[Guest Blogger Mark Gediman]

There has been a lot of discussion lately regarding AALL committees, services and programs.  What seems to missing from some of this discussion is a desire to see constructive change.  In my mind, it isn’t enough to identify a problem, you need to also show a desire to fix the problem.  The tone of this debate may be as important as the actual debate.

Anyone with kids knows that it isn’t enough to point a finger at someone and say it’s the other person’s fault.  I know with my kids,  the one who says “no” to a suggestion without making one of their own automatically loses the debate.  In order for any discussion to succeed, it needs to be structured as a dialog, not a diatribe. Not doing so forces the singled out parties to be defensive and not willing to listen to what the other person has to say.  This does not allow for a constructive debate.  As someone who has contributed to the discussion, I can say from experience that you get further presenting your issue as a discussion.

AALL is an organization that is made up of different groups, and more importantly, individuals.  It can only evolve through the involvement of the individuals collaborating together for change.  I am proud to be a member of such a diverse organization that is made up of people that are genuinely committed to the growth of the profession.  They may stumble along the way, but it is our job as members to help them as they go along.  This is what makes the organization valuable to both the profession and its individual members.  So much for my two cents.

I know that with the exception of Flipboard for the iPad, that BlindType has been getting a lot of talk around the mobile webisphere (can I trademark “webisphere”??) But if you haven’t seen this “soon to be released” product yet, you need to take a look. It will change the way you text (especially those of you that text and drive… you know who you are!!)

By the way… I got my Flipboard to connect to Twitter and Facebook yesterday (and it is awesome!!) So I can’t wait until BlindType is actually out for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices.

While walking up and down the aisles of the vendor hall at the AALL annual conference, I saw a booth for an Indian company called Manupatra. I have to be honest, when I first saw the booth I thought that it was an outsourcing company and I avoided it on my first couple of sweeps through the hall. However, once I took a deep breath and walked up and started talking with Manupatra’s CEO, Deepak Kapoor, it turned out that I was flat wrong in my assumption and Manupatra is actually the Indian legal system’s equivalent to Westlaw or Lexis. After a short discussion about Manupatra, a few Indian sweets, and a little discussion of my Bollywood movie obsession, I walked away with a good impression of what Deepak Kapoor was doing in making it easier to track the decisions the courts in India were producing.

After a follow-up email, I sent Kapoor a few questions I had about the product, the Indian legal system, and how Manupatra’s presence at AALL was viewed by other law librarians in attendance. I’ve place the transcript below. There is also great interview of Kapoor with a little history of Manupatra at the Bar & Bench that will give you some background on Manupatra’s mission.

Lambert:      Thanks for the follow up on the exhibit at AALL. It was very nice meeting you and your colleague (and I enjoyed the Indian sweets as well.) I found the Bar & Bench article from May 20th of this year and found the story behind your creating Manupatra very fascinating. Why would a non-Indian lawyer or law firm use a product like Manupatra?
Kapoor:      India has been evincing lot of focus and interest from Companies across the globe in last few years for the opportunities the country offers. China and India are the two sought for investment destinations today . This interest is on the upswing. As a result there is a building and growing need for legislative , regulatory and [procedural Indian content .
Manupatra provides a one point solution to this need by bringing forth Legal, Taxation, Corporate and Business Policy information all in one place. Archives coupled with updates across all subjects of law covering primary documents ( Case laws, regulations, notifications, statutes etc ) and proprietary analytical content, www.manupatra.com is the largest and most comprehensive online resource for Indian material.
Thus a non Indian lawyer/ law firm assisting any Company/ firm to set up business in India or evaluating feasibility/ viability for their clients to have business interests in India would require access to Manupatra database.
Also, number of students are now going oversees for their Masters. They look for Indian materials since they do their projects on Indian issues.

