Over on 3 Geeks and a Law Library, Greg Lambert makes note that yesterday at the Law Marketing Association conference, Joe Calve, the new CMO of Morrison Foerster mentioned he had moved their Library department into the Marketing department. Lambert questions the change, but does say, “From what I’m hearing from the Librarians at MoFo, they are excited about the change and are looking forward to the transition.” MoFo is known for doing things a bit differently than everyone else, after all.

I do think it odd, but perhaps no odder than having the Library report to IT as in . . . [more]

The January/February 2010 Law Librarians newsletter put out by legal publisher Westlaw has published an article entitled Law Firm Economics and the Librarian—Bring Value Through Training. The lessons can apply beyond the context of private law firm libraries:

“Bring value through training. That was one message that came through loud and clear recently in ‘Succeed in the New Law Firm Library Reality—Learn the Business Side of the Firm’, a webinar hosted by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the informal group of law library managers of the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC) (…)

“So how

CaseStudiesOnline.com is a new web site with hundreds of social media marketing case studies, all fully indexed and searchable. The site was created by Tod Maffin, a well-known strategist, consultant, speaker and thought leader based in Vancouver. The site is currently in beta with more case studies being added each day. Maffin also plans on interviewing both thought-leaders in social media marketing and the people in the trenches who are putting these tools into action.

Here’s a short video by Maffin showing how CaseStudiesOnline.com works:

I took the opportunity to interview Tod Maffin over the phone last week to . . . [more]

Lawyer, Slawyer, and newspaper columnist David Canton has teamed up with rtraction, an Ontario IT company, to produce PolicyTool. The notion is that businesses need policies in place to govern a variety of employee practices but can’t always afford the services of a lawyer to devise them; PolicyTool invites you to answer a number of questions and feeds the answers into well-drafted “boilerplate,” resulting in a “comprehensive and informed framework for your legal counsel to quickly create a binding policy.” PolicyTool does the initial drafting; and a lawyer engaged by the user will tweak and approve.

At the . . . [more]

Every now and then it is “improving,” as the Victorians used to say, for a lawyer to be caught up in the toils of another profession, in order to recapture the client experience of uncertainty in the face of an opaque problem. I’ve had the fortune, recently — I wouldn’t label it “good” — to be in that situation and it has occurred to me, not for the first time, that there is a way to make the experience better for the lay person, a way that is all too seldom taken. My small suggestion is that professionals who deal . . . [more]

I’ve always assumed that when it came to lending e-books that Libraries would need to find a method to share the digital files housing the books in question. That the e-book files would distributed to the user’s reader, and then deleted once the lending period was finished. While things may eventually work that way in the future, I’d like to share a very interesting service being pioneered at Oregon State University where the pre-loaded Kindle hardware is the item being circulated.

Students are invited to spend up to $20 on any item in the Amazon Kindle store; items which become . . . [more]

Two Supreme Court stories from me this week:

1) The Supreme Court of Canada has released a special edition of its Bulletin of Proceedings that provides a statistical overview of its activities for the period 1999-2009.

It provides information on leave applications submitted, appeals heard, judgments, and time lapses (time between the filing of a complete application for leave to appeal and the Court’s decision on whether leave should be granted; time between decision to grant leave and the hearing; time between the hearing of an appeal and the judgment).

2)The Court, the Osgoode Hall Law School . . . [more]

I’ve just come across a Ph.D. thesis from 2007 by Christine Vanda Burns called “Online Legal Services — A Revolution that Failed?” [PDF 729pp]. Dr. Burns looked at what we might think of as the first generation of “online legal products which ‘package’ legal knowledge” and supply it to commercial enterprises, governments, and other consumers of law. As you would imagine in a dissertation, she examined the relevant literature and also did some empirical work in Australia, her home.

Interesting, to me, is her conclusion that while there are lots of difficulties surrounding the implementation of such products, . . . [more]

A few weeks back I noted a yet-to-be-published case by Ontario Master Donald Short on proportionality called Moosa v. Hill Property Management. It’s now been published here, along with this bit of visual advocacy:

I’ve heard Eugene Meehan talk about charts in his written advocacy presentation, but haven’t been exposed to much else on visual advocacy. I like this example because it communicates so much meaning so quickly and, moreover, because it’s accessible to those who are not artistically inclined. Does this offend your typesetter’s eye Simon? Other examples anyone? Links? . . . [more]

The Obama Administration recently announced the details of its $400 million multi-year Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which will expand access to nutritious foods for underserved urban and rural communities in the US (see the press release from the US Department of the Treasury). To identify communities which currently lack healthy food options, the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service launched a great online research tool called the Food Environment Atlas. This tool allows you to compile county-level statistics on three categories of food environment factors:

1. Food choices (e.g., lbs per capita prepared meals, lbs per capita solid . . . [more]

Changes are afoot with the Law Librarians podcast! We have moved to hosting and support by CALI (Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction). We have also taken advantage of this change to rename the show Law Librarian Conversations.

More information is on the website at http://lawlibcon.classcaster.net/. This show was created and is produced by Richard Leiter, is co-hosted by Marcia Dority Baker, and given web support by Roger Skalbeck. It includes a varying group of panelists (of which I am one) and a number of special guests.

We are now recording live twice a month (the first and third . . . [more]

The latest Radio Berkman podcast has Dave Weinberger interviewing Carl Malamud about his efforts to make US law more accessible and copyright free. . . . [more]