It seems that the whole world has change, especially since around September of 2008. Whenever you listen to someone talk about the legal industry, it seems that the phrase of choice is “The New Normal.” However, has legal education gotten this memo? That’s the topic of this week’s Elephant Post Question, and we have some excellent contributions. The consistent theme seems to be that everything has advanced around the edges of legal education, but the core aspects haven’t changes very much at all.

Thanks to everyone that contributed this week. Once you digest all of these perspectives, scroll on down and take a look at next week’s Elephant Post, where we take a break from all the crystal ball gazing and have a little fun.

Toby Brown
AFA/KM

Short answer: They use e-mail now.

Long answer: In the 80’s I worked at a law school.  In the 90’s and 2000’s I worked for a state bar and had regular contact with the law schools.  Now I work at a firm that hires the products of law schools.  With that perspective in mind – I really can’t see any noticeable changes in what law schools do or what they produce.

I suppose one exception might be the use of online legal research tools – given to students for free.  However, it appears they are not taught how to do this in a cost-effective manner.  I’m just guessing at another example – assuming they use PowerPoint or some equivalent in Moot Court.

I haven’t heard of extensive use of online classes, as I have seen in many undergraduate programs.  Maybe I’m wrong there.

So bottom line: They are doing it almost the same way they were 20 years.  Except now I hear tuition is much higher.

Ted McClure
Academic Law Librarian

The 100-fold increase in the velocity of information. The volume of information has increased even more, but it is the speed at which we are confronted with information that has been truly boggling.

Thirty years ago in law school I used Westlaw over a 256 baud modem. Students learned how to use Decennial Digests, annotated statutes, the Index to Legal Periodicals, and USSCAN. Newsletters, loose-leaf services, and slip opinions were the fastest modes of transmission. Shepard’s existed in print only. Academic discussions took place in law reviews and lasted years. Students took notes (or in the back row played hangman) on loose-leaf paper in binders.

Twenty years ago, law schools had computers mostly for word processing. Students were learning terms and connectors for online searching but were still learning the print resources because so few practicing lawyers had online access. Newsletters, loose-leaf services, and slip opinions were still the fastest modes of transmission. Academic discussions still took place in law reviews and lasted years. Students still took notes (or in the back row played hangman) on loose-leaf paper in binders.

Ten years ago law schools had internet access, and card catalogs were being replaced by online versions. Web sites existed, and you might keep an eye on a few. Most practitioners were still doing legal research with print resources, so you still had to learn how to use them. But the internet was already starting to change the velocity of information: Email distribution lists were starting to replace newsletters, and you could check Westlaw or Lexis for the latest court opinions if you knew what you were looking for. Shepard’s and KeyCite were online (too expensive for practitioners, however). The first academic blawgs were bubbling up, but you needed to know were to find them. Most academic discussions still took place in law reviews. Students still took notes (or in the back row played hangman) on loose-leaf paper in binders.

Now I monitor around 200 RSS feeds for my faculty members and edit an academic blawg. I have court opinions within minutes after they are announced, opinions about the opinions within minutes after that, and can forward them to the appropriate faculty members within minutes after that. Blawg editors out there are watching most everything important and feeding it to everyone interested. I have Westlaw (and KeyCite), Lexis (and Shepard’s), FastCase, HeinOnline, SSRN, federated search, and other online sources at my desk, or I can undock my computer and use it elsewhere. Academic discussions online take hours, sometimes minutes. Students take notes (or in the back row play Farmville or complain on Facebook) on laptops and netbooks. I can monitor what my students think is important on Facebook. I can respond immediately and publicly to questions like “What’s the new normal at law schools?”

It’s a lot more fun! <shameless self-promotion> See “How to drink from a firehose without drowning“,  </shameless self-promotion>

Sarah Glassmeyer
Academic Law Librarian (and Legal Research Professor)

Twenty years ago I was a freshman in high school. Ten years ago I was a 2L.  I’ve been on the non-student side of legal education for 5 years now.  In my limited perspective, it doesn’t feel like law schools have changed much.  Still teaching doctrinal classes from the caselaw method, still ignoring and underfundign LRW programs and not really encouraging practical skills courses.  The legal acadame stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that it’s really just a glorified VoTech program.