Lambert:      How does Manupatra compare (price and content) to other products like LexisNexis or Westlaw?
Kapoor:      Both Lexis and Westlaw as of today do not host any Indian content, thus no comparisons are available.
Lambert:      Do you see Indian courts adopting an official citation system for its decisions? If so, are you currently lobbying the courts to adopt such a system?
Kapoor:      As per statute the court is to cite the citation of the official publication “India Law Reports specific to each court”. But this publication is either not published in most courts or has very skeletal coverage or is delayed by couple of months. Hence the private journals end up being cited. Each court pushes a particular journal which has maximum and fastest reporting. Since Manupatra is fastest to report , we see this working in our favour over years.
Lambert:      Can you give me a brief overview of how lawyers in India currently conduct legal research (are they still book researchers, or are they like American lawyers and conduct most research online?)
Kapoor:      India is still in the nascent stages as far as legal research is concerned. The users in metros and big cities have moved to online legal research The smaller courts use CD ROM based products or book research and the rest of the market is still driven by book research. Apart from geographical distinction, the age profile also distinguishes users. The senior guys would go for book research more out of habit and thus they trust the same. They personally are not tech savvy and thus books still rule the roost in their libraries/ chambers. India is fast moving towards electronic legal research, if not online research and with Computerization increasing and price of bandwidth going down the stag seems to be set for Online legal research.
Lambert:      I see you have about 45,000 current subscribers to your product. With the expansion of the number of lawyers in India increasing in great numbers, where do you see these numbers in a year? two years? five years?
Kapoor:      45000 are users and not subscribers. In India we still do not have a non sharing policy. So in a firm which has 15 users may still have a single subscription.
Lambert:      Please add anything else about Manupatra that you think would be of interest for those of us in North American.
Kapoor:      Manupatra not only started a Company but also has pioneered an industry. Through dedicated in-house effort and sustained support from clients, Manupatra has come to be recognized as the pioneer in online legal research in India.
Lambert:      I also have a question about your thoughts on the AALL conference. I imagine that many of the attendees at the conference had the same thoughts that I did when I first saw your booth… that you were a legal outsourcing company. Perhaps that is an assumption that we should not have made, but we law librarians here in the U.S. are a little paranoid that some of our jobs will no longer be around in a few years, and that they will be outsourced to a call center in India. Did you find that other attendees were thinking the same thing (or was it just me??)
Kapoor:      In India legal research is understood in a different way than it is in USA. Thus our tag line turned out to be confusing not only for you. There were some others also who came and clarified. Thanks for pointing this out since we will take care when we are exhibiting in different markets.

I’ve been using SnagIt for a number of years to do screen capturing and editing of screenshots and enjoy it throughly. However, I know from experience that not everyone has access to this paid software, but they still have the need to do screenshots and editing. For those of you that fit in this category, you need to go check out LightShot. LightShot is a very light weight (meaning that it won’t burn up a lot of memory or disk space on your computer), free (although you can donate money to them if you find it to be a valuable resources), Windows browser (FireFox, Chrome or IE), or Desktop application (Windows). (whew… was that too many parens?)

I downloaded this yesterday and have had a great time testing it. I’ve found it to be very powerful as both a screen capturing tool, and an image editor. I’ve been using the Chrome plug-in, and have had absolutely no problems using it. The Desktop Application is very cool in that you press the “Print Screen” and it gives you the ability to select the portion of the screen you actually want to grab. The online editor tool is very nice and has a lot of the same editing tools that you see in high end image editing software. I did have to refrain from “right-clicking” while editing because it is editing through the browser using an Adobe Flash interface, so it does take a little getting used to, but not much.

Here’s a four-minute video. Check it out, then get over to LightShot and test it out for yourself.
[BTW, if you know what song it is they are playing in this video, please let me know… I like it!]

