the negotiations and their options going in. Letā€™s face it, this is why they hire us. It’s up to us as individuals to create and maintain a beneficial partnership/relationship with our vendors. The Association cannot act as a substitute for us or a surrogate in our dealings with our vendors.
So letā€™s take a deep breath and consider the value the Association provides and not focus on ā€œWhat has it done for me lately?ā€ Take it, Ms. Jacksonā€¦

After attending a 4-hour grammar class–yes, I know, I am a geek–I was heartened to witness that there are those still out there who are positively impassioned about punctuation.
The class erupted in a thirty-minute discussion on–get this–how many spaces should follow a period.
Good grief.
You would have thought we were talking about which soda as better: Pepsi or Coke. No fewer than thirty-five people weighed in on the matter. These were their thoughts:
  1. If you are typing on a typewriter (and, really, who does this?), it is two spaces.
  2. If you are tweeting, it is one space–if you have even written a complete sentence, that is.
  3. If it is a legal document, it is two spaces.
  4. If it is a mobile device, most phones automatically make it a period followed by one space, if you enter two spaces.
  5. If it is web copy, it is one space.
Finally, after nearly coming to fisticuffs, the consensus was to use one space after a period.
Geez. You woulda thought it was the Grammargeddon.

Jordan Furlong added an excellent comment on a recent post and followed up with a personal note encouraging me to expand and define the idea of a cost rate versus a billing rate for a lawyer, or any other time keeper. So here we go.
There is an old Rule of Three that generally applies to non-partner time keepers that says the billing rate of a time keeper should be three times their hourly compensation. Looking at it from a profit perspective, this rule suggests that the hourly billing rate of this time keeper has three portions: The first is compensation. The second is overhead (benefits, office space, computers, software, admin support, etc.). The third is profit (a.k.a. partner comp).
Implied in this rule is a cost rate (composed of the first two portions) that is about two-thirds of the billing rate. As noted above, this is a general rule. Cost rates can actually vary from the 67% of billing rates quite a bit. So what becomes important is the difference between the cost rate and the billing rate. This really determines the profitability of a non-partner time keeper on an hourly basis. And this becomes important when a firm starts discounting billing rates, since a 10% billing rate discount would actually be a 30% reduction in profits under the general Rule of Three.
Where do cost rates come from?
At the highest level, an hourly cost rate equals the overall cost of a time keeper divided by the number of hours they bill (or should bill). If their comp is $100k per year, their overhead is $100k per year and their billable hours are at 1800, then their cost rate is $111 per hour (200k / 1800 = 111). Some firms use two cost rates ā€“ one based on a projected number of hours billed (e.g. the 1800) and another based on the actual number of hours billed. If the actual number is higher than the projected number, then the ā€œactualā€ cost rate is lower than the ā€œprojectedā€ one.
The challenges for calculating cost rates come in establishing the overhead cost number per time keeper (harder than it sounds) and agreeing on the appropriate number of projected hours. Using actual versus projected rates is a point of contention for most firms, as each rewards a different kind of behavior by partners.
Why would cost rates matter for an AFA?
Profit = Revenue ā€“ Cost. In a fixed fee AFA, the revenue is equal to the fixed fee, so we need to know our costs in order to determine the AFAā€™s profitability. The most direct way in a professional services environment that sells peopleā€™s time is to add up hours times cost rates to get that cost number for the equation. This means in a fixed fee arrangement to maximize profit you will want to push tasks to their lowest appropriate cost source since that will minimize the cost number in our equation. Having a $200/hour cost rate time keeper do tasks a $100/hour time keeper can do drives down profitability.
As you might guess this type of thinking runs directly counter to traditional hourly billing thinking. Looking at billing rates only, you would be encouraged to use the highest appropriate billing rate time keeper for each task since that behavior maximizes revenue.
This conflict highlights a fundamental challenge for law firms. Most compensation systems currently reward revenue, NOT profitability. Firms looking to embrace AFAs in a profitable way will need to face this question head-on. Taking on fixed fees and other AFAs and continuing with traditional ways of practicing that encourage the use of high cost rate people will lead to reductions in profits and failed firms. Given the nature and significance of this challenge, I expect to see a number of firms fail this basic math test.

