• 100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You've Never Heard Of. This site links to a long list of reference sites. You'll find the typical links to dictionaries and quotation references, but you'll also find resources that cover prescriptions and illnesses, technology concepts, and pop culture. (Thanks to Kevin Wenzel for passing this along.)
• Texans on Justice. Check out the submissions in the State Bar of Texas's YouTube video contest. Participants were asked to create videos on the theme "Texans capturing the promise of justice for all."
• Recent Studies on Pro Bono Practice in the US. The Legal Ethics Forum summarizes a Law & Society conference panel on pro bono.
• Sources for Congressional Voting Records. Idealware has posted links to sources for congressional voting records to make your research a bit easier.
• Public Interest Legal Technology Resources. The ABA Site-tation posted descriptions of the major legal aid technology resources and players.  - K

"Legal Services of Northern California has launched the Findability Project, a TIG-funded initiative to demonstrate how a Google Search Appliance, integrated with a SharePoint Server, can be used as a core technology for implementing enterprise-level search, and as the basic building block of an organization-wide knowledge-content system."

To keep up-to-date with the project be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed here. For more background, go here. We'll be following this project closely, and look forward to hearing from others who are implementing internal knowledge management and content sharing platforms at their organizations. (For example, using a wiki to share documents with a funder prior to a site visit.) -M

We broke the 14 minute interview with Miller in half, into two video clips:

Arthur Miller (Part 1): Legal research and writing training at law schools

Arthur Miller (Part 2): The "starting point" for legal research and use of technology for it

We welcome your comments to Arthur Miller's remarks.

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The "Partnership and Solutions for Preparing Job-Ready Attorneys" white paper addresses the key issues in the discussion surrounding the gap between desired and actual legal research skills among law students and new associates.

The discussion also was previewed in a Westcast podcast produced last week, a 20-minute discussion that featured Monice Kaczorowski, Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP; Karl Gruben, St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami; and Lezlie Bartz and Anne Ellis from West.

The new white paper on legal research builds on the discussion sparked by the "Research Skills for Lawyers and Law Students," white paper produced by West last year.

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The challenge this poses to law firms, law schools and legal information providers took center stage on Saturday, July 12 here at AALL in Portland at the West town hall meeting, "Partnership & Solutions for Preparing Job-Ready Attorneys."

The town hall, moderated by Karl Gruben from the St. Thomas University School of Law in Florida, featured a blue-ribbon panel of academic and law firm librarians who explored the challenge law schools face in squeezing research and writing coursework into an already-packed class schedule.

Gruben noted that research accounts for only one percent of law school coursework; this was reinforced by law professor Arthur Miller, who in pre-recorded video remarks decried the gap between what's taught and what's needed in that first job.

Research and writing, Miller said in the video, are "crowded out", and don't receive the focus and seriousness they should be afforded in law school.

The Town Hall also looked at a unique partnership between West and the law firm Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP that is providing new associates with comprehensive legal research training, including when and how to use print and online resources most effectively.

Monice Kaczorowski, head of Neal Gerber's competitive intelligence unit and law firm litigation partner Chris Mickus said this training has helped new Neal Gerber associates more efficiently use all of the firm's research materials. There needs to be more emphasis on research "nuts and bolts", and new associates need to know how to use the library and its print resources before jumping to online databases, Mickus said.

West produced a white paper to address the key issues in the discussion in the town hall.

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"Working in the open-sourcers' favor is the fact that what lawyers do for a living is quite similar to what Google's software algorithms do with Web sites. Lawyers prepare cases by looking through old court decisions to find arguments that will help their cause. Then they rank those cases according to a well-established hierarchy. Decisions that have been cited frequently by other judges are considered more reliable than ones that nobody cites. Appeals courts rank higher than trial courts. Recent decisions trump old, stale ones. Google's servers use similar logic, ranking Web sites according to how many other sites link to them and how lofty the referring sites are in the ranking." -M [Thanks, Claudia.]

Think again.

A new Westcast podcast explores the legal research approach and skills of the so-called Google generation, as well as ongoing efforts by West and librarians in academic, government and law firm settings to improve legal research skills training.

The podcast involves Monice Kaczorowski, Director of Library Services at Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP in Chicago; Karl Gruben, Director of Law Library and Associate Professor of Law at St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami; Lezlie Bartz, vice president, Print/CD, West; and Anne Ellis, senior director, Librarian Relations, West.

They also will take up the topic at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting in Portland, Ore. this Saturday, July 12, at a town hall discussion organized by West's Librarian Relations.

