Correcting Serious Flaws in Shepard's Acts and Cases by Popular Name, 6th ed., in Response to One Law Librarian's Heads-Up on law-lib

Some may recall Scott Burgh's (Chief Law Librarian, City of Chicago Department of Law Library) law-lib message of Nov. 30, 2010 entitled "new edition / errrors / flawed Shepard's Acts and Cases by Popular Name" which was a very serious critique of the editorial quality of Shepard's Act and Case by Popular Name upon the release of the new 6th edition in no small part because the 6th edition carry forwarded Illinois code errors that previous Shepard's editors had been alerted to but ignored. In a nutshell, Burgh wrote in his list message, "like the last edition, when it comes to Illinois law, [the new 6th edition of Shepard's Act and Case by Popular Name} is unfortunately riddled with errors"

It took something like 24-48 hours to get Scott's message to the right people at LexisNexis but that was accomplished without any involvement of our so-called AALL Vendor Liaison. Perhaps mentioning something like "we expect poor editorial quality from West but not LN" caught someone's attention.

Lexis Nexis is fixing the problem. In response to concerns expressed by Scott about the Illinois statutory references in the recently revised 6th edition of Shepard’s Acts & Cases by Popular Names, LexisNexis is performing an editorial review to include cross-references between the Acts and code sections from the Illinois Revised Statutes and the renamed/renumbered Acts and code sections in the Illinois Compiled Statutes. In addition, the revised publication will include an appendix at the end of each volume containing a conversion table for the Illinois Acts and statutes from that particular volume. The replacement volumes are expected to begin shipping by April 30, 2011. All customers that received the original set of revised volumes will receive the updated volumes at no cost.  There is no need to return to original volumes.

A couple of morals to this story:

• Each and every law librarian should speak up like Scott did when one discovers questionable editorial content being producted by our vendors by way of law-lib until some more public web communications vehicle (ah, like a CRIV-Unleashed Blog) is published. This gives everyone a "heads-up." Everyone includes our vendors who monitor AALL lists daily.
• Vendor employees tasked with monitoring AALL lists may not necessarily know who to send FYIs to because their bureaucracy has more VPs than the banking industry does. So skip several rungs of the chain of command by finding a way to contact the vendor's senior executives. Their communications will be acted upon by the editorial staff. Meaning, of course, skip vendor "librarian relations" staff completely.
• State in no uncertain terms that the flawed publication is unacceptable and explain in sufficent specificity what is wrong so the right people at the vendor can check the matter and can contact you for follow-up.
• Do not depend on our professional association doing any of this in something that even resembles taking prompt action because there is no established track record that they will.

Now, here's the flaw in this procedure. Scott called attention to a local issue -- Illinois code citations -- and LN is addressing it. But are their similar non-Illinois flaws in the current edition of Shepard’s Acts & Cases by Popular Names? The publisher won't necessarily know unless other law librarians check and speak out. To its credit LN is correcting the problem Scott identified at no cost to subscribers but it is up to law librarians in the other 49 state jurisdictions to perform quality control checks. [JH]