There has been a lot of discussion in Law Library Land lately about the use of the term “Librarian” to describe the staff that curates and researches in a private law library. The discussion, which has taken place in both blogs (Here is an excellent post) and on AALL listservs, has been lively and interesting. 

As a brand, the term is unparallelled in its universal recognition.  However, the connotations associated with the term may not be of a dynamic and forward-thinking professional. Just try telling someone you’re a librarian at a social function and watch their eyes immediately glaze over from boredom. 

As proud as I am of being a Librarian (note the capitalized first letter of the word), I am at heart pragmatic when it comes to my career and have no problem with labels like Research Specialist, Research Analyst, Information Manager, Technical Services Specialist, Director of Information Services or Lord Emperor of Research (cue the Darth Vader music).   My self-worth isn’t tied to a label. I’m sure that the Librarians of Ancient Babylon were not called Librarians.   Labels and professions evolve over time and, just as in Darwinian evolution,  those who can adapt will succeed and those who can’t will be left behind.  In the end, I will do what I need to in order to succeed. How successful I am is shown by being the go-to person people turn to when they need assistance.  A label doesn’t affect that one way or another. 

Some of us have noticed a vacuum in the space where the prolific Law Librarian Blog once stood. Anyone that has been in the law librarian profession, and hasn’t lived under a rock, is familiar with the posts that come mulitple times a day from Joe Hodnicki and Mark Giangrande (well, mostly Hodnicki). The blog went dark after the September 3rd post of The (Un)Availability of Tribal Law. I thought this was a pretty strange ending for the blog that is known for not holding back the punches when it comes to legal publishing vendors, or AALL Board Members (myself included.) Never fear, it just seems to be an offshoot from the Law Professor Blogs Network change in ownership when Joe Hodnicki sold his share of the LPB to Paul L. Caron.

Starting October 1st, Hodnicki and Giangrande move over to the blog “Law Librarians” with the subtitle “Thinking Out Loud in the Blogosphere.”

I’m sure the post entitled “Test” is simply just a test… if fact, I’m pretty sure that we’ll see some of the same ole’ Joe firing off posts on a daily basis starting tomorrow.

Welcome back Joe!!

“Better Call Saul!”

I’m watching the Breaking Bad marathon last night when a commercial comes on mentioning a familiar company. Although I couldn’t find the 30 second spot telling me to go to BringAClaim.com, I did find the 2 minute video from the firm behind Bring A Claim, San Antonio based, Watts Guerra, LLP, that describes the settlement agreement that entitles, “more than 100 million Americans who could be entitled to statutory damages of $100 to $1000 for each proven willful violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.”

It seems that Lexis wasn’t just having a problem with this issue, but according to KrebsOnSecurity, was hacked by a serious cyber criminal organization, along with Dun & Bradstreet, and Kroll Background America, Inc., where millions of social security numbers and business information were stolen and sold. The KrebsOnSecurity report, based on a seven month long investigation, reports that the Lexis breach seems to have been one where someone on the inside installed a program called NBC.exe in order to gain access to the system and download the personal data.

Perhaps the most alarming thing that Krebs’ reports is that there are over a thousand “customers” (AKA, Bad Guys) going through the hacked data:

The database shows that the site’s 1,300 customers have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars looking up SSNs, birthdays, drivers license records, and obtaining unauthorized credit and background reports on more than four million Americans.

Seems that Walter White wasn’t the only one having a bad year. But, remember, you may be entitled to damages, so you better call Saul… er, Watts Guerra.

The race for state bar partnerships between Casemaker and Fastcase took another step toward Fastcase this morning. New York, which has been somewhat of a holdout on the free access to legal research benefit, is partnering with Fastcase to provide its members with free access to the product via the Bar’s website, www.nysba.org. I believe this brings Fastcase up to 25 state bar associations, and puts the momentum squarely on Fastcase’s side.

The formal announcement will go out in a few minutes from Fastcase and NYSBA.