The panel will explore the impact the Open Web has had on "professional search", which has relied on specialized print publications and online databases.

"We're trying to get law students and new attorneys out of the Google mentality, or hopping online without a clear understanding of what they're looking for," Kaczorowski said. "I think we're slowly making headway, but I also think it's essential that we continue to teach them how the print resources are set up so they can apply it to their online research."

What do you think? Listen to the Westcast and share your thoughts with us.

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A couple of other neat things about LexMonitor:

• You can have an RSS feed from a search. I have my feed reader check to see what pro bono and legal aid content has been posted.
• You can have your blog listed on LexMonitor if it isn't already. - K

It's the index that makes it easier to do legal research, by organizing the American system of law into topics, and then dividing those topics further to quickly lead to the most relevant cases and issues in a specific search. 

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Awards Program just selected an article about the Key Number System, written by Dan Dabney of Thomson Reuters Global Resources, as its Law Library Journal Article of the Year.

"The Universe of Thinkable Thoughts: Literary Warrant and West's Key Number System" is based on a speech Dabney gave in 2006. In the article, Dabney gives an overview of the classification system and its role in efficient legal research.

The award will officially be announced at the AALL Annual Meeting in Portland, Ore., July 12-15. (We'll be live blogging from the meeting, by the way).

The AALL Awards Program was established to publicly recognize the achievements of law librarians based on service to the profession and contributions to legal literature and materials.

Dabney, a former law librarian at several law schools and professor at UCLA, is a senior director for Thomson Reuters Global Resources, based in Zug, Switzerland. We just got his reaction to the award:

Listen to interview (1 min. - mp3)

The AALL Award is not the first time Dabney's article has gotten attention. The Out of the Jungle blog, via Jacqueline Cantwell, paid him some compliments as well, last year.

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The article states: "The results confirm the importance of performance-based factors, such as law school class ranking, in the selection process for short-term clerks.  They also highlight the considerable importance of candidate personality in the selection process.  The results also suggest a very qualified effect for letters of recommendation.  Letters may get an otherwise well-qualified applicant noticed, but there appear to be few "clerk makers" among the legal professoriate."

One of the most interesting findings is in Table 2: Duties Assigned to Law Clerks.  The most frequently assigned task to clerks is, LEGAL RESEARCH, with 99.4 percent of the respondents listing this task.

Negotiations between T-Mobile and the city are continuing behind an impenetrable iron curtain while neighborhood residents have offered to work with the cellphone company to both provide service and preserve the visual qualities of the area.

My question: Is there a way to access lawsuit filings online to help residents understand the schedule for the hearings and to understand the demands in the legal action? The case number is 107-CV-1173.

I invite and look forward to anybody with suggestions or experience in researching legal actions like this.

When I think about copyright law I think, annoying, frustrating and at a stretch, interesting.  But, romantic?!  If anyone out there in Internet-land thinks the "You" our tutor was talking about is them... well, he has news for You, it's "far less romantic than you would think."

Published by Crosby Group Consulting and commissioned by Stem Legal Web Enterprises Inc. the paper aims "to provide an objective comparison between Quickscribe and QP LegalEze".

The report is titled Quickscribe: A Comparison and Evaluation Report. It found that Quickscribe has several advantages over QP LegalEze, including:

• faster system updates than QP LegalEze;
• more competitive pricing;
• easier navigation for users;
• superior ‘alert’ technology for updates;
• more accessible customer assistance;

Download the full report (39 pgs) at:
http://www.crosbygroup.ca/pdf/whitepaperquickscribe.pdf

An executive summary (12 pgs) is available at:
http://www.crosbygroup.ca/pdf/executivesummaryquickscribe.pdf

The Lexis field restrictor atleast requires that your terms appear a minimum number of times in a document.  The following search will retrieve cases that mention the phrase "bad faith" five times: atleast5(bad faith).

For Westlaw, put your search terms in the search box and click on the Term Frequency button to the right of the search box.  A list of your search terms is displayed, each with a drop-down box listing an at least number.  Select the terms you want to restrict and the corresponding numbers.  Click here for Westlaw Term Frequency instructions and a screen shot.

At this time, you'll only find Westlaw's Term Frequency button in case law, news and secondary sources.  It's not available in statutes, administrative codes, public records or pretrial documents such as briefs or pleadings.

