Some are saying that President Obama’s choice to fill Dr. James H. Billington’s position at the Library of Congress could very well define his legacy as President. If you’ve paid any attention to this discussion, the common theme is that, while Dr. Billington was a good leader, he lagged behind in positioning the Library of Congress for the 21st Century and the digital age. Now is the time to change the direction of the Library, and the American Association of Law Libraries is adding its voice to what Law Librarians would want in the 14th Librarian of Congress.

The letter below was sent to the President today recommending that he nominate a candidate who will provide strong leadership on issues affecting libraries in the digital age.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Cara Schillinger
Director of Membership, Marketing, and Communications
312.205.8020
cschillinger@aall.org

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF LAW LIBRARIES
SENDS LETTER TO PRESIDENT ON QUALIFICATIONS
OF NEXT LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS

CHICAGO, August 3, 2015 — The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) today submitted a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama recommending he nominate a visionary leader with a deep commitment to preserving cultural memory as the new Librarian of Congress to replace Dr. James H. Billington, who is retiring from the position effective January 1, 2016.

The Librarian of Congress heads the Library of Congress, recognized as the United States’ de facto national library and the largest library in the world. The librarian also oversees the U.S. Copyright Office, Law Library of Congress, and several other service and support units. Dr. Billington, the 13th Librarian of Congress, has served in the role for 28 years, after being appointed to the position by former President Ronald Reagan in 1987.

AALL’s letter asks President Obama, during his search for the next Librarian of Congress, to consider qualified candidates, including law librarians, who will provide strong leadership on issues affecting libraries in the digital age — such as preservation of and permanent public access to born-digital and digitized materials.

AALL believes the next Librarian of Congress should have a transformative vision of a strong, responsive, and modern Library of Congress for the 21st century and beyond; possess a sophisticated understanding of how technology can improve library operations and promote access and reservation;
and display a commitment to transparency, public participation, and collaboration.

The full text of AALL’s letter to the president is available at bit.ly/AALLlocrec. For more information about AALL and its other advocacy efforts, please visit www.aallnet.org.

About AALL
The American Association of Law Libraries was founded in 1906 to promote law libraries’ value to the legal and public communities, foster the law librarianship profession, and provide leadership in the legal information field. With nearly 5,000 members, AALL represents law librarians and related professionals who are affiliated with law firms; law schools; corporate legal departments; courts; and local, state, and federal government agencies. For more information, visit www.aallnet.org.

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In his post the “Great Google Debate“, Mark Gediman suggested I was wise to not touch the debate on Google, and while I am happy to take the compliment, it also makes me wonder if somewhere down the road we (and by we, I mean those industry insiders, you know who you are) can’t create a Google equivalent to support the Legal industry. Imagine a single source that allows researchers to bridge the chasm between the business of law and the practice of law.  Let me explain.

On that same panel at AALL, I was asked where CI should report, my reaction drew a chuckle and was rapidly tweeted and retweeted. It was something to the effect of “I am tired of having this debate”. And I am, for a variety of reasons.  Where any of the research types or “information and analysis brokers” – Library, CI, KM, Research etc. – report is in my opinion, irrelevant and but an administrative imperative. How and where we add value to the firm and most importantly its bottom line/top line is what matters. I tweeted yesterday that information, intelligence, analysis when used effectively and systemically by firms could be the next disruptive factor, akin to the AFA.  Research, and the information professionals who undertake these tasks are embracing technology and are “to be congratulated for navigating really difficult times in the industry” according to Aric Press.  Big Law Is Here to Stay, and if its information professionals are going to continue to step up their game in this rapidly changing industry, they need proper tools, a collaborative environment and a checking of the proverbial egos (and related reporting structures) at the doors. 

Throughout the day, information professionals on the business side of the equation, search Google, subscription databases (what’s your favourite??), social media feeds, securities filings, traditional and  new media outlets and should be doing some kind of primary research i.e. talking to people and working the network (that’s a blog post for another time). On the practice side of the equation, legal researchers search corporate precedents, case law, filings, treaties, judgments, dockets, summaries, briefs, memos and other subscription databases. Imagine if you could put it all together, search one platform – a Googlesque type platform minus the paid SEO and get whatever research you needed in one place. How much more efficient, smart and focused on client and legal service could we and our firms be with one magnificent tool at our finger tips. 

Its pie in the sky, but that’s where dreams live, right? Here’s a use case. A proposed change in legislation relating to construction zoning in a particular jurisdiction is announced.  You  – Research Warrior/Maven/Guru  access the details of the proposed changes, and are able to fire it off to the relevant attorneys for an opinion, a LinkedIn Post, or a Client Update, while at the same time researching the number of public (and private, it’s a dream database, right?) companies in the jurisdiction who will be affected. You can also access which of those companies are your clients, your competitor clients, or prospects, and you can analyze the text of the proposed change to determine what the percentage of prior proposals with similar language were accepted, or rejected. With this data in hand, you can do a historiographic or timeline analysis to determine the likelihood of the proposal becoming law and using the same magic portal you can determine which other jurisdictions may adopt similar changes based on a cursory review of relevant local media and social media reactions and commentary.  And let’s not stop there, with a few clicks, you can output all the data into neatly branded reports complete with charts and graphs – a data visualization panacea. At that point, who really cares where you report? You just saved lawyers time, developed new leads, created an opportunity to demonstrate the firm’s value and demonstrated the information professional’s propensity for serial innovation.  Not bad in a day’s work!