Itā€™s been over six months since I first warned of the coming Corporate Technology Apocalypse on this blog. In the last few weeks, I think corporate IT has gotten a couple of new nails in its coffin.
The first came in the form of a splashy infographic from Unisys called The Great IT Freezeout, which got some coverage from GigaOm last Monday and was brought to my attention by geek number 4 (and my boss), Scott Preston. In my original post on The End of Corporate IT, I touted the consumerization of IT as one of my three pillars of the coming apocalypse. The first point on The Great IT Freezeout is that the ā€œConsumerization of IT is ACCELERATINGā€. (Their CAPS, not mine.) They show that 53% of workers who use PCs, smartphones and/or tablets for work, claim that mobile devices are their primary work tools, up from 44% in 2010 and that the percentage of the same workers who think that PCs are their most critical devices for work has fallen to 35% from 51% in 2010. Thatā€™s a huge change in just a year. Iā€™m not going to list all of their numbers. Go check out the infographic for yourself, but I do want to point out a couple of other areas of interest.
  • ITā€™s awareness of personal devices used for work is about 50% of the levels that workers self report actually using personal devices.
  • IT rates their own ability to support these consumer devices as low
  • ā€œ70% of IT rate their organizations a late/last adopters of new techā€
As the Unisys graphic puts it, ā€œIT risks IRRELEVANCEā€.
The second nail was a little less obvious and came in the form of two announcements. One from Microsoft announcing availability of their License Mobility through Software Assurance plan and one from Amazon announcing that they were supporting the Microsoft License Mobility plan on their AWS EC2 hosting platform. This will let companies who have server application licenses like Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL, migrate their existing licenses to a cloud host, rather than forcing them to purchase additional licenses. I know, it doesnā€™t sound like a big deal, but it removes one more barrier to moving IT infrastructure to the cloud. Corporations spend millions in supporting and maintaining a physical IT infrastructure in-house every year. The costs for servers, cooling, power management, and support staff are huge. A large chunk of that expense can now be easily transferred to a service provider. Maintaining hardware will go from being a semi-cyclical refresh expense, with periodic, unexpected, emergency expenses to being a fixed monthly cost that can be budgeted into the foreseeable future, with 99.9999% uptime and extreme flexibility. Management can increase or decrease capacity near instantaneously with a phone call. How can we justify maintaining a server farm in-house when such things are possible? The short term answer is security. But security concerns will not ultimately save IT. Security concerns have a tendency to be mitigated, especially when they stand in the way of profits.
Now, Corporate IT does a lot of things, I’m not saying that they will be replaced overnight, but two of the big things they do are maintain and support the technology infrastructure and maintain and support end-user technology. IT is currently being squeezed on both sides. Short of a brand new justification for their existence, I think you will eventually begin to see large corporate IT departments replaced with a handful of IT Integrators acting as liaisons between management and technology service providers. The fact is, most companies aren’t in the business of technology services and theyā€™re about to realize it.

