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.

[We’re please to have Jill Strand as a guest-blogger]


So do you want to be transformed or help direct the transformation? This was my primary thought after reading “Law Libraries Transformed” on LLRX by Eleanor Windsor and Ron Friedmann are executives with Integreon, a legal process outsourcing firm with offices around the world. The title intrigued me yet in reading the article I was surprised to realize that the innovation they were advocating was outsourcing of law firm library services. Basically,  they seem to suggest that since law libraries have become less about the physical space and collection and more about the research and online resources, outsourcing is an ideal and possibly inevitable solution. While they do note that librarians are more important than ever in filtering the information overload, I have to confess feeling my feathers ruffle a bit at their general assumption that a “library as service” model will always offer greater cost savings and efficiencies. Rather than hide inside my personal closet of law librarian anxieties, I’m going to try and consider the bigger picture. So before you hit your own panic button, take a deep breath, read the full article for yourself and join me.

Outsourcing library services isn’t anything new – it first hit my radar a few years ago while working on a legal process outsourcing research project at my previous firm. Nor is it surprising, particularly in the current economy, to hear that we might be on the cusp of a trend. And when you stop to think about it, this is a pretty timely issue given the ongoing discussions in the blogosphere and within SLA and AALL about what we need to do to survive, thrive and advance to the C-level. Heck, I’ve been listening to and taking part in these discussions since my first information interview with an advertising firm librarian ten years ago. Call it alignment, advancement or whatever you want, but we are probably better served being pro-active about possible solutions rather than just reacting negatively to this news.

So what do we do? I’m sure many of you have some fabulous ideas which you’ll hopefully comment on here. A good starting place could be to think about how we could work with this trend (if it is really a trend yet) and turn it to our advantage. Do we set out to completely disprove it as a valid solution or do we find a way to take part in or take charge of it so that we have some say or control over what library functions should or shouldn’t be out-sourced? While the article does mention having skilled specialists with advanced degrees in law and business, it isn’t clear whether Integreon actively recruits librarians with MLS degrees and library experience – how can we use that to position ourselves as their perfect in-house partners? For example, I’m taking the time to sit down with each attorney at my firm to learn more about their practice, key clients and research needs – the insights gained from these meetings have helped us to tailor our services and pro-actively provide current awareness and education about available resources. How could this knowledge be used to work successfully with an outsourcing firm?

While it does seem like Integreon understands the value of law librarians and what we do, I hope that they aren’t too quick to see themselves as an ideal one-size-fits all replacement for most law firm libraries or legal departments. It would be a mistake to assume that the strategic knowledge and relationships we’ve built over the years within our firms wouldn’t be critical for any successful information services solution. No matter what type of vendor we work with, there should be a way to customize contracted services to enhance what we already offer without having to throw the librarian (or library) out with the bath water.

[Please Welcome Guest Blogger Scott Preston]

Convergence – the approach toward a definite value, a definite point, a common view or opinion.
Over ten years ago we, in IT, talked about convergence. Back then, convergence often referred to the merging of data and telephone infrastructures, and when first introduced, this idea was taboo (this always struck me as odd, there is very little difference between the data and telephone worlds). The telecom folks didn’t feel comfortable with data and the data folks didn’t feel comfortable in the telecom world.

Here we are again, only now we are talking about who owns the data and how information flows; about how the information stewards relate to the structure of a law firm. In an interesting dialog with Greg and Toby, I suggested that the CIO is the obvious point of information convergence. Greg was convinced the point of information convergence belonged within Library Services. Toby purchased another round of beers and encouraged us to dig a little deeper. In the end, we agreed to disagree on reporting structure. We did agree that IT and LS are complimentary departments, IT being more interested in system design/maintenance and LS being more interested in information research/consumption. Without good system design, it is difficult to get the information you need and without an understanding of the information needed, it is difficult to design efficient systems.

Information convergence is going to happen whether we like it or not. It must happen, the lack of convergence creates inefficiencies.

We have these issues now. Contract negotiation – in many firms IT and Library Services negotiate contracts independently. The vendors love this, but it is inefficient and costly for the firm. Information sources – often times each group uses different data sources to obtain the same or similar information. Again, the vendors love this, but it is expensive and lacks efficiency. Without communication between departments, vendors are selected for the wrong reasons and projects often started but never finished. Lack of agreement about direction and duplicated efforts between departments has a big impact on finances as well as resources. Worst of all, we continue to send a mixed message to our clients.

The solution probably varies as much as a law firm’s culture, but at the heart of the solution must be leaders who are more interested in change and less interested in puffery.

Can we just get along?

We need to:

  • Trust the intention of others.
  • Spend more time learning about the other discipline and less time talking about why it makes no sense to have them manage information.
  • Stop giving the vendors the advantage.
  • Do what is right for the client.

I’m reaching across the aisle hoping to see a similar response from the other side.