Yes, there will be those that suggest it can’t be done, or those who won’t trust the data in a single platform even if it is pulling from multiple (triangulated and vetted) sources.  And course there will be a myriad of UX considerations, search/browse convergence discussions, taxonomy whoas and other finicky things to figure out.   But it would stop the where should we report and should we use Google debates….

I just returned from the AALL annual meeting in Philadelphia and had an interesting discussion with a colleague about Google.  First, let me set the scene: I was on a panel with Zena Applebaum and we had just answered a question about our favorite CI resources.  A member of the audience then asked why neither of us had included Google in our lists. As I began to answer, Zena wisely tweeted:

There is a debate going on, both within our institutions and in the research community.  Is Google a tool or a resource?  I feel that Google is just a tool, an excellent one that allows us to access a universe of information.  Unfortunately, the quality of the information is always in doubt.  Information from a fake website or a misleading post could be included in the search results, maybe even at the top of the list. The same reasons you don’t rely on Wikipedia apply even more to Google.  Google has never laid claim to delivering only quality, vetted information.  In fact, they have taken great pains to do the opposite.  Look at the disclaimer at the bottom of the page here and listen to the conversation Richard Leiter and Company had with Google Scholar’s Chief Engineer here.

As a researcher, I know the importance of confirming anything I find on Google and noting if the information is suspect and cannot be verified.  In CI as in law, it is important to have a high degree of confidence in the information that your analysis and recommendations are based on.  Google alone does not instill that confidence. 

There is a reason we pay for services like Lexis Advance and WestlawNext.  These services ensure that their subscribers have access to current and vetted content, often with editorial review.  I’m not saying Google isn’t useful.  I am on Google several hours each day.  However, it is for these reasons I don’t conduct legal research on Google when I have these services and others like them at my fingertips.  Just like any tool, a thorough understanding of its limitations is necessary to get the most out of it.

We all know this coming of age story. A boy leaves home to study abroad, sows his wild oats, and returns home a grown man, wiser and ready to take on the world. Except this coming of age story has a bit of a twist. The boy is actually a computer. And that computer’s name is Watson.
ROSS Intelligence, which is making headlines for its novel application of the IBM Watson machine learning platform to legal research, has been hard at work training the system to understand law. The team originally worked with Canadian legal content and lawyers, teaching Watson what “good” results looked like. But yesterday, the ROSS team announced they are bringing Watson back to the States to tackle US case law. They also announced support and funding from a powerful investor: Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator. ROSS is starting small with bankruptcy and, in a similar fashion to their original work north of the border, has partnered with a number of pilot law firms. But make no mistake, this first small step is likely to create tremendous ripples in the legal profession as their program expands.
I sat down recently with two of the co-founders of ROSS Intelligence, Andrew Arruda (CEO) and Jimoh Ovbiagele (CTO), to learn a bit more about ROSS and their experience with Watson.
One of the first topics was whether ROSS complemented or replaced the likes of LexisNexis and Westlaw. Arruda’s perspective was that it complemented traditional legal research for now, but the goal is ultimately to replace them. In reality, it is a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. Traditional legal research vendors generally provide data and a search box, leaving much of the heavy lifting to lawyers. This approach was well-suited to the “leave no stone unturned” philosophy that guided legal research in the golden age of law. ROSS, on the other hand, serves up insights based on a more natural dialogue between the lawyer and its Watson-based system. This approach fits better in a post-recession world where clients are cost-conscious and expect efficiency in their law firms.
For now, ROSS is still relatively targeted in its scope and utility. LexisNexis and Westlaw have massive stores of content they either own or license, and they have spent decades gathering and curating this content. Matching their breadth and depth of content will be a daunting task, to say the least. But the big vendors would be foolhardy to ignore this threat. Anyone familiar with Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and the concept of disruptive innovation knows that incumbents are often unseated when entrants perfect their technology downstream then move to compete directly. As Arruda says, “Think of us like the Netflix of legal research; we are going to keep adding capabilities and original content until lawyers no longer have a reason to stay with their traditional providers and can cut the cord.”
ROSS’s pilot approach is consistent with this notion. They start by turning associates loose, using ROSS just as they would other research tools (yes, Google and Wikipedia, you’re included in that list). As ROSS returns results, associates can provide feedback on whether ROSS’ answer was helpful. If it is not, the result is dropped and the next most relevant one is shown. This user feedback loop helps ROSS understand what is relevant for a particular topic.
As ROSS gets a more sophisticated understanding of an area of law, the pilot then moves upstream to senior associates and, ultimately, counsel and partners. This incremental approach to learning is a recurring theme in the world of deep learning, where AI systems learn in much the same way as children. In this instance, the ROSS team took Watson to law school and is now guiding ROSS through its first years at a law firm.
I asked Arruda and Ovbiagele about some of the challenges they faced adapting Watson to the legal profession. I have some familiarity in this space, having built several AI systems for LexisNexis back in the early 2000’s. One of the key issues is the structure of the typical legal document. If you break it down, much of the text in a brief or agreement is not really that important. It’s filler text or scaffolding where the real meat of the argument is hung. Take the heading of a court filing, for instance. It may say “In the 2nd district court of appeals,” but really all that matters is 2nd and appeals. All that extra text, like “in the court of,” or the “by and between parties” in an agreement, really don’t mean much. But to a system trying to extract and make sense of concepts, the extra text is a real problem.
Arruda and Ovbiagele confirmed they experienced the same issue. Much of their work has been tailoring and building an infrastructure around Watson to make legal text understandable. While some may cry foul at this level of intervention, that is the reality of where we are with AI. There is currently no “silver bullet” general purpose AI that is fully automated. But that does not stop the creation of targeted, specific-purpose AI like ROSS. And as has been shown in many other domains, that level of targeted AI is usually sufficient to disrupt an industry.
We also discussed how Watson is designed for a very specific type of question/answer interaction. Developers are constrained to a very specific formula of content ingestion, topic extraction, and tuning of relevant answers to questions. There are many other machine learning techniques out there – clustering, classification, prediction – that Watson does not do. ROSS, like many other Watson applications, layers their own special sauce on top of Watson to make results even more relevant and meaningful. “ROSS is a composite of AI technologies with Watson at its center, but we have a dedication to using the best methods available for this grand challenge,” explained Ovbiagele.
So what’s next for ROSS? With their move to the largest legal market in the world, it is clear they are setting their sights on broader application, both in terms of practice areas and law firm customers. But much remains to be seen. How fast will this occur? What will the business model and cost ultimately look like? How will other legal research providers like LexisNexis and Westlaw and intelligence system providers like Kira Systems react? And perhaps most importantly, will lawyers embrace help from a computer as it becomes more human-like?
One thing is clear. Disruption is coming to legal, as it has to so many other industries, and this time there is a feeling of inevitability. Lawyers and firms will have a choice: adapt, or perish.