Recently Donna Seyle posted an article on the lack of a Bright Line for what is the unauthorized practice of law (UPL). I offer some additional thoughts on the subject here.
First off ā€“ the LegalZoom battle is a losing one for regulators. As noted in the article, this provider and others have been around for some time now. The only real recent issue is that the market for legal services has become truly competitive, so now lawyers are actually worried about competition. So crying wolf once it hits your pocket book, but draping your argument in the ā€œsheepā€™s woolā€ of protecting clients seems a bit wrong to me.
LegalZoomā€™s argument that they are providing a service not previously offered by lawyers rings true to me. I worked for a mandatory bar and have some front-line knowledge on this subject. About 15 years ago a senior lawyer called me up all mad at the state courts since they had just released a document generation system for use in divorce matters ā€“ primarily targeted at low income citizens. He wanted me to have the Bar sue the courts for UPL. I understood his logic ā€“ as he was a self-professed ā€œbottom-feederā€ who served low income clients and saw this as a threat to his business.
I suggested it was unlikely the Bar would sue the Court. And I told him if he thought it was such a competitive and valuable offering, there was nothing stopping him from providing the same. In the end, he started sending clients to the courtā€™s online system to generate their own filing documents. He would then give them advice and help make any needed changes to the document. I applauded him for being smart enough to realize he was a lawyer, not a software developer, and for finding ways to profit from the advance of technology instead of trying to fight it. He finally agreed that such a system was providing services to people who had not been getting them.
Towards the end of this dialog, I made the prediction that if a mandatory bar ever decided to pursue a case like the LegalZoom one, they should be prepared for a bad outcome. Even if the case is won, legislatures will not be warm to the idea of protecting lawyersā€™ market over the needs of constituents and businesses who generate jobs and valuable services. So you would expect some weakening of the laws that support the regulation of UPL.
With this rant behind me ā€“ Iā€™ll move to what I consider to be the bigger question here: The Bright Line. Every state has different rules and very few resources to pursue UPL violations. This creates a very blurry line which is an open door for new competitors to enter the market. I have previously given examples in the IP Disputes market, but much broader and better funded providers have recently appeared and no one is raising the UPL flag.
Another prediction: no one will raise this flag until their business feels it and then it will be too late. Much like the LegalZooom situation, the market and government will ask why no one said anything before, and as a legal market our only fall-back will be some variation of clients being injured by the new providers. Too little ā€“ too late.
So what is a reasonable response?
If lawyers want to protect their market they would do well to come up with a Bright UPL Line now. And as importantly, they should start innovating and finding ways to provide better, faster, cheaper services to preempt new competitors from entering the market. Without these two efforts, they can just sit back and watch the future happen around them, while their island of protected space grows smaller and smaller.
Back to my original story – that lawyer and I kept a dialog going on the topic for a few years. We finally came to the conclusion that the only real protected space for lawyers was court appearances since the courts can be an effective gatekeeper. Everything else was open to attack.

Ron Friedmann and I ran a point-counter point post a while back on Bet-the-Farm versus Law Factory models for law firms. The dialogue was intended to generate some thoughts and ideas on the future shape of law firms.
In this post I take a tangent on that topic and explore whether firms should or could be General Contractors, versus legal-only niche players from the prior dialog. I think the ramifications of this concept extend deep into the future role and shape of firms, but in a different way.
General Contractor (GC)
Law firms have been tempted in the past to play a GC role but havenā€™t done well in executing on this. Iā€™m using your traditional definition of GC here, whereby the GC plays the primary role in a project, using sub-contractors for various aspects of an engagement. The obvious GC example is construction, where the GC contracts to plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc for each piece of the work. Two important points to note here: The construction GC is THE relationship point in the engagement, 2) The GC stands to make the highest return on its time/investment.
Ten years ago firms were acting as GCs (and some still do this) sending e-discovery work out to sub-contractors and passing that expense along to the client. This has not been going well since: 1) The firms didnā€™t manage the costs well, leading to clients taking these efforts in-house and 2) The firms didnā€™t make any margin on the work, meaning they were happy to let it go. Unfortunately, this also meant the coding and first review work would now start going to these third party providers.
What could the GC role look like?
An entrepreneurial firm could take a strong GC role, establishing itself as a cost-effective, low-burden provider. It would be cost-effective, since it would use its market position to secure the best rates from qualified sub-contractors. It would be low-burden, as it would remove the administrative and management burden from clients who are currently managing these sub-contractor relationships. These are the primary reasons you use a GC for any work. You want them ensuring the project is getting done right, on time and within the budget.
In a recent client meeting this concept came up. The client was asking why law firms are apparently unwilling to take a GC role. The client was not happy that it had to take on the GC role and especially not happy when they were able to easily realize significant cost savings from the sub-contractors. The list of potential sub-contractors discussed was surprisingly long. E-discovery providers were mentioned, but also included were copy services, court reporters, and even included contract lawyers (think on- and off-shore).
After the discussion and some time thinking about this idea, I came to the conclusion that the reason firms have not taken on this role is that they consider sub-contractor work to NOT be lawyer work. Being non-lawyer work puts the efforts beneath lawyers and not their concern. The vast majority of AFAs I have seen specifically exclude ā€œexpensesā€ as fees not worth including in the arrangement and not the law firmsā€™ problem.
Recommendation
Law firms would be VERY smart to take on the GC role. In addition to bringing more value to clients, it will keep them in the primary relationship role with clients. I am already seeing legal spend decisions shifting to business units (versus in-house counsel) so ignoring this need and opportunity will come at some peril. Admittedly certain statesā€™ ethics rules may present some challenges, however that is no reason to sit on the sideline and watch your business be pulled away by third-party contractors who take on primary relationship roles.

