Lex Libri

Aspiring law librarian. Erstwhile lawyer. Parallel citation needed. Writing about law, libraries, and law libraries—and any other information issues that catch my fancy. lex n. [lɛks] law [Lat.] libri n. pl. [lIbri] books [Lat.] Tags

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Summer Learnin'

School may be out, but the learning never stops! Here are a few general library things I'm excited to brush up on this summer, while the job search kicks into high gear:

Languages (French; Italian; Irish)

HTML, CSS, XML (upcoming workshop from Ladies Learning Code)

MS Office (I use Office for Mac every day, but should revisit Windows)

Presentation tools (Prezi; SlideShare)

LibGuides

Sirsi Workflows

Sharepoint

Tumblibrarians: are there other tools I should be learning and/or brushing up on this summer?

Business/Competitive Intelligence Databases (thanks, J.)

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Legal Research: Rated M for Mature

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Legal Apps

The Law Librarians of Puget Sound have put together a list of nine essential apps for legal practitioners.  I like this list because it sticks to the essentials: four productivity apps and five legal research apps.  

Most of these would be useful for Canadian legal research, apart from Fastcase and LawStack. I haven't been able to find all-in-one Canadian alternatives to those products—seems like this area is ripe for innovation.  Is this something CanLII might be able to take the lead on?

Top: Evernote, iAnnotate, Dropbox, Dragon Dictation

Bottom: Fastcase, LawStack, HeinOnline, WestlawNext, Lexis Advance 

[baralgin]

Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

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You're a recent law grad and a new hire at a small firm. A partner asks you to use your Westlaw or Lexis student account to get your research done for free. What do you do?  What do you do?

In this post, Jason Potter offers two irrefutable reasons for avoiding any sort of unauthorized use (i.e., it's unethical and Westlaw/Lexis will recover from you).  He also gives students a great solution: offer to leverage all available free legal research tools to get the job done.  

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Getting to know Steve Matthews, the founder of Stem Legal.  I was especially interested in Steve's take on the potential interplay between the law library and the IT department...

Law librarians need to be involved in [IT] projects much much earlier. That means:

being a bit of a visionary, and seeing what the firm is not doing;

maintaining dialogue and ongoing discussion – especially during planning season; 

bringing information to the table that helps IT make better decisions; 

watching for ways to support IT’s projects, building some “good will”; and finally, 

moving some of that good will towards IT-Library joint projects.

...and the marketing department:

Most law libraries have BI & CI on the radar these days (or at least they should), but librarians can also have a role in marketing. Think about:

resource collections with a marketing draw beyond law; 

getting the newest decisions to the blogging lawyers in your firm;

rounding up industry news, and helping your firm publish content as a service.

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All Over But The Pomp & Circumstance

I just handed in my Information Policy, Regulation & Law paper...which means I have finished all of the requirements in satisfaction of the Master of Information (Library and Information Science, Collaborative Program in Rare Books and Print Culture) degree.

YAY!

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What Should We Call Me?

We had an amazing panel of law librarians come to speak to INF 2133 on Monday; so informative! One thing they mentioned is the trouble finding the right title: are we librarians, consultants, information specialists?

The business cards I've received from practitioners are split fairly evenly between law librarians and information specialists. Curious, I decided to see what the breakdown looked like in terms of printed references; here's the result. 

(via Google Ngram Viewer)

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(via Social Media in the Legal Sector)

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Make sure you know how much time you can spend on something, and how much Westlaw or Lexis money you can burn...you’re going to be the one who gets yelled at when the client balks at the $30,000 research bill you ran up on a fairly minor point of law. If you’re not sure how much time something should take, ask. If you don’t know how much time you can spend on Westlaw or Lexis, ask. Even, “Hey, do you have a ballpark idea of how long this should take?” can save you from a very unpleasant situation down the road. (Oh, and make sure you know how to research cost-effectively. When in doubt, ask.)

10 Things Your Law Firm Boss Wants You To Know, but Isn't Going to Tell You | The Girl's Guide to Law School

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From the Dictionary of International Business Terms (Owen & Clark, 2001)

Poison Pill: Technique used by companies facing a hostile takeover bid to make their stock as unattractive as possible to the aggressor.

Porcupine Provision: Provision written into a company's articles of association, or into a corporate charter or bylaw, designed to act as a deterrent to hostile takeovers.

Shark Repellent: Informal term for defensive tactics resorted to in the event of a takeover bid.

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Causal Links, Vol. 5

The Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale has a comprehensive country-by-country guide to researching foreign law that includes links to WorldLII, online research guides, and other online databases. [Guide to Foreign Law Research]

The Library of Congress offers detailed guides for researching laws from fourteen international jurisdictions: Australia, Brazil, Britain, China, Egypt, Eritrea, France, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, Russia, and Sweden. [Foreign and International Law]

Toujours sur le thème du droit international, Legisfrance, le "service public de la diffusion du droit" offre plusieurs traductions du droit français (en plusieurs langues) comme le code civil et la constitution, parmi d'autres lois et décrets. [Catalogue des Traductions]

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The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show them This Chart

Alexis Madrigal's latest in The Atlantic nicely illustrates how the "number of people reading [has] not declined precipitously, it's actually gone up since the perceived golden age of American letters."

I love his larger point about the faulty assumption that books of the past were somehow "better" than books of today, because we tend to compare those that have stood the test of time against our current bestsellers (Nabokov vs. Snooki, in Madrigal's example) and despair.

Consider the bestseller list of 1952 (the low point on the chart). East of Eden and The Old Man and the Sea became part of the canon, but the rest?

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Jason Potter, a legal research and writing professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, is curating and blogging/tweeting about free legal research tools at researchfreedom.com and @researchfreedom.

I'm really jazzed about this project. On the surface, the delivery is so simple and straightforward—but the implications for access to justice? To help legal professionals and law students be more cost-effective in their work? It makes me want to shout and point: "Yes! This!"

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From the preface to Sir Edward Coke's Reports (1601).

To the Reader mine advice is, that in reading of these or any new Reports, he neglect not in any case the reading of the old Books of years Reported in former ages, for assuredly out of the old fields must spring and grow the new Corn.

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Noting up legislation just got easier on CanLII. 

For some reason, this got me thinking about the term 'noting up'—I never gave it a second thought in law school, but really, where did that term come from?

Here's an explanation from an 1836 law textbook called The Law Library:

Let the student—or rather young practitioner—set himself down resolutely to the task of reading, with the utmost care, each new number of the Reports; and after noting up every decision, i.e., minuting it on the margin of some previous case in the Reports, which it materially affects—either corroborating, overruling, or qualifying it—distribute their contents under their appropriate heads in any favourite text-book.

Now it takes what, two clicks? I'll never complain about noting up again.

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This post from Allison C. Shields is full of useful tips—on everything from networking to live tweeting—just in time for the spring conference season. I'm attending (and, with any luck, volunteering at) my first CALL conference in May—so excited.

I have one additional tip, based on my recent symposium experience. If you can, take five minutes after each presentation just to reflect and make some summary notes. It will give all those new ideas a chance to sink in, and save you from that information overload feeling at the end of the day.