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Matt Coatney is an AI expert, data scientist, software developer, technology executive, author, and speaker. His mission is to improve how we interact with smart machines by making software smarter and teaching people how to work (and cope) with advanced technology. Great things happen when smart people and smart machines work together toward a common goal.
Follow Matt on LinkedIn and on Twitter @mattdcoatney. Follow the conversation at #BridgingTheAIGap.

We constantly make fun of the lack of innovation in the legal field, but there are a number of highly talented people out there that battle the constant resistance to change, and make a difference for their own organizations and profession. For the past five years, Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, has recognized those whom he lists as innovators, visionaries, and leaders in the law through his Fastcase 50 Award Winners. I was honored to be a part of the inaugural Fastcase 50 back in 2011, and I’m even happier that my fellow Geek, Ryan McClead, received the award this year. (In fact, Ryan is so good, that when the list was initially displayed, he showed up twice!)

Here’s the write-up on Ryan:


Ryan McClead
Legal Technology Innovation Architect, Norton Rose Fulbright

Ryan McClead leads Norton Rose Fulbright’s Global Legal Technology Innovation initiative, solving information supply-chain problems in one of the world’s largest law firms. Ryan is a regular contributor to the popular 3 Geeks and a Law Blog (perhaps the most prolific contributor recently). According to Original Geek (OG) Greg Lambert: Ryan’s writing is “pure genius.” Lambert adds: “The Exponential Law Firm series, and The Myth of Disruptive Technology are instant classics and not only show Ryan’s ability to talk about current trends in legal technology, but also to peer into the future, all in a funny, imaginative, and thought-provoking way. Ryan’s projects at Norton Rose Fulbright also expose his creative side. Pushing out technologies directly to the firm’s clients and other consumers across the globe, Ryan is turning the concepts of what we think technology can do within a law firm on its head. We could all use a Ryan or two at our firms, to enable us to break out of our groupthink mentality and see things from a completely different perspective.”

Ryan is just one of those people that sees things in a different way, and finds ways of making things work, sound, and look better. Much of that comes from his creative background of working in the fine arts and applying his ability to tell a story in a way that makes us all sit up and say “ohh, I get it.”

Congratulations to Ryan and the other 49 recipients of the Fastcase 50 award.

[Ed. Note: Please welcome guest blogger Noah Waisberg, CEO of Kira Systems, and a good friend of the 3 Geeks. Noah was on an ILTA Panel with me last year, and will participate in the follow up to that panel this year called, Legal Technology Innovation: Bolstering AND Destroying Legal Work.  This post originally appeared on the Kira Inc. Blog. – RM]

[CC] Gengiskanhg

Watson is almost certainly the most significant technology ever to come to law, and it will give lawyers permission to think innovatively and open up the conversation about what is possible in a field that has been somewhat “stuck.” 

 –“10 predictions about how IBM’s Watson will impact the legal profession“, Paul Lippe and Daniel Martin Katz, ABA Journal

IBM’s Watson AI has received a lot of attention for how it might change law practice. Should it? Or should commentators expecting “Watson” to change the world instead refocus their attention on “artificial intelligence” or “machine learning”?

Recently, legal market observer Ron Friedmann wrote, in a post on potential business models for Watson in the legal space:

if we aim to improve the efficiency of the legal market, there is no lack of technology to choose from. Whether Watson is the best place to bet remains an open question.

  1. What is Watson currently good it, and is it even the best avenue for automating tasks where it is strongest?
  2. Is Watson strong in the most promising areas for legal automation?
  3. Will Watson grow to become leading machine learning or AI technology across the board, or will it remain high quality only for question answering?

Watson, Currently

From Wikipedia: “Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language”. Today, it appears to be a leading machine learning offering for question answering of a very specific sort (as we will cover below). IBM looks to be attempting to build Watson out into leading general purpose artificial intelligence software, but there is no consensus that it is at or better than the state of the art in areas beyond question answering. Indeed, early reviews on released Watson APIs have been underwhelming. As Ron Friedmann points out, it is not even clear whether Watson is a better technological approach for legal question answering tasks than, say, Neota Logic.

Apparently, one vendor is currently using Watson to extract data from contracts. I have yet to see any data suggesting that identifying contract provisions is in Watson’s sweet spot (by data, I mean information such as, say, published provision extraction accuracy numbers for a system built using Watson; the vendor claims their “goal today is to deliver a 20% cost reduction for a law firm in a typical diligence exercise”, which would not stand out relative to claims from other contract review software vendors (e.g., our clients tell us they find from 20–45% time savings on page-by-page review using our contract review software, and 60–90% time savings when they rely on it more heavily)).

