The Law Librarian Blog’s (LLB) Joe Hodnicki pointed out the newest National Jurist’s academic law library ranking and what a colossal waste of time it was for everyone involved.  Joe warned his readers that it wasn’t even worth browsing the results because the way the schools were scored were out of whack with what really makes a library great.  Currently, National Jurist uses the following scoring methodology to determine “who’s got the best law library.”

Using data gathered by the ABA:
   50% = Number of volumes and unique titles
   20% = Ratio of library study seating to enrollment
   15% = Ratio of full-time professional librarians to enrollment
   15% = Number of hours open per week

I haven’t been an academic law librarian in over ten years, but I’m a little disturbed by the definition that the National Jurist used to describe what makes a great law library:

“What makes a good law library in the 21st century includes a variety of factors: comfort, accessibility, convenience and most of all, availability of the latest technology tools.”

This definition is mentioned, not once, but twice in the article.  I’m thinking this describes what makes a Barnes & Noble good, not a law library.  I understand that this is a survey of how National Jurist thinks that law students like their libraries to look and feel, but do we really want a definition of a ‘good library’ that doesn’t include any mention of ability to retrieve relevant legal materials in an expedient manner?  Call me old fashioned, but I thought the main objective of a law library was to point its users to the best resources to answer their legal research needs.  I could care less if there are twice as many seats available for me to sit in than there are students enrolled at the school.  I’d rather have access to legal databases over access to an onsite Starbucks.
When I go into a law library, there are five things I’m looking for:

  1. Legal materials (be they print or electronic) that I can access easily and quickly
  2. Reference librarians that can assist me in my search for resources I cannot find on my own
  3. For items that are not available within the law library, I want the law librarians to tell me where I can locate it (either by driving to another local library, or through an Interlibrary Loan)
  4. A chair and table to sit down and read (basic wood works fine for me)
  5. A copy machine or copy shop that takes a credit card and gives me a receipt
Again, I’m not a student, so my objectives for a law library are different from someone that is looking for a quite place so I can brief a case for my Con Law II class.  But really…  comfort, accessibility, convenience and latest technology tools should be further down the list for anyone that is making the practice of law his or her profession… shouldn’t it??

 

While cleaning up my twitter account this week, it dawned on my that something has been missing from my daily stream of twitter information… that nasty twittergiest, @hklawtwits that was constantly telling me how bad the law firm of Holland & Knight was.  The last tweet was posted back on November 29, 2009, and quite frankly wasn’t @hklawtwits best work at all.
I mentioned this twitter account last summer (along with the previous @hklaw account that was doing the same bad mouthing tactics.  Could it be that this angry person just burned out on all that hatred they had built up against what I’m assuming was their former firm? Has he or she just taken a hiatus?  Or… Oh no… could it be that @hklawtwits actually got a job???  This last scenario is the one that seems most believable.  It’s amazing how gainful employment can keep angry people occupied.
I’ll keep a special place in my twitter heart for @hklaw and @hklawtwit and their super-sized anger tweets against Holland & Knight.  We can only hope that someday they are fired from their current law firm and can refocus all that anger toward someone new.  Until then, I guess I need to seek out some other angry twitter’ers out there in the vast twitterverse.