Students, on the other hand…

Twenty years ago I remember having my parents drive  me into Cincinnati so that I could go to the public library and use their CD Rom collection of periodicals because I was obsessed with the Canadian comedy troupe “The Kids in the Hall” and that was the only way to learn more about them. Consequently, the library was a special place with unique knowledge and the visit to it was “an event.”  The idea that I could sit at home and get must of the same information on “The Internet” would have blown my mind.  So, students perceptions of physical spaces such as libraries have changed.

Ten years ago, I still took all my class notes by hand. Maybe 2 or 3 people per 75 person class had a laptop.  If they did have a laptop, they certainly weren’t on the Internet with them (playing solitare, sure…but no email, IM, or looking up the answer to the profs question).  For better or worse (and I’m not entirely sure which side of the scale it tips to), the addition of technology have changed the classroom environment.

In the past five years, social networks have arisen and people who aren’t nerds are much more locked into their computers and other technologies.  I’m sitting in my office right now watching a student with an iPod in his ears, texting on his phone, a laptop open (a Mac, no less!) with three IM windows up (plus Facebook) and…oh, yeah, an Emmanuel’s outline.  Is it actually possible to learn with all those distractions?  I’m going to say no, you need to unplug at least some of those things to adequately learn the law.  However, I don’t know that anyone has ever encouraged (read: forced) today’s law students to ever do that.  I really worry that we are churning out a generation of lawyers who have been failed by the educational system their entire lives…they’ve been taught to pass standardized tests, have limited critical thinking skills, aren’t willing to (or perhaps capable of) reading through dense pieces of text for understanding and don’t even have the tools to gain these skills.

Ed
Legal Publishing

What has changed at law schools is that the volume of graduates has increased beyond what the job market can handle. As a result, the market is flooded with graduates who are unable to pay back student loans. Most lawyers I know express similar views and all repeatedly tell friends and family members who are considering going to law school that they should not.

Danny Johnson
Law Student – 1L

Very expensive tuition is the new norm at law schools!

Elmer Masters
CALI developer

20 years ago I was just finishing my first year of law school. Since then I’ve been a faculty research assistant, a reference librarian, an electronic resources librarian, law school web developer, director of law school IT, and, for the past 8 years, chief tech guy for the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI). In that time I’ve witnessed (and participated) in a huge shift in the infrastructure that supports legal education. At the same time, I haven’t seen the same rate of change in the way that law is taught.

New and remodeled classrooms in law schools feature smart podiums, projection and sound systems and white boards. Wireless is ubiquitous, student laptop ownership near universal, and everyone in a law school has a computer. Many law schools encourage faculty use of course management systems. Exams are taken on computers, typically student owned laptops. Students ran over 1 million CALI Lessons online last year.

While more and more faculty are using tools like blogs and wikis to enhance their teaching, in many places consistant use of PowerPoint slides in the classroom is considered a cutting edge technique. Simply the teaching of law has not kept pace with the advances in technology available to it. Teaching law is very conservative profession. The slow uptake of technology to enhance teaching is evidence of that and it is one thing that needs to change most about law schools.

So, the new normal at law schools? Lots of great technology available but not used, same old teaching methods being used.
[Image (CC) emdot]
Next Elephant Post:

What is the best lawyer television show and/or movie of all time??

I’m going out on a limb and pick a Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off, Angel. The whole idea of a law firm where the Senior Partners are Demons from Hell… literally. I mean, really… how can you go wrong with a story line like that??

So, dust off your pop-culture references and think about what your favorite law firm, lawyer, judge, paralegal, law librarian… just kidding, they don’t make movies about law librarians for some reason… and share it with us.

&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Loading…&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;

I was reading over the latest post from Ben Young and he discusses the difference between “managing” vs. “creating” and how that causes either the frustration or excitement that comes with how you approach what we do. Ben states that we are generally dissatisfied when we find ourselves simply managing, maintaining, or reporting what we do instead of creating, curating, and connecting all of these things in order to actual make a difference.

As I was reading the (very short) post, the idea of how we approach Knowledge Management (KM) kept entering my head. When you think of those KM projects that are out there (completed, or in process), what are they actually doing? Are they simply siloing information in a way to retrieve bits and pieces? Or, are they creating interfaces that allows the customer (whether it is Attorneys, Marketing, Business Development, or Client Relations) to really create the information they want?

I would think that looking at how the customer uses existing resources should be telling as to whether they are simply maintaining data for retrieval, or if you are connecting the dots of the wealth of information and creating new ways to retrieve and interpret that information so that the end result is greater than the sum of its individual pieces of data. When you have something that does that, then you are actually making a difference. Granted, creating resources that generate ideas is not an easy task, but that’s part of the process that makes what you do exciting.