Bloomberg Law

I've read a bit about Bloomberg Law and spent time on their web site, but had yet to learn more about them.  The most I had learned from other librarians was that Bloomberg had created problems for them by selling directly to the partners.  To my surprise, the product looked better than I expected.  "Looked better" is probably the wrong description.  After all, the interface for Bloomberg looks a bit like a terminal emulator of old.  [Terminal emulator software allowed users to work on a UNIX based computer or other mainframe computers.  The terminals used for those computers were often called "dumb" terminals.)  To date, Bloomberg has no plans to move away from this interface to a web interface.

I guess what I meant to say was the content looked better than I expected.  It includes 100+ years of case law with practice area/jurisdiction collections of case law, statutes, regulations, and other resources, company information, real time news, court dockets, SEC documents, alerts for dockets, etc. and more.  Searching seemed both easy and powerful (I would need to test more to say that definitively), however, the results display was difficult to navigate and read.  Most likely because of the interface.  It was too much text for me and in a format I gladly gave up some time ago.

The law reports that come along with the subscription (the Bloomberg subscription is $1800/month/desktop), can be delivered electronically or in print.  Interestingly, the electronic delivery of the reports web-based in a very readable format. 

I've heard from many librarians that if you subscribe to Bloomberg, they will deliver and install terminals that provide access to their system.  That isn't exactly accurate.  Bloomberg may have been delivered that way in the past but now is software based.  You get software to install on any PC that you are licensed to use, to access Bloomberg Law.  That means that you can switch between software installed on the desktop already (e.g., Microsoft Word) and the Bloomberg service.

I spoke with two Bloomberg representatives, one who swore that librarians were his best friends and another who was a bit more forthcoming, saying that Bloomberg is contacting partners in firms and will continue to do so.    The reality is that this is a service that has some power behind it and the lawyers in your firms will want to look at it. 

My advice to law firm librarians would be, to be proactive.  Invite Bloomberg in for a visit.  Invite associates and partners to be part of the meeting where you will ask Bloomberg to demonstrate their service.  The associates need to be there to provide a reality check on whether they want to use the older interface while doing research.  After the visit, do a thorough comparison between Bloomberg, Westlaw, and Lexis, or if you're using just one of the big vendors, compare that vendor's product with Bloomberg's. 

Meet with the decision makers at your firm to present your findings or, if you can't get their time, write a memo that is brief enough that they will read it but provides the complete picture to them.  In the meeting or memo (actually, you probably want to do both), make a recommendation of which service you think the firm should use.   Be honest with yourself and with the partners.  If Bloomberg provides the best content for your firm's needs and the lawyers at the firm are willing to step back in time to do their research on an interface that has all but disappeared from use, subscribe to it.

My advice to Bloomberg would be, move to a web-based solution.  The associates and librarians starting at law firms today who will be doing the largest part of the research and be partners some day (fingers crossed), have grown up with the Internet.  The lawyers and librarians who have worked in law firms for some time, have made the switch to using the Internet for research. 

Also, many firms today want to integrate the information they get from their research service into their intranets.  Yes, they probably could do it with your data and their custom interface but my understanding from the demonstration is that Bloomberg does not offer an API or web service to do this (please correct me if I am wrong).

To summarize, I was more impressed with Bloomberg Law's content then I expected and more willing to consider subscribing than before I saw the demo, because of the content.  If I could just come to terms with the interface (I tend to shudder when thinking about terminal emulation because of the problems with it in the past), it looks to me that it could possibly be a contender.

Sure, this approach makes complete sense for most legal applications. It's essentially a technique of verifying stare decisis. Does it really make sense for research, though? I find that it's particularly annoying as a Research Assistant because my adviser is always saying, "Find me something that says X." For the most part, we're not looking for statistics; we're just looking for a similar statement so we can mark it down and make a footnote. 

Sometimes we look for statistics, but it's definitely the minority of the time. I get the impression that most legal scholars don't collect their own data. I suppose that's the difference. Scientists, in my experience, generate their own data at least as much as they rely on other peoples' data. The application was always more fun, at least for me, than combing the tomography books looking for algorithms. 

I think what it comes down to is that I learned this summer that I'm really looking forward to working for a firm and being involved in real cases. In that case, this sort of research is almost analogous to experimentation in support of a hypothesis.

While it is great to see a published paper and maybe having it influence policy, I'm looking forward to the prospect of having my research have an immediate impact on clients.

"For savvy legal researchers who have access to Westlaw or LexisNexis, or know their way around a law library, PreCYdent offers something that can supplement their research needs."

Also includes some Web 2.0 features like tagging and case ranking.

