While I was in Seattle at the 2013 AALL Conference, I had a chance to listen to, and briefly talk to Casey Flaherty of Kia Motors America, Inc. As many of you have read recently, Casey is making waves by giving his outside counsel some basic skills tests on how long it takes them
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| Richard and Maya Hsu of The One Page Blog |
“Today, with the help of my thirteen year old daughter…”
This is how my former colleague, Richard Hsu, now a partner at Shearman & Sterling starts his “HsuTube” videos on complex transactional legal concepts. We’ve covered Richard before when he and I both worked
Dan: Recently a number of firms have announced reductions in their secretarial ranks as a means of improving their secretary ratios – which is to say 5:1 is the new 4:1. For those not familiar with this stat – it means that the new goal is 5 timekeepers for every 1 secretary. This approach makes
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| Image [cc] the|G|™ |
A friend from another firm recently told me a story that made me think about the way law firms are structured, the resources available, and whether or not attorneys actually take advantage of those resources. The story goes something like this:
A Practice Group Leader and a few other partners sat down
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| Image [cc] fraggy |
We live in a time where most people are not only doing their job, but they are also doing the job of someone that retired, got laid off, left and that position was never filled. Many of us talk about this as “the other hat that I wear at work.” Some would
[Editor’s Note: Steve Lastres asked if I could repost this information on the Law Library Society of Washington DC (LLSDC) and the Private Law Libraries’ (PLL) “Showcase: Empowering the Next Generation of Law Firms.” The original post was on the On Firmer Ground Blog, which should be in your RSS Reader, and was
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| Image [cc] Seattle University Law Library |
We’ve discussed the idea of embedded library researchers on this blog in the past, but as I was having a conversation on alternative ways of promoting the value of library and research services in a firm yesterday, I started wondering if the idea of the “embedded librarian” could be
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| Image [cc] mastermaq |
Yesterday, the Special Libraries Association, Competitive Intelligence Division hosted a free webinar on how to give a Pecha Kucha (PK) presentation. The webinar, sponsored by AuroraWDC, was entitled: Pecha Kucha: Learning the PK Presentation Method to Maximize PowerPoint Effectiveness and can be viewed here for those that missed it.
The presentations
One of the trends that I’ve seen in the past 15 years or so of legal research is that the lawyer requesting the research has become more and more self-reliant. For legal research specialists, this is a mixed blessing at times. In many cases, it means that the lawyer has completed a major portion of
As many of us gear up for a smaller Summer Associate program, we find that we need to tweak some of the basic skills (or completely teach them) for many of those Associates. I hear a lot of griping at conferences about the skills that law students have when they are fresh out of their