Is Current Watson Right for Legal Problems?

Watson is currently a leading technology for question answering tasks. Are most legal tasks that could be impacted by software question answering tasks?

“Question answering” could be very broad, and most or all legal tasks could be interpreted as giving answers to questions. However, today Watson only stands out for performance on a narrow definition of question answering.

Each of the following questions illustrates a type of legal problem technology could help solve:

  1. Is it illegal for individuals to have ferrets in the state of California? (Watson-type question answering)
  2. Which of these 1 million documents are relevant to determining if anti-competitive behavior occured in this specific case? (eDiscovery technology-assisted review)
  3. How long does it tend to take for cases to get to trial in front of Judge Vernon Broderick? (Lex Machina)
  4. Who will the Supreme Court decide for in King v. Burwell? (Katz/Bommarito/Blackman algorithm)
  5. Can you draft a brief for us to submit to the court for this case? (NarrativeScience, Automated Insights (neither appear to be currently targeting legal))
  6. Do any expense items on this legal bill seem inappropriate? (SimpleLegal)
  7. Which of these contracts have change of control or exclusivity clauses? (us (Kira) and others)
Despite how all of these legal automation areas were phrased as questions, current Watson seems to only have documented high quality performance on tasks similar to the first, legal researchey issue. Is there any data to support the idea that Watson could best other currently-existing technology solutions on the other questions?
Alternatively, is being great at legal research question answering sufficient to make Watson the leading legal technology? Are all the other areas insignificant compared with an ability to know the law? As an ex-corporate lawyer, not to me. I know there are large numbers of lawyers that hardly ever do legal research.*

Will Future Watson Be Better Than Alternatives?

A Watson proponent might say maybe Watson is only truly great at question answering right now, but it will grow into the accross the board leading AI technology. After all, Watson won Jeopardy!, and IBM is pouring tons of resources into bettering it. As Friedmann states, after listing off a number of companies—including us—who build contract review software:

But as Paul points out, Watson’s R&D investment is probably 100x all these companies combined, and so has the potential to ride a much steeper performance curve.

Since machine learning does not yet have one approach that is better than others across the board, it is hard to say how much value Watson’s extensive R&D investment matters in the contract review software space (or, for that matter, in most other areas of technology, legal or otherwise). The argument that Watson will dominate outside its core because of overall R&D investment is akin to arguing that Lance Armstrong, straight off winning seven consecutive Tour de Frances, would win the 2006 New York Marathon. After all, he had incredible aerobic capacity, slow twitch muscle training, toughness, and more spent on his training than others in the field. Plus, running is basically just putting one foot in front of the other. For what it’s worth, Armstrong finished in 856th place his first try, and 232nd the next year.
Winning Jeopardy! is great, but there have been many other very impressive machine learning feats, including self driving cars; translation, including of live speech; and writing decent enough quality news articles that human reviewers could not necessarily tell the difference. Even on question answering, was Ken Jennings easy competition at Jeopardy! relative to a different current AI system like Google DeepMind?
Moving past Jeopardy!, IBM may be putting significant resources into Watson, but other companies are doing the same. Some equally large companies to IBM, including Google, HP, Facebook, and Baidu, are also putting a lot of resources into machine learning. Why will IBM beat them? Why will IBM even beat out newer AI focused startups such as DeepMind (bought by Google in 2014 for $650 Million), MetaMind, or many others? IBM itself appears to recoginize that others are building valuable machine learning technology, acquiring deep learning focused AlchemyAPI in May. 
Lots of companies are building AI technology for specific verticals (like us with contract review). Current machine learning is quite problem-specific, and these companies are getting experience honing their technology for their particular use cases. Will Watson’s technology really be better for specific verticals than companies focused on those specific verticals? Would you use Watson for eDiscovery ahead of offerings from companies who have been focused on that challenge for years? Will Watson do machine learning fraud detection better than well-funded Sift Science? Or movie recommendation better than Netflix? Will Watson even be better on legal research than something Thomson Reuters builds? IBM may be a lot bigger than TR, but TR is not small and has to nail this, whereas IBM does not need to get legal research right.
There are a lot of different legal tasks ripe for automation. There are also a lot of different technological approaches to solving AI problems. I suspect we’re a long way out from saying any one vendor’s technology is going to transform law practice on the whole.
* There is one other way Watson could transform law practice that I did not discuss here. Perhaps question answering lies behind as-yet-undiscovered-but-transformative legal applications. No doubt, there is a lot of opportunity to improve law practice through technology.

[Ed. Note: Please welcome guest blogger, Keith Lipman, President at Prosperoware. Keith is a long-time friend of the Geeks, and well-known leader in the information management field of the legal industry. This post originally appeared on June 24th on LinkedIn. – GL]

What’s in a word? Lack of precision often. The terminology in the legal industry around phases, task codes, and tasks can drive you crazy. The word “task” is particularly imprecisely used. Generally in our industry, the term task does not actually apply to a task in the traditional sense of the word but actually applies to work performed during a phase or a sub-phase of a matter. Confused? So are many of us. Let’s de-bunk the most common misuse of this terminology and get everyone on the same page.

The root problem dates back to the design of the ABA task codes and the Uniform Tasks Based Management System (UTMBS). The purpose of these coding systems was to enable electronic invoice processes. The primary use of the code set are in the areas of litigation and the cost codes around managing expenses and disbursement.