Whether you are BigLaw, MidLaw, or SmallLaw, the change that LexisNexis just made may have some significant effects on how you conduct legal research and plan your subscriptions for legal research services. LexisNexis is no longer offering “LexisNexis by Credit Card.” In order to access those legal research tools, you’ll need to sign up for a (long-term?) subscription to Lexis.

I talked to one subscriber last night who told me that her subscription that she uses for credit card access runs out at the end of the month, and “then I have to get a ‘subscription from sales’ or go to www.lexisweb.com.” The LexisWeb site is a minimalist version of legal information, and doesn’t contain the value-add products that a real LexisNexis site has. “The timing is suspect with its correlation with plunging market share; I think it’s a move to prevent firms from cancelling their subscription and just buying what they need.”

Many law firms have used the Credit Card option for LexisNexis in order to only buy “what they need” and will now have to re-evaluate that strategy. Other products, such as Fastcase, rely upon the credit card option for their users to access cite-checking resources such as Shepards. As of last night, the link to Shepards from Fastcase was still working, but I’m not sure if that will continue. If so, then it looks like all of those users will either have to sign up for Lexis, or will have to use KeyCite as their citation tool.

[UPDATE 8:50 CT] I emailed Ed Walters of Fastcase about this and he said that the change in LexisNexis by Credit Card, “Doesn’t matter much to our users: some have Lexis in their firms and can use Shepards under their firm subscription.  Those who don’t have Lexis passwords can just use KeyCite by credit card on Fastcase.” Ed says that the move may actually be a “Bigger deal for West.  For half a million Fastcase subscribers, KeyCite may have just become the #1 citator in America.”

Have you used LexisNexis by Credit Card? If so, how will this affect how you conduct legal research or your subscription strategies? Is this a good move by Lexis, or do you think it will end up biting them in the long run?

Here’s the announcement that Lexis had on the ending of the Credit Card site:

LexisNexis no longer offers the website LexisNexis® by Credit Card. This decision is part of our effort to create and support products that better meet those needs identified through collaboration with our customers, including tools that help our customers across markets to more efficiently find, assess and manage research findings.
LexisNexis continues to offer 10 years of free unenhanced federal and state case law via lexisONE, www.lexisone.com, our free open legal web service, via Lexis® Web at www.lexisweb.com and a wide variety of legal and business online communities at www.lexisnexis.com/communities which provide access to free up-to-date content and resources such as blogs, content, and news.
For continued access to convenient and affordable LexisNexis research content, please contact a representative at 888-285-3947 to learn more about LexisNexis subscription options.

I missed commenting about this when it was announced last week. Looks like former AALL Government Relations representative, Mary Alice Baish, is hard at work at her new post and is working to pilot the release of Federal Court decisions via FDsys.gov. This should prove to be a much better format than the PACER system that served as a poor interface for Federal Court decisions in the past.

I look forward to testing this out and have high hopes that placing the decisions on the FDsys platform is the start of moving more primary federal law into a resource that anyone can access. Here’s the press release from last week:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and the Federal Judiciary are launching a oneyear pilot program providing free public access to court opinions through GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys). The joint project was approved by the Judicial Conference of the United States and GPO’s Congressional oversight committee, the Joint Committee on Printing. When fully implemented, the pilot will include up to 42 courts. The Judiciary continually has sought ways to enhance public access to court opinions. Free access to opinions in all Federal courts is currently available via the Judiciary’s Public Access to Court Electronic Records service (PACER). Building on that success, staff from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts met with GPO management to explore making opinions available through FDsys, which can provide the public with a robust search engine that can search common threads across opinions and courts.  The public will be able to access court opinions in the next several months through GPO’s Federal Digital System:  www.fdsys.gov
“GPO’s partnership with the Federal Judiciary on this pilot program is another example of how the agency is becoming the digital information platform for the entire Federal Government,” said Superintendent of Documents Mary Alice Baish.  “We are excited to add these important court opinions to our digital repository, providing the public with quick and easy access to the workings of the Federal Judiciary.”
The twelve participating pilot courts are the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second and Eighth Circuits; the U.S. District Courts for the Districts of Minnesota, Rhode Island, Maryland, Idaho and Kansas, the Northern District of New York, and the Northern District of Alabama; and the U.S. Bankruptcy Courts for the District of Maine, the Southern District of Florida, and the Southern District of New York.
With 2,200 employees, GPO is the Federal Government’s primary resource for producing, procuring, cataloging, indexing, authenticating, disseminating, and preserving the official information products of the U.S. Government in digital and tangible forms.  GPO is responsible for the production and distribution of information products and services for all three branches of the Federal Government, including U.S. passports for the Department of State as well as the official publications of Congress, the White House, and other Federal agencies. In addition to publication sales, GPO provides for permanent public access to Federal Government information at no charge through GPO’s Federal Digital System (www.fdsys.gov) and through partnerships with approximately 1,220 libraries nationwide participating in the Federal Depository Library Program. For more information, please visit www.gpo.gov.  Follow GPO on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/USGPO
Twitter http://twitter.com/USGPO and on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/gpoprinter.