It has been almost a month since my trip to Philly for the 2011 annual SLA conference and INFO-EXPO. Over the course of the month, I have been thinking about what lessons I learned, and what I took away from the conference, and after letting it all stew, I am ready to share my thoughts. First off, I am not a librarian. I feel like I say that a lot, and I definitely had to say that and explain it a great deal at SLA ā€“ but I digress. Despite my being a member of the non-librarian, non-library technician crowd at SLA, I still find the conference one of the most satisfying events to attend. SLA 2011 is an important conference for professionals like me who are entrusted to have the right information, insights and trends to make good decisions and gain competitive advantage. SLA is many things to many people. It allows me to be targeted and specific in the type of sessions I attend, but it is also far reaching in its scope and divisions. I can take advantage of sessions in CI, KM, portal development, information management, as well as those hosted by the Legal Division and Business and Finance Division. So what did I learn in all of this goodness? Here are my top five musings:

  1. The jury is still out and will likely be out for a long time in determining if CI is a set of competencies, or if it is in fact a profession. The discussion of this topic never seems to get boring and for good reason.
  2. The Pecha Kucha presentation tournament hosted by AuroraWDC at the CI Dvision open house was a very fun event that introduced some great topics in a creative and quick format, which I believe has been discussed on 3 Geeks in the past.
  3. CI is all about framing and context. This is likely my favourite.
  4. I learned that many law firms still think they are the only ones doing CI. Since the conference, a new LinkedIn Group has been started to address this faction of the population and hopefully stimulate some good online networking and sharing of best practices.
  5. Social media, ethics in primary source collection, trend forecasting and evolving information needs continue to be the cornerstones of what the CI community is currently discussing.

Addressing these issues from a law firm perspective continues to be a challenge. Some food for thought for the 3 Geeks and subscribers.

Projections for 2011 were that the legal market would be stagnant.  We thought we’d ask if you are finding those predictions to be true. From those that I’ve talked to, it seems to depend upon what part of the industry you are in. If you are in the state government sector, it seems that the cuts everyone else felt in 2008 has caught up, but the work is still there (but the money isn’t.) If you are in the private sector, however, it seems that business is back upā€¦ but everyone is having to do more work, with less people.
Thanks to everyone that contributed their perspectives on this question. We do it all again next week and ask if you will share with us some of your secrets on how you prepare for a public speaking gig. So, read through and digest this week’s Elephant Post answers, then get ready to add your perspective to next week’s question.
Zena Applebaum
Intelligence & Intranet

From a CI perspective, demand for our services within the firm have increased tremendously.  It seem that following the recent downtown the community has come out a more competitive place than it was in 2010.  There has been economic recovery to some extent and companies are doing business again.  The key to competing and winning, is be smarter and better prepared and we are the resource they need to be both of those things.

Sarah Mauldin
Librarian

I feel like we’re busier and that I’m getting questions from more of the practice groups than I have before.  That may be because they’ve finally figured out that there is a library and that we’re here to help, but I think it has more to do with having more work.  I’m also seeing projects that associates were hoarding to keep up their billables coming my way.  I’ve also been working more closely with Marketing, which keeps me nice and busy.

Jodi Triplett
LSAT prep company

From a bit of a different perspective (pre law students hoping to become lawyers), we’re seeing fewer students taking the LSAT and those that are are becoming increasingly cognizant of the reality of repaying law school loans in a flat legal market.  It’s actually making prepping top scores even more competitive as students realize they need to attend a good law school to land a high paying job/parlay a good offer into scholarship money lower down the rankings.

Toby Brown
AFA

AFAs: Demand continues to grow.  And the role for AFA staff within a firm continues to expand.  Previously it focused on process, review and approval.  Now pricing is becoming and art and science across a firm’s operations, including traditional hourly billing.  Legal Services: Demand is flat, with some variations.  The predictions for a flat or slightly growing market seem to be playing out.  Of course certain practices are down and others may be up some.  But generally for a firm to grow it needs to be taking market share from competitors.