Take the example of discovery in the ABA Litigation Code Set. The phase code for “Discovery” is L300, which represents the discovery phase and the task codes include “Written Discovery,” “Document Production,” “Depositions,” “Expert Discovery,” “Discovery Motions,” and “Other Discovery.” However, these labels all represent sub-phases not tasks. The “real tasks” lie underneath.

Things got worse when many clients and law firms decided they didn’t like the ABA labels and changed them to fit their needs. For example, the official label for L200 is “Pre-trial Pleadings and Motions” but some clients want it to read “Pleading and Motions.” As a result, within a single firm the same code can have slightly different meanings for different clients or for internal firm purposes.

The problem with all these codes is that a significant number of lawyers don’t use them accurately. Anecdotally, I’ve been told on many occasions that 60 to 80% of time entries have inaccurate codes. Much of the problem stems from the fact that there are over 29 codes in the litigation code set. A choice of 29 codes is a lot, especially when you need to enter codes all the time. If a lawyer bills 8 hours per day, they’ll need to make somewhere between 8 and 20 time entries per day or 2,000 to 5,000 time entries per year.

My general experience with look-up lists on frequents activities is that they should ideally number less than 5 entries and no more than 10. After 10, the accuracy of picking the correct choice diminishes pretty quickly. I based this conclusion on best practices that emerged from my experience designing and managing document management systems, which have exactly the same problem.

While the UTMBS tasks codes are good for billing, they actually don’t help you effectively price or estimate a matter. When you go back and look at a prior matter, there is little information about critical details. In most U.S. litigations, the critical details that make the difference in cost is number of motions, number of documents, and number of depositions. This is next to impossible to find out because traditionally no one tracks the “real tasks” underneath the sub-phases.

To understand this better, let’s turn back to the task label that are really sub-phases, such as “Document Production,” a sub-phase during which carry out many specific tasks. Examples of these tasks include collecting documents, processing documents, planning for document review, reviewing documents, quality assurance about the reviews, and producing the documents. Some sub-phases are simpler but still problematic. For example, in the area of “Depositions,” you have two fundamental tasks, take a deposition and defend a deposition. These are very different things, but under e-billing they all get grouped under “Depositions.”

If you notice, all tasks start with a verb. Under each of these tasks are a multitude of activities performed by a multitude of people. Let’s take the example of taking a deposition:

  • Schedule the deposition (secretary/paralegal)
  • Pull the hot documents (associate)
  • Review the documents (partner)
  • Build an outline (partner)
  • Take the deposition (partner)
  • Update the factual timeline (associate)

As you can see, we have three people involved in this one task, which means that process improvement may simply need improving the speed with which one of these activities gets done.

Measuring and getting to this level of detail is the nirvana. However, to get there, your current technology needs to evolve, and the partners in your firm will need to agree on the list of tasks and activities in each phase and sub phase. I believe I have the answer to this and will present it in the Fall.

What you should do in the interim is setting up a limited set of tasks codes in any matter and use a time entry system that can limit the list of available codes to those that are available for a particular matter. This is going to create more work in setting up matters, but it’s the price you’ll have to pay for better data. The other critical interim step is to create a scope or assumptions that go with any budget and write a post action report on any matter to understand the difference between your assumptions and reality.

As I said, look for a follow-up on this in the Fall.

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) announced two name changes for its Special Interest Sections (SIS) this morning. These changes represent a broadening of the SIS appeal to law librarians and information professionals, as well as a modernization of who the SIS represents, and the mission it serves. The two SIS changes are:

  • Government Law Libraries (GLL-SIS) formerly the State, Court, and County SIS.
  • Private Law Librarians & Information Professionals (PLLIP-SIS) formerly the Private Law Libraries SIS.

I’ve been a member of both of these Special Interest Sections and like where both are going with the name changes.

The GLL-SIS has a continued focus on supporting those within libraries or other government information services with the Access to Justice (A2J) issues that these members work every day to promote on the local level.

The PLLIP-SIS name change represents the changes in the basic structures of our profession. Turning the focus away from libraries as a place, to the librarians and other professionals that contribute to the overall gathering, compiling, analyzing, and distribution of information and knowledge resources found throughout the private legal practice profession.

These may be subtle changes on the surface, but are really leading indicators that the profession has changed, and the association that represents the profession is beginning to change in order to meet the needs that its members face. I see these changes as foreshadowing upcoming changes in other parts of the organization. More focus on individuals rather than maintaining traditional facility models; more focus on supporting services, processes, and strategic missions of the groups, and; more focus on expanding the base of the organization to include those who align with these missions and goals, rather than simply looking at the department in which they work.

It’s a new day for the profession. I am happy to see the changes and look forward to seeing more.

Below is the official statement from AALL HQ:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Cara Schillinger
Director of Membership, Marketing, and Communications
312.205.8020
cschillinger@aall.org

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF LAW LIBRARIES ANNOUNCES SPECIAL INTEREST SECTION NAME CHANGES

CHICAGO, June 18, 2015 — The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) announced today
that it has approved the name changes of two special interest sections (SISs) — member groups
with specialized areas of interest in law librarianship and legal information.

The AALL Executive Board approved the following SIS name changes:
• Government Law Libraries Special Interest Section (GLL-SIS) is the new name for the former State, Court, & County Special Interest Section (SCCLL-SIS).
• Private Law Librarians & Information Professionals Special Interest Section (PLLIP-SIS) is
the new name for the former Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section (PLL-SIS).

The SIS name changes reflect the interests of their members and required member votes, SIS bylaw
amendments, and final approval from the AALL Executive Board.