While I was going through law school, I worked a side job for the university as a mainframe programmer/analyst. It was a fun job, and I worked with some extremely intelligent people. One of my co-workers used to have a saying that he used all the time whenever we’d decide that we needed to “create a program” to make some task easier for our customers:

Making it is easy… making it easy on the other hand, is really hard to do.

This saying has stuck in my head for nearly twenty years now, and it is just as true today as it was when he first said it. We can easily make things to use in our day-to-day work, but if the things we make aren’t easy to use… then you might as well not make it in the first place.

The basis for an idea like this is that you are supposed to be “customer-focused”, and that anything you develop, whether that is a program, an interface, or work-flow process, you have to develop it from the customers’ perspective. In my world today, that means I have to evaluate what I develop from the eyes of the lawyers that will have to use it. Unfortunately, I have to add one more caveat to this saying:

… and those that will benefit the most from what you make, won’t make it easy for you.

Just think of the example of how attorneys really get frustrated when it takes them a long time to get specific work accomplished for a client. However, when you come in and explain to them that you can develop resources, work-flows, and templates for them that will make it easier on them the next time they have to do this type of work, one of the most common reactions is that they are too busy to waste time on those types of (“I can’t bill my time to the client?”) projects.

That’s quite a paradox to battle in your quest to “make it easy.” It’s the battle that most Knowledge Management and Legal Project Management leaders face everyday. I guess we can all take solace in another phrase we all might use from time to time:

If it were easy… then I really wouldn’t be needed to lead this project. 

After all, it’s the challenges that make what we do exciting.

Planetary

Hopefully that title just made you start humming the Beastie Boys song. If it did, see me in Philly at the Summit and I’ll buy you a beer.

I’ve always been a fan of visualizing information in unique ways. I stumbled upon an app this week that does just that sort of thing with the way I “listen” and “view” the music that’s on my iPad. Planetary takes a pretty simple idea and brings it to life via the iPad. The idea is to transform your music into a Galaxy, your artists into Solar Systems, their albums into Planets, and their songs into Moons. Visually it is very cool to watch and play. The thing that I like most is that when you play a song, the amount of time it takes to play the song is the amount of time it takes for that Moon (Song) to orbit the Planet (Album).

Here’s a blurb from Planetary’s iTunes page:

Planetary is just the sort of science fiction experience you expect when using an object from the future like iPad. You’ll want to show your friends this beautiful app. We’ve made it even easier to share Planetary at home; it looks incredible when you hook your iPad 2 up to a big HDTV or projector using the HDMI accessory.

 Or, to quote one of my kids the first time I opened this up and showed it to them:

That’s Epic!!

Here’s some screenshots that I took from my iPad (I’m still with my version 1, so I haven’t had a chance to hook it up to my HDTV to watch yet.) It’s definitely a fun app to use, and best of all… it’s free!!

Go check out Planetary and let me know if you find it as fun as I do. (Now, if I can get my law firm to adapt this “Galaxy” approach to some of the data we present for business development purposes…)

Select the Artist by Letter
See the Galaxy of Artists…
See the Solar System of Albums of that Artist…
Zoom in on the Planet (Album)

Watch the Moon (Song) Orbit as it plays…

The Dewey B. Strategic blog has a great post on The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Research Training.” I highly recommend you take a look at it.
As I was reading the post and thinking about the challenges of better managing costs relative to legal research, it occurred to me what a client might think about this dialogue. Here’s what I came up with in response to the three issues.
1. Cost effective research training is a hopeless exercise.
Client: I don’t care.
2. Cost effective legal research training is counter-productive.
Client: Figure it out.
3. Subscribing to the myth of cost effective research training keeps the focus off the true culprits and keeps us from demanding a real solutions.
Client: Refer to #1.
Clients are dealing with cost savings efforts. Now it’s time for law firms to do the same. As my former boss and mentor used to say, “We’re all smart people. We can figure this out.”