I found this comment to be particularly intriguing: "[Thomas A.] Smith is not just indexing; he is describing a natural order. 'Thus, we view ourselves as being more true to the underlying organic structures of law than the indexers are, and certainly more true than (mere) textual searching is.'”

http://www.virtualchase.com/articles/sites_for_litigators.html

Thanks to the law.com legal blog watch for tipping me off to this helpful information.

If you're interested in online resources particular to class actions, see this previous entry.

The partnership allows content to flow both ways between LII and GetLegal.com’s Legal Information Center and Legal Research Center. The Legal Information Center and Legal Research Center will be centerpieces of the new GetLegal.com website, scheduled to launch this summer. GetLegal.com and LII will share each other’s currently existing content and develop new content in both English and Spanish. New content will be available on both GetLegal.com and LII (www.law.cornell.edu).

GetLegal.com’s Legal Information Center will provide summaries of the law written with the average person in mind. Initially, the center will cover family law, accident and injury law, tax law, criminal law, immigration law, bankruptcy law, employment law and intellectual property law and will quickly expand its coverage to other legal areas. This legal information also will be available on GetLegal’s Spanish-language site, FuenteLegal.com.

GetLegal.com’s Legal Research Center will be the most comprehensive resource for free legal research available on the Internet. It will compile and organize every significant site on the web containing primary or secondary legal research material. GetLegal and LII also will provide Spanish translations of selected portions of the U.S. Code and other important primary source materials.

Later in 2008, GetLegal plans to launch its online Student Center with the participation of law schools across the country. GetLegal.com and LII will jointly develop materials for the Student Center.

About GetLegal.com: GetLegal.com provides online interactive resources for the public and the legal community. The new GetLegal.com website will launch this summer. The family of GetLegal sites includes GetLegalTV.com, an online video site with legal news, information and entertainment; GetLegalCafe.com, a social networking site with a legal twist; TheAttorneyStore.com, a one-stop shop for the legal community; and USALegalOpinion.com, a gateway for the public to connect with attorneys about legal issues.

About the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School: The Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School is one of the most linked-to legal websites with more than 1 million inbound links. It receives nearly 1 million page views per day from more than 200 countries.

]]> http://erickregalado.wordpress.com/?p=10 Sat, 24 May 2008 22:01:57 +0000 Erick http://erickregalado.wordpress.com/?p=10 Off to Colorado, will be back in a week or so, just in time to start work and begin my summer semester at SJCL. 

Thanks to all my readers who've stopped by and listened to me spew boring law stuff.  Researching case law and statutes usually turns the stomachs of my law school friends, but there's a few of us (me included) that actually eat this stuff up and really love it.  Even with new technological research advancements like WestLaw or Lexis I must admit that sometimes nothing beats heading into the library and pulling out the hardbound reporters and supplements, strolling through volumes of Witkin and California Jurisprudence.  If anyone from school is reading this I hope they're not rolling their eyes ;)

In the realm of legal research blogging is my way of exhaling; just as one can't hold all the air in them for fear of suffocating, I can't just learn about all this cool stuff and not share it.  My inspiration to start this thing came from this blog post from the Frugal Law Student: Why Every Law Student Should Blog

I hope at the very least I have been informational and maybe, perhaps...entertaining?  But for whatever reason you came here and stuck around to read more than two words of my drivel I say thank you.

Thank you and keep reading!

Legal Research and Legal Analytics services includes:

• Research on various aspects of the laws, case law, foreign law, memoranda of law, statutory law, regulatory and administrative law research etc
• Research drafts on different contracts let, job agreements, sales agreements, vendors and distributors agreements, NDA (Non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements),
• Research on Legislative chronicle, supplementary sources, patronage secrets, Lexis research, West law search etc
• Multi jurisdictional survey
• Analysis of case-laws of federal, state and administrative of the country which may include intellect prop info, taxation etc
• Research on bill tracking
• Research on Commission verdict and community
• Research on intellectual property rights, including copyrights, trademarks, etc
• Look after on entire contract review process

Having rivalrous bounds over repose of the offshore providing countries, Indian LPO service providers comprises of wellspring legitimate professionals passed from the most respected law schools in India. As the theme of the law practices comes from UK, India and USA share shared law scheme in Humanities exclusive, KPO service providers deliver large pool of services similar litigation operation, contract management, migration services, data processing, HR compiance, Intellectual properties rights, Document drafing etc.

"Media Giant or Media Muddle?" includes analysis of the impact and potential of the new company and mentions West's expertise as the market-leading legal research provider.

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