Dear “New Lexis.com”,
I know that you are still in the gestation stage of your life, but I thought I’d write you a letter to help you enter the world on a better footing than your cousin WestlawNext did.  Let me start off by saying that we’re all excited to see what you look like, and we’re all hoping that your delivery goes without complications.  But we all know that most newborn legal research products can sometimes be extremely stressful on your parents, and you children aren’t always as wonderful as your parents tell everyone you are.  Let’s take your cousin WestlawNext (WLN) as an example and learn from what his parents did, so your parents don’t make the same mistakes.
First of all, let everyone know exactly who you are, what you can do, and how much you are going to cost us.  Don’t play with phrases like “modest premium” or “we’re still working on the pricing” as you enter the world.  Come out with a price based on what all of us know.  We’d all love to have you as part of our families for no additional cost, but I’m sure your parents are extremely proud of you and like any good parent/manager, will want to get the best return on their investment by charging as much as they think they can get out of us.  If that is the case, then just come out and tell us.  Say something like, “To have my Lexis.com over at your house will cost you 5% (10%, 20%…) extra from what you’re paying to have our older kids play at your place.”  Just let me know a price and I’ll let you know if I think that’s reasonable enough to come play with my family of lawyers and researchers.  If you cost me too much, then tell your parents that they need to be willing to negotiate from that price. And, whatever you do, please, please, please, don’t have your parents turn their sales force relatives loose on us with the directive to ‘get as much as you can from all of them.”  To be honest, we simply don’t trust that they have our best interests at heart. We would all like to have you come over, but some of us just aren’t willing to pay a high premium for the privilege.  No offense, of course, I’m sure you’re a wonderful resource.
Second suggestion, tell your family to be nice… even if we sometimes say things that make them angry.  Whenever there is a change in the family dynamic, some of us can get a little… shall we say, cranky.  It doesn’t mean that we think you are a terrible product, mainly it means that we’re nervous about allowing a new member into our fold without knowing what we’re getting into first.  Let me give you a simple example using your cousin WLN.  One of my friends, Lisa Solomon, was a little shocked that in order to have WLN over at her place, she’d have to pay an additional 68% premium for the privilege.  She’d had WLN’s older brother over at her place for years along with some of his siblings, like “ResultsPlus” and she was quite fond of each of them.  But she knows that children grow up and go out on their own eventually and we’ll need to replace them if we want to continue our relationship with their parents.  But, one of WLN’s uncles got a little snarky when Lisa asked if the 68% premium was worth it.  Seems that Uncle Rick, who is WLN’s Chief Technology Officer, is very proud of WLN, but apparently seems to think that WLN’s brothers and sisters have just been “messing around” for years now and need to be kicked to the curb by anyone with a brain.  Here, let me show you the conversation:

So baby Lexis.com, let me give you a word of advice that you should tell your family.  No matter how snarky your customers get when they talk about baby Lexis.com, do not, under any circumstances, get snarky back.  It just doesn’t do anyone any good to have grown-ups acting like children.  
Third word of advice, think creatively on how you want to compete for attention against your cousin WLN.  Family rivalries are bound to happen when you are competing for attention from the same group of people.  Some are going to say that WLN is their favorite, while I’m sure others will like baby Lexis.com better.  It’s been that way between all your older siblings going all the way back to, God rest their souls, your terminal brothers and cousins.  Now that I think about it, I guess “terminal” was kind of a mean name to give them…. but, I digress.  
Since you know there’s going to be some rivalry, you might as well play it up, and I’ve got a great suggestion for you.  How about you make a deal with some of the folks that want to have you over at their house by paying them to not play with your cousin?  Tell them that if they get rid of WLN and his sibs that you’ll give them a “rebate” after a year of playing with only you?  Yes, I know that it sounds a little like bribery, but it won’t hurt to ask them.  Here’s what I suggest.  If they promise to only play with you and not let your cousin into their house, then you cut them a deal… say ‘no increase in current subscription price.’  If they keep WLN out for a year, then you might want to give them a 2%-3% rebate on what they paid you for that year.  To sweeten the pot a little more, tell them that if you can advertise that they don’t play with WLN and can use their name and image in magazine and web ads, you’ll give them a 5% kick-back, er, ‘rebate’ at the end of the year.  You might be surprised at how many of your friends will jump at the chance to get rid of WLN if you sweeten the pot for them.  
Well, that’s my advice for you at this time.  I’m hoping that you grow into all of the wonderful things that your parents have been bragging about.  Remember that a good first impression is important, so think long and hard about how you would like to present yourself to us for the first time.  Your cousin, WLN, gave us all a bit of a roller coaster ride in his first few months of life, and although he is impressive to look at, all that other baggage of uncertain pricing and mixed messages from his immediate family has left many of us a bit hesitant about inviting him into our homes.  Here’s one last bit of advice for you.  If there is one thing we want from you and your cousin, it is ‘certainty.’  We want to know what you do, why you are better and how much you will cost us.  Give us those three things right up front, and I’m sure we’ll be friends for a long time.
Yours truly,
Greg