I do a fair amount of presentations on Law Library, Knowledge Management, Records, Social Media, and Competitive Intelligence topics. When the talk is over, I usually go through the comments from the audience to see what I could have done better, or if there were things that I missed and need to include the next time around. Almost without fail, however, I see one comment every time I review those comments:

“I’ve heard all of this before, you’re not giving me anything new that will fix the issues I have at my office.”

This comment is usually tagged along with the section where I tell the audience that you need to “market” what you do; that you need to “communicate” with the key players in your firm; and, that you need to be “proactive” in your mission and not wait for someone to come to you first.

Everyone has heard that trifecta of Market, Communicate, and Being Proactive, but the primary reason you are hearing it over and over again is that without these three key elements, your goals won’t make it off the ground. Another reason that you hear these elements is that, although you may be the exception to the rule, most of the people that are in the room still struggle with actually implementing these three processes. I’ll give you one example from a webinar I moderated last week.

When asked what the Information Technology group could do better in working with the Library at a law firm, one of the answers was roughly, “IT should come talk to the library before they begin planning their projects.” The idea behind this comment was that the library has resources, experience and expertise in many areas that the IT group could leverage to approach their projects more effectively. That’s a great idea… but does anyone think that the IT group is going to amend its Standard Operating Procedure manual and add in: “Step One- Contact the library”? Probably not. So, the takeaway that I would think that you’d get from the trifecta of key processes is that you’d apply them in this order:

  1. Be Proactive – Go to the IT Group when you hear of upcoming projects that you believe your department could help with.
  2. Communicate – Talk in the language that IT understands. Build a business case that explains specifically what resources, experience and expertise the library has that would make the project more efficient. Verbal communication alone is simply not enough.
  3. Market – Upon successful implementation of the processes you’ve developed, bring that up with everyone that you want to do business with in the future. Nothing breeds success like success.
As much as I would love for one of my presentations to inspire someone go to out and solve all the issues they face back at work, I understand that it probably won’t happen like that. Presentations are more like conversation starters and idea generators. They are very general and the examples used in the presentations almost never address the specific issues that you face back at work. The best that many of us can hope for when we attend a presentation that is presented by a peer, is that we can have a few “take aways” that we can adapt to our issues. Presentations are simply that… presentations. The people that present are not consultants, they are usually your peers that are wanting to talk about some successes (or failures) that they’ve had to deal with and wanted to share those with others in order to get a conversation started. The hard work of actually continue that conversation, or building upon those ideas, is up to you.
It kind of reminds me of this story that I heard from one of my more opinionated congregational members of the Pentecostal Church I grew up in:

One morning, the Preacher was having individual prayer session with his congregation, which was made up of mostly farmers. As each farmer came in and talked with the preacher, they each gave pretty much the same request. “Brother, would you pray for me and ask God to kill off all these weeds that are choking my crops?”
After hearing this request from farmer after farmer, the Preacher welcomed in the final farmer and immediately said to him, “I suppose you want me to pray for God to help you with your weed problem?”
The farmer replied, “Oh, no Brother. I needed you to pray for my youngest child, who has been sickly lately.
The preacher was stunned, “Don’t you have a weed problem, Brother?”
“Oh, yes I do. They are terrible this year,” replied the farmer.
“Well, what are you doing about it?” asked the preacher.
The farmer looked the preacher in the eye and answered, “I get up early every morning and pray hard for the Lord to help with the weed problem. Then I get out in the field and hoe like hell.”