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 25, 2013
New York State Bar Association Partners With Fastcase
to Provide Free Access to Legal Research Library
Access to Smarter Legal Research Tools Now Available for State Bar Members at No Cost
Washington, DC (September 25, 2013) – The New York State Bar Association and legal publisher Fastcase today announced a partnership to provide 76,000 members of the association with free access to the New York libraries in Fastcase’s legal research system.
The nation’s largest voluntary state bar association is offering access to online legal research for its members in New York, 49 other states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and 113 countries.
Beginning this week, members will gain free access to Fastcase’s New York libraries by logging on to www.nysba.org, going to Practice Resources and clicking on Fastcase. The free benefit includes judicial opinions from New York State courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court. It also offers access to New York State Consolidated Laws; New York Codes, Rules and Regulations; and the New York Constitution. 
As part of the benefit, members may subscribe to the nationwide Fastcase premium subscription for $195 per member per year—which normally costs $995 per year, a discount of $800. In addition, a specially tailored benefit will help new attorney members gain professional and financial footing during their first two years of practice. They qualify for free access to Fastcase’s entire federal and 50-state library, which will be available to them in October.
“We are pleased to provide the Fastcase online legal research library as a benefit to our members,” said New York State Bar Association President David M. Schraver of Rochester (Nixon Peabody). “The legal community has been conducting legal research online for decades. Now we are able to bring our members unlimited access to one of the largest law libraries in the world as a member benefit.”
This member benefit provides NYSBA members with access to one of the largest law libraries in the world, training webinars and tutorials, and free reference assistance. The member benefit is unlimited – with no restrictions on time or number of transactions, unlimited printing, unlimited reference assistance and unlimited customer service included for free.
“This is the new normal, when New York firms are absorbing their legal research costs as overhead, and firms of all sizes are looking to add a nonbillable ‘house account’ for legal research,” said Fastcase President Phil Rosenthal. “This partnership makes the NYSBA and Fastcase a better value than ever for New York firms, because they can reduce the costs of legal research and they can do so with the world’s smartest legal research tools.”  
Over the last few years, 24 state bar associations and scores of the nation’s largest law firms have subscribed to Fastcase, which now has more than 600,000 subscribers.
Fastcase has gained very strong momentum in the legal research market and continues to challenge traditional legal publishers. Fastcase was voted #1 in Law Technology News’s inaugural Customer Satisfaction Survey, finishing first in 7 out of 10 categories over traditional research providers Westlaw and LexisNexis. The American Association of Law Libraries named Fastcase for iPhone the 2010 New Product of the Year. In 2011, Rocket Matter named Fastcase’s apps for iPhone and iPad the Legal Productivity App of the Year, and Fastcase was named to The Best of Legal Times in multiple categories in 2012. Three times the company has been listed in the EContent 100, the most influential companies in the digital economy, alongside Google, Apple, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  And the 2013 ABA Tech Survey reports that Fastcase’s mobile apps are by far the most popular app for lawyers, more popular than all other legal research apps combined.
“When bar associations subscribe to legal research for their members at a volume discount, everyone wins,” said Rosenthal. “One of the most valuable bar memberships in the country just got better.”
About the New York State Bar Association
The New York State Bar Association, with 76,000 members, is the largest voluntary state bar association in the country. The organization has been serving the legal profession and the community since it was founded in 1876. To learn more about the NYSBA, visit www.nysba.org.
About Fastcase
As the smarter alternative for legal research, Fastcase democratizes the law, making it more accessible to more people. Using patented software that combines the best of legal research with the best of Web search, Fastcase helps busy users sift through the clutter, ranking the best cases first and enabling the re-sorting of results to find answers fast. Founded in 1999, Fastcase has more than 600,000 subscribers from around the world. Fastcase is an American company based in Washington, D.C. For more information, follow Fastcase on Twitter at @Fastcase or visit www.fastcase.com.

###
Media Contacts:
For Fastcase:
Jennifer Brand 202.731.2114
jbrand@brandsolutionsgroup.com
For the NYSBA:
Lise Bang-Jensen
518-487-5530
Lbang-jensen@nysba.org

It was 1987 and I was in my High School Freshman English class. We were asked to pick a partner and jointly write a paper on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
Washington Irving’s tale of a headless horseman who terrorizes a small
New England town. The assignment was to “be descriptive”.  The teacher
wanted as many adjectives and adverbs as we could use to describe the
story, the characters, and the setting.  The kid sitting next to me scooted his desk next to mine and we started
writing. Everyone else turned in a page or two, but we wrote eight or
nine pages and still probably had fewer sentences than any other team. I
bet that was the worst and the most painstakingly descriptive paper ever written on the subject, but we got an A.

I
was reminded of that incident recently when a colleague forwarded a
vendor’s email.  The email was so full of jargon as to be comical. 