Interesting discussion going on over at Law Office Management Assistance Program (LOMAP) today regarding low-cost legal research providers Fastcase and Casemaker.  Casemaker lays out a claim that Fastcase is chock full of missing case citations, and even gives out a list of the first 50 cases missing a correct citation (A.3d, P.3d, ect.) from all 50 states. This would mean that if you searched by citation in Fastcase, these cites would not show up at all (even if the actual cases were in the database.)  It also means when you cross-check cases using Fastcase’s citation system, those cases would be missing from the results as well.  Casemaker claims to have a list of over 100,000 missing citations from Fastcase.

Ed Walters responded that he could probably show as many errors in Casemaker’s database and that Fastcase is better than Casemaker because Bob Ambrogi said so in his review, and Oregon switched from Casemaker to Fastcase.  Steve Newsom from Casemaker counted that Ambrogi’s review was not a deep dive and focused on user interaction and not quality of the information contained within the databases.  As many of you remember, I actually picked Casemaker over Fastcase (and even Loislaw) as far as having the most case law content.  The fact that Casemaker also has a group of former Michie Company editors on staff to oversee operations is a big plus in my book as well.

The part I like the most was that Newsom offered Walters the entire list of 100,000 missing citations if he could show that Casemaker was missing as many citations as Fastcase is missing.  It will be interesting to see if Fastcase scrambles to clean up these errors.

Here’s the claim (Casemaker), response (Fastcase), and counter-response (Casemaker).

Casemaker Claim

“How Far Back in Your State to Miss 50 Case Citations? 

‘How many years back do you have to go in your state case law to find 50 missing case citations?’ After seeing the legal research map posted on 3 Geeks, some analysis was made to do a more complete comparison of the various services. A comparison between Casemaker and Fastcase turned up a large number of missing case citations in the Fastcase system. At first, this appeared to be a hit-or-miss, minor quality control sort of issue. Then it became apparent that this was a much bigger issue. It became a very time-consuming comparison between the two providers in order to see how many years you would need to go back before the number of missing case citations hit 50. In the Casemaker 2.2 database there were found very few incorrect citation postings and, in a rare exception, a duplicated case. In Fastcase, there were a host of missing citations and duplicated cases; it became most alarming.

Casemaker has created a state-by-state comparison for 50 missing citations by state, and also says that they had identified over 100,000 missing citations within the Fastcase database between the years 2000 to 2009. Casemaker has declined to provide the complete lists for each state, saying that the complete list would be very valuable to Fastcase. Casemaker was initially going to provide 100 missing citations per state, but pulled back to 50, noting that, once the information is made public, Fastcase will quickly correct the liabilities in their database. Casemaker did state that under a limited nondisclosure agreement, they would provide the next missing 50 and each week following an additional 50 missing cases for the time period 2000 to 2009. Imagine if this analysis covered the longevity of the entire database (100+ plus years), instead of just the 10 years?

Casemaker and Fastcase are not a mirrored database, and there are clear and vast quality differences when choosing between the two providers.”

Fastcase Response

“Fastcase and Casemaker are both very good services, as Bob Ambrogi has pointed out in an independent, third-party review in Law Technology News. Both have traditionally updated pagination first from regional reporters (such as P.3d) and added parallel citations where necessary from state reporters. It’s an ongoing process for both services, and a process that is nearly complete for both — although the scope of the process is radically overstated by the above paragraphs from Casemaker.