“AALL’s special interest sections represent the interests of more than 2,800 of our members who
belong to one or more group,” said AALL President Holly M. Riccio. “It is important for our SIS
members to feel that the names of their sections represent the types of institutions in which they
work, their areas of expertise, and their roles within those areas.”

“Changing our name to GLL-SIS reflects the multiple levels of government where our members
serve the public, the practicing bar, and the judiciary,” said GLL-SIS Chair Maryruth Storer. “Maintaining access to justice is imperative to a democratic society.”

“The PLLIP-SIS name change reflects the expansion of new roles undertaken by legal information
professionals in law firms including competitive intelligence, practice alignments, analytics,
knowledge management, pricing, and business development,” said Jean O’Grady, immediate past
chair of the PLLIP-SIS. “As the legal industry has changed, our members have been at the forefront
of driving innovation in the development of information strategies and the delivery of knowledge to all facets of the business and practice of law.”

AALL will gradually implement the name changes on the AALL website and in forthcoming
publications and communications.

For more information about AALL Special Interest Sections, visit bit.ly/AALL-SISs. For more
information about AALL, visit www.aallnet.org or contact AALL Member Services at membership@aall.org.

About AALL
The American Association of Law Libraries was founded in 1906 to promote law libraries’ value to the legal and public communities, foster the law librarianship profession, and provide leadership in the legal information field. With nearly 5,000 members, AALL represents law librarians and related professionals who are affiliated with law firms; law schools; corporate legal departments; courts; and local, state, and federal government agencies. For more information, visit www.aallnet.org.

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[Ed. Note: Please welcome Holly Riccio, AALL President and long-time friend of mine, as today’s guest blogger. Recently, Holly attended the invitation-only National Summit on Innovation in Legal Services and she asked if we would allow her to give an overview of her experience at the event so that she could share it with our readers. Holly originally wrote this for the AALL Spectrum blog, but since many of our readers here at 3 Geeks are not members of AALL, we thought this would put it in front of many people that would otherwise not see the original writing. The theme of the summit caught my attention immediately:

[C]hallenge thought leaders both from within and beyond the legal profession to…spark fresh thinking about the delivery of legal services and to find new, actionable ideas that are not constrained by traditional models and are rooted in the essential values of protecting the public, enhancing diversity and inclusion, and pursuing justice for all.

After reading Holly’s review, I wished I would have gotten an invitation.

I hope you enjoy Holly’s highlights of the Summit. – Greg Lambert]

Earlier this year, ABA President William Hubbard established the Commission on the Future of Legal Services to improve the delivery of—and access to—legal services. The Commission published an Issues Paper, requesting that key stakeholders submit written comments, which the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) did. The Commission also held hearings at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Houston, in February, and, in my role as AALL President, I was able to attend on behalf of AALL and testify—along with other bar leaders, judges, law firm practice managers, and legal service providers—focusing my remarks on libraries’ integral role in expanding access to justice for all individuals and communities.
The culminating event for this Commission was the invitation-only National Summit on Innovation in Legal Services, which took place last month at Stanford Law School, assembling 200 participants, all proven leaders and innovators in the legal profession.

AALL was invited to participate in this event, convened to “challenge thought leaders both from within and beyond the legal profession to…spark fresh thinking about the delivery of legal services and to find new, actionable ideas that are not constrained by traditional models and are rooted in the essential values of protecting the public, enhancing diversity and inclusion, and pursuing justice for all.” The two-day event—packed with inspiring keynote speakers, panelists, and TED-style mini-lectures, and combined with ample time for breakout sessions organized around the key areas identified in the Issues Paper—was not only a great opportunity for AALL to start developing richer relationships and collaborations with the ABA in the access to justice arena, but also reflective of the commitment by the ABA leadership to bring about real change in the way we define and deliver legal services.

I can’t possibly condense everything that I heard or learned into this blog post, but I will share some of what I considered to be the highlights.

Sunday morning kicked off with a panel of innovators from outside the legal world, including Judit Rius Sanjuan from Doctors Without Borders, Ron Dolin from Stanford Law’s Center on the Legal Profession, and innovation and design strategist Denis Weil. Sanjuan told us that “9 out of 10 lawyers are trying to maintain the status quo” and that the most creative thinking has to come from those working in other professions. Dolin focused on metrics, telling the audience that the legal profession is not really running on quality metrics. “General counsels want to see return on investment,” he said. “Law firm reputation is just a stand-in for ROI metrics, but it is not a good one.” Sanjuan echoed this sentiment by stating that “corporations don’t want to stop legal spending, they just want to quantify what they’re getting.” Weil, formerly Corporate Vice President, Concept and Design, at McDonald’s, argued for focusing on leading indicators (customer satisfaction), not lagging indicators (ROI metrics), and urged lawyers to stop “backcasting” and start forecasting. “Teaching innovation is not enough,” said Weil. “Lawyers have to find comfort with ambiguity…and be serious about giving clients choice and control.” The panel got a round of applause when Dolin said he didn’t know why we are still producing court opinions and contracts without XML markup. The panel, while inspiring, was also realistic about the challenging road ahead, with Dolin stating that “we have an ecosystem of barriers” to overcome.

The next panel addressed some of the challenges to innovation. Moderated by Deborah Rhode, Summit Co-Chair and Director of the Program in Law and Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford, it included two professors, USC’s Gillian Hadfield and Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University/MIT, and the founder and CEO of Avvo, Mark Britton. Van Alstyne emphasized the need to create an innovation ecosystem and encouraged openness to allow outsiders to come in and innovate, solving the legal profession’s problem of having “a homogeneous pool of potential innovators.” He also talked about platforms, arguing that platforms beat services almost every time and that “platforms drive innovation through openness, modularity, and enabling of third parties.” Britton organized his remarks around three things the legal profession needs for future success: the right mindset, the right support, and the right rewards. He encouraged the audience to be opportunity-focused, think big, accept and reward failure, share knowledge, cultivate innovation, and create rewards that are personal, qualitative, and quantitative. His goal is “to make a legal check-up as regular as a medical check-up.”

