David Whelan, the Director of Legal Information & the Great Library Society of Ontario, discusses his recent article “The No Legal Research Provider Landscape,” and how lawyers, law librarians, and the legal industry looks at legal information services. Do you need to have multiple resources like Westlaw, LexisNexis, Bloomberg or others, or can
Over the weekend, I had a nice conversation with some of my peers in other law firm departments (Marketing, IT, and other administration leaders), about the American Association of Law Libraries’ (AALL) letter to Lexis, asking that Lexis cease their current sales requirement of tying Lexis Advance to non-related materials, including Law360, Lex Machina, print material, and other products. I think my colleague, Jean O’Grady did a great job covering this topic in her blog post, so I won’t re-hash the specifics of the letter. However, it is definitely an issue which those outside the law firm libraries should take notice, and be very concerned. This is something that affects the entire law firm, not just the law librarians.
Continue Reading Why Lexis’ Sales Approach Should Concern Law Firm Management and Leadership
I don’t think I am telling anyone something new when I say that the relationship between legal information providers (vendors) and legal information professionals (law librarians) are at all-time lows. A once vibrant and symbiotic relationship has become one of simple buyer and seller. This has been somewhat of a slow burn evolution as vendor consolidation began in the late 1990s with the West Publishing transition into Thomson West (then eventually into Thomson Reuters), the acquisition of LexisNexis by Reed Elsevier, CCH and Aspen into Wolters Kluwer, and BNA absorbed into Bloomberg. On the librarian side, there is the seemingly reduced influence of law students on vendor products, much lower budgets from government law libraries, the “single provider” movement from law firms, and the idea that law firms are somehow still suffering from the great recession, despite most big firms posting sky-high record profits and breaking the $3 billion revenue barrier.
Continue Reading Can Law Librarian / Vendors Relations Ever Be a Win-Win Relationship Again?
I just finished renewing a vendor contract over the past couple of weeks and the experience left a bitter taste in my mouth. Sudden changes in how the product is structured caused our existing “all-in” contract to suddenly become an “almost all-in” contract. It wasn’t so much that I was surprised at how it went
I wanted to use this platform as a way to share our experiences on the new mandatory eFiling system for Texas Civil Courts. I have talked with many librarians around Texas over the past few weeks and have found many of us have been tasked with preparing our firms for the new mandate, and working
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
I’m going to make this post short and sweet. American Lawyer Media (ALM), stop acting like this is 2002 and quit with the Pop-Up Ads on your site. There is a good reason why Internet Explorer created a Pop-Up blocker in 2004!!
Nina Platt reminded me this morning of just how annoying and counter-productive these
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| Image [cc] Cacau & Xande |
A friend of mine pointed me to an article from Quidlibet Research, Inc.’s, Nina Cunningham, entitled “Leveraging the Assets of the Law Library.” I read it… then I read it again… then I read it again. Each time finding different things to agree, and disagree with. I
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| Image [cc] jronaldlee |
Tracy Thompson-Pryzlucki sent the following letter to AALL members this morning to explain why she is supporting the changes in AALL Bylaws (PDF) that expand the definition of Active AALL members. I asked Tracy if I could repost her letter on 3 Geeks as a continuation of the conversation started