“…we are a global customized research solutions provider. Since 2003, we have worked with a number of law firms in US
and Europe – supporting decision makers tasked with responsibility for their firm’s growth – with quick and insightful research on key initiatives relating to business development, client
retention or strategy execution.
“Our offshore research model
with
350+ analysts based in India – pioneered by McKinsey and now used by
many professional services firms
– allows us to cost-effectively service both urgent or
quick turnaround research requests as well as in-depth
market or competitor intelligence assessments.
[Our company] is a knowledge partner of choice to several Fortune 1000
companies and SMBs in
the US, Canada & Europe. We have executed
research assignments in more than 80 sub-sectors entailing analysis of
market and competition dynamics in 50+ countries, using a judicious
blend of secondary data sources and primary
interviews with industry stakeholders.”

I know what all of the words mean, but…

Why
do people write this way? It’s not easy to read or understand. It
doesn’t make you or your company sound more impressive. If your
marketing materials read like my freshman English paper, I would really
hate to see what your research looks like.  Try this…
“…we are a global [ ] research [ ] provider. Since 2003, we
have worked with a number of law firms in US and Europe – supporting [people with] responsibility for their firm’s growth – with [research] relating to business development, client retention or strategy execution.
“Our [business
model,] with 350+
analysts based in India – [DELETED Irrelevant] – allows us to [ ] service [] urgent [DELETED
Redundant] research requests as well as [ ] market [and] competitor [ ] assessments. [Our company] is a [vendor] of choice to several Fortune 1000 companies and SMBs in
the US, Canada & Europe. We have [helped
companies] in
more than 80 [industries] in 50+ countries, using [ ] secondary data sources and primary interviews with [people in each industry].”

Now, I’m not saying that’s the greatest copy ever written, but at least I can understand it without rereading it four times.

It has been said that those who can’t do teach and those who can’t teach criticize.  I have always aspired to be a literary critic and Mitchell Kowalski has finally given me that opportunity in Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century. To my great adolescent joy, there is much to criticize in this book; from the title before the colon, which I feel promises something very different than the book delivers (though the title after the colon is spot on); to the multi-faceted and yet, somehow still stubbornly two dimensional characters; to the long monologue of new-wave legal philosophy punctuated by descriptions of lunch utensil management. However, these criticisms tell you infinitely more about my literary snobbery than they do about the value of this remarkable little book. Kowalski may not have delivered unto the legal world a literary masterpiece, but he has given us something much more valuable and useful, a destination. 

The book presents Bowen, Fong, & Chandri (BFC), a new kind of law firm, through the eyes of three people with three very different perspectives: Maria, General Counsel of a large corporation evaluating outside counsel; Mark, a new lateral attorney going through the BFC onboarding process; and Kim, a new member of the BFC independent Board of Directors attending her first meeting. The only character in all three parts of the book is Sylvester Bowen, CEO of BFC. Bowen is Kowalski’s version of Howard Roark, an idealist fighting against tradition and conformity. Unlike Roark, Bowen is remarkably successful in his quest and has managed to build a firm that any of us who struggle with the conservative and backward-looking nature of law firms would jump at the chance to work for. BFC is what Google would be if they practiced law. In fact, BFC is actually the main character in the book. Bowen is merely there to give the firm a face and a voice.

Primarily through Bowen’s philosophizing, we learn all about BFC’s unique approach to practicing law.  They don’t hire students or junior attorneys. They don’t have Partners. They don’t bill by the hour. They use Project Management extensively. They evaluate and compensate attorneys based on how they contribute to Knowledge Management. They run their own LPO out of India. Most employees work from an open and modern satellite office in a converted warehouse outside of the city center, while their smaller office downtown consists of conference rooms and temporary hoteling spaces. They use SaaS solutions exclusively. They provide only temporary and emergency technology, otherwise attorneys are given an allowance to purchase their own. They have no IT staff. Each of these points, and many more, are explained and justified throughout the book in a style that is emphatic, but never quite crosses the line into preachy.

I suspect that anyone who has been paying attention to the trials and tribulations of the legal services business over the last few years, on this blog and elsewhere, will find very few unfamiliar ideas in this book. But Kowalski has managed to do something that I haven’t seen anywhere else.  He has put all of the pieces together in a way that creates a convincing and compelling picture of what a law firm could be.