What followed these two panels was a series of short, rapid-fire presentations focusing on the client and illuminating disparate experiences with the legal system from a variety of client perspectives. A few of the highlights for me included:

• Rebecca Sandefur, associate professor of sociology and law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, shared many illuminating and enlightening statistics, including that when the general public is asked to explain why certain problems happen in their lives, only 9 percent think of these problems as legal. She suggested that bridging this gap could be solved, or at least improved, by advertising: connecting problems to law and people to legal services. “We need to be timely, targeted, and trustworthy,” she said, “and meet them where they are.” Sandefur suggested a few solutions where law libraries could play a role: co-located services that can extend our reach and “human handholding” with the use of Internet and technology legal resources.

• The executive director of Bay Area Legal Aid, Alex Gulotta, made sure no one in the audience was dozing off, as he wore the passion and commitment he has to access to justice issues on his sleeve. “We need a single point of entry to the legal justice system,” Gulotta stated, “but there are hurdles to overcome, the first of which is fear.” Echoing what others speakers had shared, Gulotta said that we need to find ways to incentivize the creation of such a system, then left us with one final thought: mere access to the justice system does not equal justice.

• What Pima County (Ariz.) Superior Court Judge Charles Harrington is doing to bring the courts to the people is a great model, one that I see as being ripe for law librarian input and collaboration. Because the Grand Canyon cleaves Mojave County, Judge Harrington explained that residents on the north side have to drive great distances to get to the county courthouse on the south. To address this, the Superior Court set up the North Canyon Kiosk, an automated booth at the Mojave County DMV that allows users to file papers, speak with court clerks, and pay fines…all remotely. (I could easily see county law librarians providing input on ways to incorporate links to their resources for self-represented litigants from these remote kiosks.) Another project originating from Judge Harrington’s court is a collaboration between University of Arizona English majors and law students called Simpla Phi Lex. The two groups worked together to create an easy-to-use workflow around common court forms and also provide easy-to-understand explanations and form language.

This took us to the first of two sessions with our assigned breakout groups. I was in one of the two groups focused on access solutions for the underserved, and in our first session we were tasked with identifying the challenges that stand in the way of providing better access to justice, and then prioritizing our ideas to come up with the top five challenges. When we came back together later in the day, we took those top five challenges and brainstormed together to offer some possible solutions. Based on what came out of our group alone, there are definitely some potential areas for law librarians to partner and collaborate with the ABA as these solutions take more shape and become a reality.

In between our two breakout sessions, we enjoyed lunch and another keynote presentation, this time from author and legal consultant Richard Susskind, who focused on how technology can make the legal process quicker, cheaper, and better. Susskind spent quite some time describing the recently launched Online Dispute Resolution project he developed for the ODR Advisory Group of the Civil Justice Council. Echoing what others had already shared, Susskind described the ways in which our legal system is outdated and urged us to embrace technology from a customer’s perspective. His PowerPoint slide that got the most laughs? The one that said, “It is not the purpose of the law to provide a living for lawyers.”

Following lunch, there was another series of TED-style talks, this time focused on real-world examples of programs that are bridging the justice gap. As with the mini-presentations in the morning, the presenters shared a plethora of innovative programs and inspirational stories. The common denominator among all the programs is that these individuals saw a problem, challenge, or deficit and came up with a creative, proactive, and often no- or low-cost solution.

• In Oregon, Judge Aiken created a re-entry program that employs wearable technology that can track whether individuals show up for appointments and other court-required activities. The program has resulted in a 16 percent decrease in recidivism, and Aiken estimates that the 160 re-entry court graduates have saved Oregon over $1.6 million. “We don’t take services away when they fail,” Aiken said. “We increase them.” Her motto for the program: truth, transparency, trust, and trying.

• Judge White started her talk by sharing some startling statistics: 1 in 75 Louisianans is incarcerated, twice the national average. “Louisiana can’t arrest and incarcerate our way out of this problem,” she said. White launched a re-entry program that matches felons sentenced to terms of 10 years or less with prisoners serving life terms, the latter acting as teachers of professional trades as well as social, spiritual, and personal mentors. Judge White monitors the former inmates for five years after their release from prison and requires monthly visits to her office to check on their progress. She screened a video of the program for the audience and, when the video ended, concluded her talk with a “mic drop” moment, leaving us with the following as she prepared to exit the stage: “This program receives no funding and costs the taxpayers nothing.”

• Other inspiring ideas included Suffolk’s new Accelerator-to-Practice program, the legal entrepreneur incubation program at the Chicago Bar Foundation, and the ODR model that Modria is currently providing.

The day concluded with a reception at the Stanford Faculty Club, where attendees were encouraged to learn more about the novel approaches to access to justice being taken by the exhibitors in the Innovators Showcase. At dinner we were treated to an emotional and inspiring speech from NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund President and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill, fresh off her appearance on Face the Nation as part of the panel “Searching for Solutions in Baltimore.” Ifill called on lawyers to help preserve democracy and fix a broken legal system, stating that “whether we deserve it or not, people look to lawyers to be leaders.”