It would be easy for us to derive the same list of missing citations for Casemaker, tit-for-tat. The errors and omissions in that service are legion. But we won’t. Picking their service apart would bepetty, and would demean us both, as well as the bar associations that we both work with. We won’t do it.

Instead, we will let the results speak for themselves. Bar association after bar association that compares both services — including thorough data quality comparisons — selects Fastcase as its partner. This recently has included the Oregon State Bar, which switched from Casemaker to Fastcase after an exhaustive evaluation – and they are thrilled with the change. No bar association has ever switched from Fastcase to Casemaker.

Instead of relying on Casemaker’s evaluation of both services (or even Bob Ambrogi’s), we invite state bar associations to conduct their own, independent evaluation. When they do, we’re confident they will conclude that both are valuable services — and then select Fastcase as their partner.”

Casemaker  Counter-Response
“The devil is always in the detail and we too recognize that there are two rather good but distinctly different research providers.LegalGeekery says, in a blog post on the FastCase iPhone app, that “Fastcase keeps subscription costs low by not hiring researchers to write summaries or manually cite check.” Casemaker invests heavily in quality review of case law and cites and has recently moved its headquarters to Charlottesville, Virginia to take advantage of the quality talents of employees and attorneys from the past Michie/Lexis Company. Fastcase’s Ed Walters mentions tit-for-tat and I so challenge Ed that if he can come up with 100 missing citations within Casemaker for the same time period and scope of coverage, I will give him his missing citation list of over 100,000 so that he can correct the errors in Fastcase. A note on Bob Ambrogi’s article of 8 months ago, which recognizes intuitiveness of the products and in which Bob later states that he did not do a deep dive into the content . . . we believe content dependability and integrity is first and foremost and this will remain our focus as a company.

We agree that bar associations should check for themselves and under a non-disclosure agreement, I am glad to provide the full missing list of Fastcase content for their evaluation. Ed asked the question “How is this evaluation/discussion productive?” My response is that it makes a value statement on the two services . . . Casemaker provides our clients with a high-quality product and traditionally at a higher cost than Fastcase. But make no doubt about it, the content quality and completeness is nowhere equaled.

We welcome competition for it will make both of our companies better . . . 

Casemaker added statutes and codes . . . Fastcase followed; 

Casemaker added customer support personnel and live training . . . Fastcase followed;

Fastcase added a mobile application for iPhone . . . this time Casemaker followed with a full mobile app for all devices and all data fields; 

Casemaker has added quality review staff and editorial services . . . Will Fastcase follow?

Warmest regards to a good friend and competitor, Ed . . . You do make us better, but we are not the same.”

It seems that the first ‘virtual shots’ have been fired in what might become the first big Internet War of the 21st Century.  According to reports from The Guardian this morning, it seems that Google has been hacked, presumably from the Chinese Government, and the bios of Google executives have been converted to Chinese.  Many of you may be thinking that this is kind of funny, or at least not very surprising given the fact that Google redirected its search engine away from the highly censored .CN version to the uncensored version in Hong Kong   earlier this week.  But for information professionals, this type of action by a Government against a corporation should sent some shivers up your spine.

There has been a saying in business for a number of years now – “The Network IS Your Business”.  And for information professionals, “The Internet IS Your Business”.  We’ve become very comfortable in abandoning local collections in favor of having them hosted remotely.  When access is cut off from the information, then work tends to come to a stoppage.  Think of the times that the Outlook Exchange Server went down and you found yourself and others roaming the hallways aimlessly until email was restored.

The uninterrupted access of information has become a core business process.  Many of us have Disaster Recovery (DR) plans that address issues of natural disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, fire, etc.), but almost all of those are based on the assumption that the events will be localized and can be rolled over to other locations.  Now we have to worry about the potential for state sponsored cyber terrorism and assume that the information that we’ve become accustomed to accessing on-demand, may not be there. Just think, Google probably knew this attack was coming and couldn’t stop it.  Just one more issue for all of you on DR teams need to add to your plan.  Good Luck!!