This morning I had the pleasure of participating in a Houston Chapter AMA sponsored roundtable presentation with Larry Heard, the President & CEO of Transwestern. He gave a brief and engaging talk on leadership and then opened the floor for questions. My $64 dollar questions was: Given the economic reset, what sort of fundamental shift are you making in your market strategy?
He had a very simple answer: Do things differently.
He went on to describer how when you are in an ‘up’ market and every one is well capitalized and confident you can only make gains at the margin. But after a significant downturn there are tremendous opportunities to gain market share and profit from bold moves. The alternative to being bold was obvious – and left unspoken.
I liked the message in part due to its economics approach. He went on to say how in this emerging upturn the stakes are even higher. The rapid changes in technology and global competition have upped the ante on this proposition. The market is rife with opportunity, but also treacherous for those who do not act.
I would add another level of urgency for law firms. With the guild broken and a competitive market (or call it a buyer’s market if you like) in place, law firms have an even bigger reason to “do things differently.”
The Reality: Not many law firms are doing this (and I’m being generous).
The Future: The vast majority of law firms do not have the institutional will to engage in such an approach. A major reason is the Paradigm of Precedence they live in.
The Result: We may be removing the question mark from the title of Richard Susskind’s book – The End of Lawyers?

Over a year ago I mentioned that the Gartner Blog Network gave law firms a model to use (along with specific instructions and guidelines) to set up a firm-wide blog network for your firm. Since that time, I’ve talked with individual bloggers at firms and the answer has always been that their firms don’t want to take the risk of allowing their lawyers to blog on a firm-wide platform. Of course, the number one reason that was mentioned time and time again was the fact that they didn’t want some lawyer giving legal advice through a blog. My answer to that is, if you can’t trust your lawyers to follow rules of ethical conduct on a blog, then why give them email, or a telephone, or let them ride up the elevator with non-firm people?

Well, just to embarrass you once again, it seems that another group of professionals that lawyers listen to have started a blog platform for their attorneys to contribute. Westlaw’s Reference Attorneys have set up their own blog where they focus on the needs of Summer Associates and produce blog posts that point out some of the needs expressed by Summer Associates and relay that to others. The bloggers share information that comes in from Summer Associate calls in order to identify trends (such as issues on the gulf oil spill), and get someone to blog about how they’ve handled the issues so that others can benefit from the experience. Mike Carlson, Reference Attorney with Westlaw, talks about the reason for setting up the blog as a way to enter the space that a segment of their customer base is using. In fact, Mike mentions that they see a number of attorneys (not just Summer Associates) that are Googling on legal topics and find their blog in their Google results. Once they find the blog, they also give the West Reference Attorneys a call.

Let’s think about this for a minute. West Reference Attorneys have a common blog where they discuss trends they are seeing in legal research; their customers find them through searching legal topics; their customers are then reading the blog, and some even make a follow-up call to the reference attorneys to get more information. Seems like a decent business idea to me.

I suggest going back and taking a look at my post on the way Gartner established guidelines for its bloggers and see if it couldn’t be adapted to your firm or practice group. Blogs and social media are all about discussion and interaction. If you’re not doing something in the social media world, you’re missing out on that conversation.

I got things stared off with a bang yesterday when I discussed a couple of blog posts where I said that the status of law firm librarians has diminished over the past 15 years or so. In those posts, I laid the blame at the feet of the current leadership (AKA “baby-boomers”) and the law library professional organizations. As you might image, the conversation after my talk was quite lively, and the room (which was filled with baby-boomers’ of course) was very happy to point out where they thought I was wrong (a lot), and where they thought I was right (a little).

I was very happy that the conversation included ideas on what could be done through organizations like AALL or SLA, or even through external entities like the ABA, ALM, or NLJ. At the same time, I was a little disappointed with those in the audience that thought that because they were content with their individual situation, and that the status-quo of self-promotion will work fine for the profession (because it has worked for them). My discussion is focused on the profession as a whole… not individual pockets of success. For those that think that things are fine just the way they are, or that law firm librarians are merely feeling the effects of a down economy and that as the economy bounces back, so will the library profession, then I suggest that you answer the following survey:

Rank how the following law firm departments’ status has changed over the past 10 years, where 1 is “fallen significantly”, 3 is “the same”, and 5 is “increased significantly”.

Business Development ____
Information Technology ____
Knowledge Management ____
Library Services ____
Marketing ____
Recruiting ____
Secretarial Services ____

You can keep your answers to yourself, or share them with the rest of us in by leaving a comment.

The point of my talk was not to insult the current leaders, but rather to get the discussion going on what we need to do to go forward and improve the status of the profession. If it means that we need to poke a few bears along the way in order to get them engaged in the conversation, then so be it.

To borrow from the AALL keynote speaker, R. David Lankes, “the future for librarianship is bright, but not if we continue to see our value in our collections and resources — instead of in ourselves…. The future of librarianship is in our hands and we must be ready to fight for it.”