There’s a joke about a tourist in Ireland asking directions from a local farmer.  The farmer’s response is “Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” I’m afraid that Avoiding Extinction will do little to help existing BigLaw firms avoid extinction. The amount of change required to morph a typical BigLaw firm into BFC is probably beyond the capacity of any BigLaw firm to actually change. But Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century provides a possible destination for any firms willing to undertake the difficult journey, or more likely, for any new firm rising from the ashes of those that fail along the way.

Why Did Etisalat Block Flickr
Image [cc] Za3tOoOr!

Nothing really irritates a researcher more than attempting to get to a website only to find that it has been blocked by your network software. In fact, many of you may find that social media sites are closed off at work because someone decided that you’ll spend your time uploading cat videos instead of your real job. Hey!! Cat videos are a fun way to relieve stress, and it really doesn’t take that long to upload. Sorry… got off topic there. Back to the blocked websites.

Most of the time you can call your IT Department and have them exclude you from the ‘blocked’ list (and I highly suggest that you do this first!), but there may be times where you just need to quickly get to the site and get the information. It’s really easy, and it kind of shows that blocking websites might be a lesson in futility. The key is using translator sites, such as Bing Translator or Google Translate as a proxy. Here’s the simple instructions. If you want more information, you can view this Reddit thread, provided that IT hasn’t blocked Reddit.

Steps:

  1. Open translator: (I’ve found Bing to be a bit easier, but both work.)
  2. Enter the Blocked URL in the translate box
  3. Click on the Translate button
  4. Voilà, the translator is feeding the page through and is bypassing your web blocker.

Note: Sites that are not supported by the translator (e.g., Netflix, Spotify, or secured websites) will not work with this method. I’ve found a few sites, like Online-Translator that work around some of these issues (by telling it to translate from German to English), but nothing is 100%.

Here’s a good video that walks through the process. Again, this isn’t 100% perfect, but I’ve found it to be pretty helpful when I was in a bind and needed to get to a blocked website… strictly for research purposes, of course.

IMGP1885 [2011-12-13]
Image [cc] JAM Project

We live in what is referred to as “The Information Age”, but I think that we may have shifted into a new phase that might be called “The Collaboration Age.” There was a very interesting article from The Business Insider a few weeks ago that discussed an Indian Intern’s impression of life in America, and one of the ‘weirdest’ things he found about the culture here is that people are highly collaborative. He talked about how students collaborate and the goals of the collaboration wasn’t to simply complete a project, but it was rather to use collaboration as a way to share, teach, train, and learn until everyone “got it.” This was in an environment (John Hopkins University) that a few decades ago was know for being so competitive that students would hide important books in the library in order to gain a competitive edge over other students. In addition to the need to collaborate, he notices that the students take an ethical approach to the collaboration, and a desire to accomplish something that they will be proud to attach their name to. Therefore, actions that once may have been seen as “cheating”, are now seen as valuable collaborative efforts that help everyone achieve the desired goals. When you step back and think about it, it is really a monumental shift in culture.

There was one part that this intern mentioned that is probably true not only of the assignments within the university setting, but also found in today’s professional work environment. Assignments are extremely difficult, complicated, and complex. Attempting to complete a project on your own is no longer the best option. Whether it is completing an assignment in school for a professor, or answering legal issues for a client, the questions are difficult, and the process of getting to the answers/solutions are complex. Today’s professional workers need to collaborate. We see it in our personal lives, and it is making huge inroads into our professional lives as well.

So that was my long introduction to this week’s Elephant Post answers to what tools do you use to collaborate at your work. There are some interesting answers that range from very old-school tools to some of the new resources available. Enjoy the answers, and think about your work environment and ways that you currently collaborate, and ways that collaboration can be improved.

Steve

We use Jabber from Cisco as an instant messaging, and easy way to pass files to each other. It is a great informal method of communications that is much faster than email, and it also connects to our phone and Outlook calenders so we can tell when others are in a meeting, or on the phone. It is very informal, so it makes it easy to ask questions without feeling like you are filling up someones email. It also allows you to chat with multiple people at once.

Anonymous

I use Box in my law firm. I use it to access my documents from my mobile device when I am away from my office. I also use it since it allows me to easily collaborate with my clients and coworkers easily. It eliminates the need to send multiple emails when working on a legal document, and I can just add a collaborator and we can work on the document by adding comments and tasks in one string of communication. Lastly, I like how I have control and visibility over my documents. I can see when and by whom my documents have been viewed and downloaded, and also password protect access to my documents.