Okay… stop laughing at the title.  There is a perception of law librarians as being too quite and sitting behind a reference desk waiting on someone to come us and ask a question that they can answer.  But, if you go to an SLA or AALL meeting, you’ll see a different side of law librarianship.  Librarians discussing the hot topics of the day ranging from vendor relationships to workplace rights and even social issues.  I’ve enjoyed sitting at round table discussions where law librarians have heated conversations about how they need to address the issues of staffing reductions, budget cuts, all while having to handle increased demands for the services they provide to their firms, courts, faculty or public users.  However, one firm director I know mentioned to me that law librarians tend to be preaching to the choir, but not doing much preaching to anyone else.  Her suggestion was that those in management positions in law libraries need to expand their professional circles and join at least one other, non-librarian, association in order to have an audience that they need to be preaching to.

One of the organizations that she suggested was the Association of Legal Administrators, but there are numerous organizations out there that would help expand your professional circles.  One determining factor may be to look at the professional organizations that your administrative leadership belongs to.  I happen to like ILTA because I know it is an organization that many of my fellow managers and directors belong to.  Attending these meetings, even if it is just on the local level, exposes me to other leaders in my organization, as well as peers in other firms that I would never see at a law library meeting.  There are probably dozens of other non-librarian associations that are out there that would help you expand your professional circle (feel free to add some suggestions in the comments if you have any favorites to share.)  One suggestion is to ask around at your organization to see if your organization has a blanket membership to professional organization (like mine does for ILTA… remember I’m cheap, so a free membership is something I’ll take advantage of every time!!)

These associations are in addition to your current librarian associations.  For those of you that don’t belong to any associations, or don’t contribute to the conversation of your current association… shame on you.  Remember, if you’re not involved in the conversation of the direction your profession is heading, then you can’t complain when others make those decisions for you.

I thought I’d do a follow up to last week’s post where I crowned Casemaker as the “King of State Case Law Coverage.”  There are two reasons behind the follow-up.  First, Nina Platt brought up an assumption that many people might have about state case law coverage and the idea that the vendor selected by the state’s bar association should have the most coverage.  Although you would think that would be the case, it actually turns out not to be so.  The second reason for the follow-up is that I just like playing with the maps feature in IBM’s Many Eyes program.

The first map is a listing of the main low-cost legal research providers and which one covers the most case law for each state.  The second map is a replay of the map we did a couple weeks ago on who is the official vendor for the bar association.  Since Casemaker and Fastcase are really the only big players in providing their resource through the state bar associations, a third map was created that did a head-to-head comparison of coverage between the two.

It seems that the folks at WestlawNext have created a simple two-page resource that helps us all understand the pricing of their new product.  You got to love a clearly written two-page document like this that list out twenty-four scenarios along with three footnotes listing caveats to some of the scenarios.  Don’t forget to multiply those per minute charges by 60 and let everyone at your firm know that accessing a brief will cost you  $3,300.00 an hour. So, tell them to be fast!

There are now at least two major law firms that have now launched their own iPhone Apps. Canadian law firm Torys LLP and Morrison Foerster (MoFo2Go) both have new iPhone apps that I think are great public relations tools and will get a lot of attention as early adopters of a new technology.  Apart from the great PR, however, I’m not sure if approaching the market through an iPhone app is really the best way for firms to get to their clients smart phones.  I, for one, own an Android phone… Toby and Lisa each have a BlackBerry… so; there are 3 Geeks already that are shut out from using the app.  I guess we could all cut our contracts with Verizon or Sprint and jump over to AT&T to get an iPhone, but I really don’t think any of us are going to.  Toby will also have to add a caveat to his saying of “my Blackberry can do anything your iPhone can… only slower” and now add “except access your firm’s iPhone app.”