Stephanie Kimbro
Lawyer, Author

I provide unbundled estate planning services online.  For the past couple years, it seemed like my client base was putting off getting their estate planning needs met unless there was an urgent need.  They would register online and start working on the process and then find reasons to put off completing it. More than once it was work or unemployment related reasons.  However, this year it seems like clients are more motivated to have their estate planning handled, but at the same time they also are expecting flexibility in the way that they pay for those services.  Most of my online clients are now expecting payment plans that help them budget for legal expenses.  I’m fine providing these even if it does mean a little more administrative work in following up with balances owed.    I’ve also noticed this year that there is an increase in the number of baby boomer generation clients who are retiring or moving to my state who are deciding they need their documents updated.  So far, 2011 is looking good. It is just a different type of online client base than last year and certainly from when I started in 2006.
Next Elephant Post

How Do You Prepare For Public Speaking Engagements?

Do you spend hours and hours preparing for a 20 minute speech, do you just show up an wing it, or do you have some other way that you prepare for a pubic speaking engagement? Share with us a few of your processes that you use to get you read to dazzle the crowds.

Last night in its 120th annual meeting in Vail, Colorado, the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) passed the Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act (UELMA) in order to provide a set of rules for states to follow to establish “an outcomes-based, technology-neutral framework for providing online material with the same level of trustworthiness traditionally provided by publication in a law book.” Many in the legal publishing industry, as well as law librarians, have worried how electronic media will change over the decades, and UELMA takes on some of the key elements that keep many of us up at night. According to the statement from the ULC, the Act requires that official legal material be:

  • Authenticated, by providing a method to determine that it is unaltered;
  • Preserved, either in electronic or print form; and
  • Accessible, for use by the public on a permanent basis.

The Act puts the responsibility on the States to name an “official publisher” from the ranks of their own state agencies or a state official. One that designation is assigned, the official publisher is the one in charge of authenticating, preserving and providing access to those electronic documents. In addition, if the material is only available in electronic format, then the official publisher may also take the additional step of certifying it a the “official” document as well as the authentication, preservation and access elements.

The Act makes it clear that this doesn’t affect any of the current contracts or relationships that states currently have with vendors such as Westlaw or Lexis. However, as we’ve recently seen in Illinois, those publication deals for state materials, coupled with the shrinking state budgets, have pressured states to transition from print publications by vendors and go straight to self-publication through electronic means.

Of course, this is just the beginning of the process. A lot depends upon what the individual states do from here. I had an email exchange with Phil Rosenthal, President of Fastcase, who was an observer on the committee and he points out three potential challenges that are being left to the states to decide:

First, the Act requires that the legal materials be “reasonably available for use by the public on a permanent basis,” but does not demand that access be free, define what cost is reasonable, or demand that the law be bulk-downloadable.  Second, the Act allows a state to choose to offer the official version of legal materials in electronic form only, but  then choose to preserve it only in another form such as paper.  Finally, the Act does not address whether a state can assert copyright in its law or claim to grant the asserted copyright to a commercial publisher.

Rosenthal points out that many of these issues were outside the purview the ULC committee, but that if states made “the wrong choices, public access will be more limited than in the old world of books, and competition will be severely hindered.” He went on to give a specific scenario where a state creates a process where its official laws are online, but the preservation portion of the process is stored only in paper:

In the old non-digital world, there would be copies of the legal materials in many libraries throughout the state, both public and private.  Access to archival materials could be achieved in many different ways.  In the new world, because the law was available online to all, there was no incentive for libraries to build archives.  When the law is taken offline by the state to be preserved in print, suddenly there may be only one or two copies in the world, available to the public only when and at the cost deemed reasonable by the state.  This would actually be a step backwards from the days of many paper copies in multiple libraries.  

Rosenthal pointed out many other issues that are hanging out there for the states to determine. Issues such as the availability and affordability of bulk downloads for vendors; issues of ensuring quality control; and, what happens if state budgets don’t support the costs of preservation; states once again claiming copyright to this new format and bringing back ghosts of “official pagination” claims once again. “If the right choices are made, having official online authenticated law will do wonders for public access, preservation, and competition. If the wrong choices are made, access to historical materials may be reduced to a level below where it was in the print-only days, and competition and innovation could be significantly stifled.”

I guess time will tellā€¦