James

We use Confluence quite a lot to facilitate wikis (team collaboration spaces as we prefer to call them) and blogs to some extent. We’ve also looked at using Yammer to encourage teams to collaborate and communicate with each other.

David Glenn

Trello

Anon

SharePoint

Bert Gregory

Microsoft SkyDrive primarily. Box.com as secondary. It used to be Google Drive until they made their public statement that nobody should expect privacy with their services. Our business has 36 employees.

Chad Burton

With our team, we use Box (document management), Clio (internal client matter communications and other matter-specific collaboration) and Yammer (for general idea sharing unrelated to client matters and as our virtual water cooler). Oh, and there is always the dreaded email (Google Apps for Business). We use these platforms because they all integrate.

Anonymous

We are using MS Lync in our firm quite often and everyone seems to like it. We are able to have quick just-in-time chats with one person or multiple people. We have are using it for at your desk video conferences. Right now it is just 1-1 video conversations, but may expand to multiple parties. People are still getting used to the video thing, but it is a good way to connect over long distances. We also use Lync to share documents, charts, web pages, etc…, for comparison and review.

Ketan

  • Google Docs (paid to increase security, despite NSA monitoring)
  • Shared and layered calendars (cross platform)
  • Wunderlist
  • Google Hangouts for video chats
  • Google surveys/forms!

Previously:

  • Yammer
  • Skype messaging

Not too long ago, Jordan Furlong wrote a good post on what law firms sell. Normally I would go all “Dan Aykroyd” on him, but not this time. His post got me thinking about the broader question of what law firms sell in terms of product offerings. And here’s the catch: They don’t know what they sell.

And now a car analogy …

If Ford acted like a law firm, they would know they sell automobiles. They would probably know they sell some volume of sedans, SUVs, trucks, coupes, etc. But beyond that, they would not know how many of each product they sold. Under SUVs they would not know how many Explorers versus Escapes versus Expeditions were sold. Oh, and in the SUV category there would be some sedans, trucks and coupes included.

Of course if Ford acted in such a fashion, they MIGHT know they sell automobiles

Law firms know what they sell only at the high level because that is all they have needed to know until recently. Although most firms have some taxonomy of matter types, they are rarely used effectively. For most firms, the work gets a high level categorization based on the billing partner’s practice designation. This means transactional work can be tagged as litigation if the billing partner is a litigator. The choice of matter type when it is an option, is too often made by a secretary. These well-intentioned secretaries picked the most convenient type or the one least likely to get anyone’s attention. Therefore when someone wants to see “Single Plaintiff Employment” cases, the only way to find such a list is manually – which means it never happens.

This is obviously an opportunity for Knowledge Management (KM) to shine. But I predict the usual challenges for KMers who tackle this problem. First – a firm will appoint a committee to develop a ‘comprehensive’ list of matter types. The Committee will want to make sure every possible matter type makes it on the list, since Fred’s Admiralty practice is just as important as the rest of the firms’ commercial litigation practice. The result will be a long list of never-used matter types … and we’re back to where we started.

My advice: Firms need to know what they sell, down to a reasonable product level. Finding that reasonable product level is a task for marketing and leadership and then KM can be the engine to continually support this effort. Once firms know the true volume and margins on each of their product offerings, then they will know where to focus their market efforts and product resources.

Let me shake your hand
Image [cc] Nathan Rupert

At any given moment, I may have one, two, three, four, or more collaboration tools at my disposal that allows me to nearly instantaneously communicate with my friends, peers, co-workers, and staff. Be it the old fashion telephone (although mine has video build in… ’cause I’m special like that), or email, or Instant Messaging, or Twitter, or Facebook, or even getting up off my duff an walking next door to actually verbally communicate face-to-face, there are tons of ways to communicate.

I’m kind of a big fan of the Private Facebook Groups, and the flexibility that it gives me to send out actual business related questions to a set of peers, or to send out classic viral cat videos to the same group. It can be formal, but it tends to be very informal. It is extremely convenient, and we really hope that it remains behind a privacy fence (although, I think we unofficially know not to say anything that would get us into too much trouble if that fence were to fall down.)

So this week’s Elephant Post question is this:

What Collaboration Tools Do You Use?

Tell us about some of the interesting resources you use, including any non-traditional tools, or maybe some resources that are so old-fashioned, they are actually new again!! I’ll pull these together and post all of the answers on Friday. Please take a moment and either fill out the embeded form below, or email me (xlambert at gmail dot com). You can see what others have answered by going here.

 

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