LightShot Desktop Screenshot

As I was purusing the news yesterday, a comment from the SayAnythingBlog caught my attention. Apparently, University of North Dakota’s Law School asked for a $10 Million to expand their courtroom setting, and the request was rejected. The rejection of the courtroom wasn’t the comment that caught my eye, however, it was the alternative that was suggested on where to put the courtroom:

“The Law School has an enormous amount of space. They’ve got every electronic teaching aid known to man. If they want to they can clear out the law library since Lawyers don’t use law books anymore, it’s all electronic.” (emphasis added)

Between this comment, and the one I heard from R. David Lankes‘ keynote speech at AALL, it makes me wonder if the physical space that the library takes is actually hurting the concepts of libraries more than it is helping?

Take a look at the picture that Lankes showed of a library 70 years ago, and the same library today. There is a stark difference of a place that people go to gather, study and learn, to a place that houses books. Libraries look more like a showpiece for bound books than it does as a place to come to learn. So, should we be surprised when someone says to clear out the library since no one uses it any more? Now, the mentioning of moving collections back behind closed doors and having people come ask for those hidden items may be too appalling an idea to actually put into action. The idea sprung from the fact that closed collections could be housed in a far smaller footprint and allow libraries to be viewed more as a place for people than a place for books. [By the way, I ran the idea past my wife (who happens to now be an elementary librarian after many years of being a corporate librarian), and she thought the idea was horrible. But, horrible and/or crazy ideas have never stopped me from investigating them (or writing about them here!!)] If we turn the focus of a library away from the collection of physical items and toward more of an idea of where the community you serve comes to learn, then you may very well see a place that people go to gather and learn. As long as the identities of libraries are viewed as simply a space that houses books, then we will constantly lose that space, and eventually the true identity of a library as a place to gather and learn.

Although I’m loving my iPad, there are just certain things that I’d much rather do in a Windows-based environment. For example, editing this blog using the iPad is very difficult to do and I just don’t have the flexibility that I have when I’m on my PC. Well, never fear, TeamViewer HD helps connect your iPad to your personal PC’s desktop. For someone that has grown up in a Window environment, it makes the iPad even more productive, and gives me the ability to not worry about “do I need to find another app that helps me do what I could easily do from my home PC?”

Now TeamViewer HD is not for iPad alone… it works very much like the Real VNC program I used to use to connect to remote desktops. So the concept isn’t new, just the ability to do it from the iPad is. As with all remote desktop sharing software, you are literally connecting to the desktop as though you were sitting in front of that PC. So, remember, anyone that happens to actually be in front of that PC (or Mac, or Linux) can see everything you are doing.

The touchscreen capability of the iPad is limited to the moving around of the remote mouse, so you don’t get a touchscreen effect on your remote PC (and it can be a little disorienting at first because your finger movements can feel opposite that of how you normally operate the iPad. For example, when you move the mouse down (by dragging your finger), the screen will go up when you reach the bottom. There are a number of options that work with the touchscreen that make the product work well, such as the tapping of two fingers to emulate a right-click. It takes a little getting used to, but you should quickly catch on.

TeamViewer HD is free for personal use, and can range between $719 – $2,690 depending upon your licensing of the product for business purposes. I’ve found it very, very useful in the few days that I’ve played around with it. Here are a few screenshots of what the product looks like.

The Login Page

Splash Screen w/Basic Instructions
Navigating Through the Start Menu
Small Screen View w/Keyboard
Landscape View (of me catching my kids watching Justin Bieber Videos!)
A Reminder Screen That I Should Only Use This For Personal Use

I’ve never been afraid to tell you things that I should have know, but didn’t. Here’s just one more example of something that I should have been doing, but wasn’t. While at the AALL conference in Denver, I walked into the exhibit hall one morning, made that automatic left-hand turn to the BNA coffee and donut section (thank you, thank you, BNA!!), and sat down with a couple of academic law librarians that I’d never met before. Turns out that one of them was from Wake Forest and (after I had a couple sips of coffee) that triggered a memory. I had a Summer Associate from that school currently at my firm. Aha!! This was at least a conversation starter, so I mentioned it to the librarian and she immediately knew the name of the Summer Associate I was talking about.