Monday took us into the home stretch, starting with a hot breakfast and more speakers from both inside and outside the legal profession sharing their advice and insight, kicking off with ABA President Hubbard in conversation with Richard Barton, founder of Expedia, Zillow, and most recently, Glassdoor. Barton told the audience that he sees “an information asymmetry” between the consumer and the services being provided. He urged lawyers to give “power to the people to bridge the information gap,” inciting a sense of urgency by adding that “transparency is an efficiency generator.”

What followed was a stellar panel, moderated by Monica Bay, now a fellow at CodeX at Stanford, focusing on innovations from within the legal sphere. One of the most intriguing presentations came from Margaret Hagan, a fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession and lecturer at the Stanford Institute of Design, who is leveraging both her law and design school education to devise better ways to provide access to legal services in a mobile environment. She is taking the design process, which is focused on how to generate new solutions, and applying it to law. If we could get Hagan together in a room with legal hackers and law librarians, I can only imagine the kinds of platforms, apps, and portals we could develop.

The morning concluded with a presentation by Renee Knake, professor of legal ethics at Michigan State University College of Law and the official reporter for the ABA Commission, who took all the notes and flip chart pages generated by the 10 breakout groups the day before and condensed them into a series of slides, essentially creating a wish list for the future. The list included a wide variety of suggestions, ranging from permanently altering the law school model, establishing the right to counsel in civil cases (“Civil Gideon”), allowing non-lawyer ownership of law firms, co-location as a means to provide legal services and resources, and the establishment of ABA Technology Innovation Grants, just to name a few.

What followed were comments from a reaction panel moderated by legal consultant and analyst Jordan Furlong. Stanford’s Deborah Rhode stated that “we must open up the regulatory process and change the rules that prevent effective collaboration across disciplines.” Lisa Foster, director of the DOJ’s Access to Justice Initiative, called for each state to develop its own legal help portal, where users could post a legal problem or question and get directed to potential answers. “It’s feasible,” said Foster, “we just haven’t done it.”

The final remarks of the Summit came from Stanford University President John Hennessy and ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services Chair Judy Perry Martinez. President Hennessy reminded the audience that we can’t solve our current problems with the same thinking used to create them. Martinez, who had earlier stated that “access to affordable legal services…has been [something] that our profession has struggled with…[and] we have not been able to make justice for all a reality,” summed up the takeaways from the event in this hopeful remark: “We have to make a difference, and the time to make it is now.” Or, put in a slightly different way by ABA President Hubbard earlier that morning, “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you become part of the menu.”

Now, the hard work really begins, with the Commission taking all the inspiration and information from the Summit and creating and prioritizing action items to implement change in the legal profession. Judging from what I experienced in my breakout session and the reports from the other breakout groups, there are definitely possibilities for AALL to partner with the ABA on some of these newly identified opportunities to provide better access to justice.

For additional coverage of the ABA National Summit on Innovation in Legal Services, you can also take a look at the following articles, blog posts, and Twitter roundups:

• Summit on Legal Innovation in Legal Services Gets Underway in Silicon Valley
• True Innovation in the Legal Industry Requires Outside Views and Thinking, Summit Speakers Say
• Legal Innovation Summit Attendees Are Long on Ideas But Short in Data
• How a Mexican Kid from the Ghetto Winds Up Hanging with Elite Legal Minds
• The ABA Turns Up the Heat on Legal Service Innovation
• New Law Strategies Needed to Expand Services to the Poor
• ABA on Innovation: Blue Skies Ahead or Pie in the Sky?
• ABA National Summit on Innovation in Legal Services Crowdsourced Coverage (Storify)

[NOTE: A version of this summary was originally posted on the AALL Spectrum Blog.]

It’s conference season again for many of us. I get to go to Chicago next week for the P3 Conference and then to Philadelphia in July for AALL. If I get really lucky, I’ll sneak in to the ILTA conference in Las Vegas in late August. I enjoy catching up with peers and friends, and attending the sessions to listen to speakers discuss hot topics, trends within the industry, and innovations that will revolutionize the way we provide services. That being said, I want everyone to take out a phrase that has been a trusty standby since 2008.  That phrase, of course, is “recent economic downturn.”

You all know how it is used to introduce change:

“Since the recent economic downturn, law firms have significantly reduced / restructured / altered (yada, yada, yada) the way it does business.”

This phrase isn’t the first of its kind, nor will it be the last. Remember such similar introductory phrases as:

  • Since the collapse of Brobeck/Howrey/Dewey… 
  • Since 9/11
  • Since the Dot Com bubble
  • Since the collapse of the Soviet Union
  • Since the S&L crisis
  • Since the oil bust (insert relevant decade)
  • Since the OPEC embargo
  • Since the Great Depression
  • Since Noah landed the Ark
  • and so on…

I know we are all still feeling the effects of the financial industry failures of 2008 and 2009, but I think it is time to preface our reasons for changing how we conduct business on something other than subprime mortgage loan. This week, I’m starting to use “Since the Houston floods of 2015…”.

I am all for leveraging a bad situation to help change bad or outdated behavior. As Rahm Emanual, and other politicians are fond of saying, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.” The problem with “recent economic downturn” is that it has run its course. It doesn’t have the punch it had five years ago, and I have started seeing smirks and eye-rolling whenever a speaker starts a discussion with that phrase. (Okay… maybe it’s just me that smirks and rolls my eyes.)

So all of you presenters out there who are writing your discussion points and filling in the bullet points of your PowerPoint slides, get out your red pens and cross off the phrase “recent economic downturn.” Find something a little fresher to put in its place. We’ll all be better for it.

In the meantime, I’ll start drafting next year’s blog post for outdated phrases. I think I’ll start with such things as “iPads” and “Bespoke.”