I totally missed the opportunity to chime in this week’s Elephant Post and rather than comment on everyone else’s comments, I thought – What would Greg do? The answer is axiomatic – blog about it. And so I am. From a competitive intelligence perspective, I hope legal directories never die, in print or online. But I do like the print editions there is certain gravitas that comes from seeing the best of the profession wrapped in nicely bound shiny book. But maybe that’s just me. In any event, the directories for me, are a treasure trove of information. Aside from being a terrific mechanism from which to source laterals (as mentioned in the Elephant posts), you can also source client relationships such as who acts for whom in what city, state/province, and most importantly in a given practice or industry. As my firm continues to grow internationally, legal directories are great source of general market intelligence as well. Directories describe the types of deals being done, by whom, for whom, with all kinds of additional details. All that’s left to do is bring some CI analysis to the party. Online versions make this even easier. I actually use directories so often, that I recently found myself looking for certain international directories and being upset when I came up empty handed. There are the pay-for-play vanity press type directories that are generally the domain (or pain) of Marketing Departments but to the discerning to the CI practitioner, there is value in assessing a firm’s strategy to participate (or not) in those as well. Directories make doing my job easy and despite the amount of work and questionable ROI (another post for another time), you can learn so much about a firm or market from them. I could go on, but I think you get my point. When you need them, legal directories are like neatly wrapped presents, just asking to be opened and enjoyed and I hope they live along and happy life.
image [cc] miss pupik

What is the future of legal directories?  Are they still valuable?  If so, in what form?
This question came to us from Dallas law librarian, Kevin Miles. What surprised me in this week’s answers was the fact that no legal marketing people chimed in to give an answer. Aren’t they the people that support these directories? Maybe I’m reading too much into that (frankly, it could be because they don’t read 3 Geeks), but it would seem that law firm marketing folks should have some opinions on this issue. I’m hoping that maybe we can get those marketers to give us something in the comments section (hint… hint…)

Next week’s post (see below) should also be an interesting question… one that Toby Brown and I thought of after a Jason Wilson tweet about why incoming law students are still encouraged to read Scott Turows’s One-L, even though the book was written in the mid 1970’s. My snide remark back to Jason was to ask “have law schools really changed that much since 1977?” We won’t ask you to go back that far, but we really want to know what really has changed in the structure of law schools in the past twenty or so years? Scoll down after you read this week’s answers, and chime in with your own perspective.

Sid Kaskey
Law Librarian

No future and it is not a question that keeps me up nights…but the legal digest for various states once available via Martindale now there is something still useful.

Martin Korn
Law Librarian

I believe that as firm to firm mobility increases it will become crucial for attorneys to have some sort of home base.  When an attorney moves from one firm to another much of their history is lost on the new firm’s website.  By maintaining a directory listing (and let’s face it, online is the only one that will matter) an attorney has the ability to keep her or his complete cv available.  It is also a great way to hang on to contacts from previous firms and clients, assuming the legal directories continue to evolve into social media sites.

Toby Brown
AFA/KM

I don’t see how traditional legal directories can sustain in the long-run, or even sooner than that.  The value proposition to a lawyer or firm is that clients will find you that way.  That method of finding a lawyer is fading into the sunset.  Maybe lawyers with a “retail” consumer practice will find some short-term value there, but I just can’t see it sustaining.

New breeds of directories may have a fighting chance though.  One example I recently saw is BidYourCase where clients describe their needs and subscribing lawyers bid to get the work.  Even then, the site will need very strong SEO to be found by clients.

I realize some firms will cling to these tools, since they will get some clients from then.  But as my former boss and mentor used to say, “Bus bench ads work.  With enough of them out there, you are bound to get one phone call.”  The point being, there are much better ways to spend your limited marketing dollars.

Sarah Mauldin
Law Librarian

I find directories great for hunting down possible lateral hires, but not for much else.  I think they are dead in print, but may continue to live online as long as the pricing models are changed.  Ever since the Martindale Digests stopped being provided in print, I’ve had no need for the rest of M-H in print, either.

Next Week’s Elephant Post:

What Has Really Changed In Legal Education in the Past 20 Years?

I don’t know about you, but I can’t have a meeting at work without that overused phrase “The New Normal” popping its ugly head up in the middle of every presentation. To be honest, it could probably be used in one of our previous Elephant Post Questions were we morphed the Princess Bride quote (I think you need to look up the phrase “New Normal.” I don’t think it means what you think it means.) Any amount of change equals “New Normal.” Any amount of cuts, pain, reduction in force, bonus reductions, etc., is all chalked up to “The New Normal.”

Well… what’s the “New Normal” in law schools? For many of us standing on the outside looking in, we haven’t seen a lot of changes. Are we wrong? Is there something we’re missing?

If you’re inside the law firm environment, tell us what were missing. If you’re like me, and are standing outside looking in, then let us know what you think has changed (or, what you think needs to change.)