I had never thought about this opportunity before, but I think I’m going to start doing something a little differently when preparing for these law library conferences. I’m going to start contacting the law librarians at the schools that my firm’s Summer Associates are attending to see who will be attending the conference that year. Perhaps we could meet up and discuss what we could both do to help the student succeed when he or she is ready to come back as an Associate next year. Simple things like identifying journals that we commonly route to the practice group could help keep the law student up to date on issues that others within their potential practice group are reading. Not only could it help the student, but it may also help the librarians by exposing each of them to materials they may not have currently in their own collections.

We law firm librarians tend to complain that law schools don’t prepare students for the realities of law firm life. Maybe here is an opportunity to give pointed suggestions to the law school’s librarians on how to assist specific students to be better prepared for the transition. At the very least, it gives us one more opportunity to network with others in our field.

I’m just getting back from by extended conference / vacation in Denver, where I enjoyed the AALL conference, and especially enjoyed the Private Law Libraries Summit (pre-conference). I know there was a lot of fuss about the amount and types of programming that was scheduled for private law librarians at the conference (including guest posts on this blog), but I have to say that I wasn’t really all that disappointed. I’ll also go out on a limb and say that I thought that the PLL-Summit was one of the best day and a half seminars that I’ve ever attended on the topic of law firm libraries. Of course, since I presented, I may be a little biased.

I hope that there is a pre-conference again next year. If there is, I’m going to encourage a number of folks that I know that usually don’t go to AALL conference to at least attend the pre-conference. I found that the presenters were great, and that the audience was much more engaged in the topic than you get in a normal session. The fact that the room was entirely private law librarians also helped focus the talks and even have lively arguments when we disagreed.  After all, we were all there to think… not think alike.

Here’s an email that Jennifer Berman (PLL-SIS Education Chair) sent out to the list last week explaining the steps you need to take in order to submit a program for the general sessions of the 2011 AALL Conference in Philadelphia. I also have a couple of suggestions:

My Suggestions:

  1. Don’t submit a 3-part program. Do one topic, in one session, and do it well.
  2. Don’t submit a program where you want to learn a topic… See if an expert on that topic will do it, and help them submit the program. 
  3. Encourage new people to contribute. We all see a lot of the same faces presenting each year. Be a ‘mentor’ and get some new blood in front of an audience.
Berman Message:

Congratulations to us all. Our programs at AALL – Denver, CO were well attended, discussed, and received good reviews. In short, SUCCESS!! Thank you to all of the coordinators, moderators, and presenters. It was evident that a good deal of hard work went into the endeavor.
Now, we can’t sit on our laurels. Preparation for the 104th AALL Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA is well under way and proposals for presentations must be submitted by September 15, 2010.
There is no real theme to the 2011 conference. Programs are to parallel the competencies required for librarianship. If you have an idea for a presentation, please don’t hesitate. Put together a proposal and send it in, but please make sure to indicate that you would like PLL to sponsor the program.
A few helping details. Start by reading the short proposal description on the AALL website (http//:proposals.aallnet.org). It will link you to the Programmer Planner’s Handbook, (http://www.aallnet.org/events/ProgramPlannersHandbook.pdf), which will guide you through the process. Included in the Handbook are suggestions of how to write the proposal, wording to use that will catch the eye of the members of the Annual Meeting Program Committee (AMPC) and others. One hint we received is not to use the word “competency”. It’s the conference’s theme, so the idea should be inherent in your presentation. Overplay, and it may backfire.
As members of the PLL-SIS Education Committee, we review each proposal that is sponsored by PLL. There may be suggestions we would like to make that would give your presentation heavier weight with AMPC members, so sometimes we may request a small re-write. In order to assure that your program proposal is formally submitted by the September 15th deadline , we have implemented the following time schedule for sending in your proposal:

  • Aug 30 (noon CDT) – Submission of your program proposal to the members of the PLL Education Committee (names and contacts below). Page 43 of the Planners Handbook indicates how to share the program with us. When you share the program with us please DO NOT click the submission button or your program proposal will be submitted and there will be no opportunity to revise the proposal.
  • Sept 8 – You will have received a phone by a committee member to discuss your proposal. We will discuss recommended revisions, if needed, or suggest to submit as is.
  • Sept 15 – Final date for submission to AALL.