I’ve mentioned before that iPhone Apps (and Android Apps… and Palm Apps) contribute to what is being called the “Splinternet“.  That is the fracturing of what used to be a somewhat organized way of putting information out on the web without having to write a different code for every application that accesses the information.  Firms that create iPhone (or any other smart phone ‘app’) are basically telling their clients that the firm prefers a specific technology.  What kind of message does this sent to your clients who don’t have this technology??


Q: Why not just build a mobile web page that works for all smart phones?

Jeff Richardson (iPhone J.D.) thinks that MoFo’s app is a marketing tool that has been “done right.”  I actually agree with Jeff on the fact that MoFo2Go, and even Torys iPhone apps are actually good resources for iPhone users, but at the expense of excluding everyone else.  Doug Cornelius also reviewed the MoFo2Go app and brings up the same point I’m trying to make.  Why in the world would you develop something like this and exclude a large portion of the marketplace?  Contributing to the Splinternet is going to be a massive headache sometime down the road.  But, I assume that the ‘flash’ of an iPhone app for some firms may be too hard to resist.  I think that having a great mobile web site that works on all phones is a much better way to go.

Granted, it may mean that the MoFo Maze game may have to go away, but really… do your clients need a game to play?  Do your clients really need to buy an iPhone in order to feel connect to your firm?  Developing apps for specific smart phones will get you some press, but what are you going to do when you go into a meeting with your clients and tell them to download your new iPhone App and they all whip out their Blackberrys and ask when are you going to release the app for their phone?  Welcome to the world of the Splinternet… your contribution has been noted.

I always enjoy reading project management articles that are written for specific industries, and then seeing if they also apply for managing projects outside of those industries.  This morning I came across one such posting on one of my favorite blogs, Heavy Mental.  Although the post describes the ten keys of project management for an enterprise 2.0 project as presented at the Paris forum, many of these rules could be used verbatim in KM projects or IT projects or even Library projects.

1) Manage risks from the early stages of the project
2) Seek Executive supports
3) Know your business needs and address them
4) Knowledge sharing in complex and fast paced changing environment for distributed workforce is a common motive
5) ROI may be complicated to evaluate but some benefits are unassailable
6) Usability is key for quick adoption
7) Cross functional participation is critical
8) IT support is critical but IT Governance is crippling
9) Don’t use the S word
10) Top-Grassroot-Down is the new Bottom-up


Rules 1-7 are pretty straight forward project management rules that can be used in almost any project you’re managing.  Rules 8-10 are pretty specific to the Enterprise 2.0 project topic, but with a little modification could be used in almost any PM topic.  I do love how IT is specifically called out for being a necessary evil in this project, but let’s face it; almost everything we do needs some type of IT support these days, but doesn’t need to be run by IT.  This topic was covered in a post on the Cloud Ave blog called “The Art of the Enterprise: Marketing Shrugged.”  In that post, there is a hypothetical (at least I assume that it was a hypothetical) where one department did its best to boycott IT altogether because they did not want the project to go into the black hole of IT Governance.  

Rule 9 specifically uses the “Don’t use the S (social media) word” for this Enterprise 2.0 topic, but there are many taboo words when it comes to project management in specific areas.  I heard some KM managers say that they specifically no longer say “This is a Knowledge Management Project” to their attorneys or administrators.  We all know there are certain words or phrases that raise the hackles on the back of some necks around our firms, so the best thing to do is to come up with another way of presenting the project without using the taboo words that cause such negative reactions.

Rule 10 is worded a little strangely, but basically says that Top-Down and Grassroots-Up are both essential to managing successful projects.  Buy-in is needed on all levels and no longer can you force a project upon the end-users (no matter how great the project), nor can you make an unusable project work (no matter how enthusiastic the end-users are about the idea.)  

Regardless of your project, these are ten good rules that can be adopted to fit your needs.