Remember, the earlier the better. If editing is required, we want to make sure that you’ve the needed time to do it to get it in on time and have it accepted.
If you have any questions or need any help, please call any one of us at any time. We are here to help you and make it as easy as possible to get through the process.
To jump start a little bit of thinking – the following three ideas were proposed. If you would want to flesh it out and write up a proposal for it, we can assist you with the process.

  1. The future of legal research 18 months later (Law firm librarians and academic librarians talking about what’s happened with respect to adoption or nonadoption of WestlawNext, Lexis for Microsoft Office, New Lexis, Mobile Apps, etc.
  2. Conversations with legal news reporters (what is happening in the legal world)
  3. Summit on Training Part 2 (continuation of “Mile High Summit in Training: Are things coming to a peak?”, a very well attended session). Discussion with law firm deans, managing partners, and students about training)

Enjoy, have fun and good luck to us all!

Alright, you can now stop calling the forthcoming Lexis platform “New Lexis” or “LexisNext”. I learned this morning that the folks over at LexisNexis have named their new platform “Lexis Advance”. Toby got an advanced peek at the product a couple of months back and seemed to be impressed. Here is a snippet of the notice I received this morning announcing the baby’s, er, the product’s name:

We recently announced to our employees that our new legal information platform will be named “Lexis® Advance” when it goes to market.
To be clear, Lexis Advance is not available yet. It will be rolled out in phases for different segments of the market over an extended period of time starting later this year and moving forward into next year. That’s when legal professionals will start seeing the product and name.
Meanwhile, the name “New Lexis” continues on internally at our company as the moniker for our broad investment and invention program to create the next generation of innovative solutions with and for our customers. Another example of a new solution from this overall program is Lexis® for Microsoft® Office, which as you know, was announced earlier this year.

I’ve already stumbled over this name a couple of times (including typing it here), because it is very similar to another LexisNexis product called “Lexis atVantage“. Now, let’s see if the sales and marketing team at LexisNexis have learned from their counterparts over at Thomson Reuters on setting a clear price on their new baby. They can always look back on my open letter to remind them of how well “modest premium pricing” went over at law firms. (Hint: Don’t start off the conversation with “Lexis Advance comes with an advance pricing model.”)

Last year I had the pleasure of attending a presentation made by Don Schultz, professor emeritus at Northwestern. I left the presentation with a key insight about how Web 2.0 has changed the landscape of marketing. As a consequence, I follow Don’s writings. In this month’s AMA Marketing News, Don’s column provided another layer of insight.
In the presentation Don gave, he had talked about how marketing was built on a ‘push messages to the masses’ foundation (think Mad Men). And that marketing continues to hold to these methods, even though the world has changed. Push is losing it’s ability to persuade as consumers take an active role in the marketing space. Web 2.0, a.k.a. Social Media, allows the customers to take part in the conversation. Push is out – participation is in.
Don’s article took this insight to a deeper layer. Based on a conversation with a colleague from China, he came to appreciate the different marketing and advertising methodology used there. In China, marketing is not about persuasion. Instead it’s about negotiation. The purpose in marketing there is “to create situations to be considered, thought about, bargained for and haggled over.”
If this concept sounds familiar – it should. This is how Web 2.0 works. So Don’s epiphany is that in the US in addition to holding on to the ‘push’ world, we still subscribe to the persuasion model of marketing and advertising. This is problematic since our venues for marketing are quickly becoming negotiation platforms.
The moral of this story: We need to shift our entire marketing philosophy from a persuasion based approach to the Chinese model of negotiation. Persuasion messages fall dead in the negotiation space. When people find no reason to engage with your marketing messages, the messages will never make it past the door and never even make it in to the market.