Law Librarian Blog

Thank you AALL for Listening and Being Flexible

I want to publicly thank AALL.  I received an email today from Kate Hagan letting me know that while AALL was adhering to the September 15th deadline they were also going to provide members affected by the earthquake and hurricane the opportunity to request an additional five days to complete their proposals. 

If you were adversely affected by the August earthquake or hurricane on the East Coast and will be unable to meet the September 15 submission deadline, contact proposalhelp@aall.org prior to the deadline.

Thank you AALL and particularly, Kate Hagan, for recognizing the hardships we East Coasters have and are encountering over the last week, and for allowing us the ability to request additional time to complete our program submissions and make this a great Boston conference.  This law librarian much appreciates that you listened and were flexible.

Caren Biberman

Contemplating “RIP AALL” Ahead of Boston 2012: Muster of the Minutemen (and Minutewomen)

As an organization of institutional buyers, AALL is on the verge of becoming irrelevant. Just follow the money. Look at where our major "legal professional service vendors" are spending their ad and meeting sponsorship dollars for marketing their wares. It ain't on "us" anymore. 2011 was the year this became obvious for all to see. Our major vendors are spending proportionally higher amounts of their limited marketing budgets to sponsor and advertise to the Law Tech market. TR Legal is leading the pack to sell "solutions" to this market, some which offer, some which don't offer online search as a component. Good luck with that since the Company has some way to go to catch up with Lexis Legal & Professional which began focusing on software years before TR Legal did. Wait a minute – perhaps, that is why TR Legal has refocused so much of its marketing dollars -- playing catch-up with Lexis?
 
The writing is on the wall. While law librarians are deeply involved in legal tech, many are not sufficiently exposed to these solutions. We certainly address matters of online legal search, particularly with the rise of new WEXIS platforms but we haven't extended our professional expertise to a critical analysis of software products that have been and are coming to market, at least not in AALL literature, forums, or programs at the national level.

Isn't it time to do so? Isn't it time to evaluate what they actual do and what they cost against a backdrop of vendor advertising claims about them? Of course, one can't blame law librarians if they choose not to address this issue. If we can't make "anti-competitive" comments in AALL communication mediums, what’s the point!

AALL already has one foot in the grave. Why? Because our vendors are spending their marketing dollars for their Next Big Think, "solutions," elsewhere while our association's "gag order" to its institutional members is leading AALL's second foot right into the grave of irrelevance. There is, in my opinion, no way to evaluate the services already in the market and services coming to market which will eventually transform, have already transformed "legal publishing" into law-based "solutions," without such critical assessments echoing in consumer advocacy.
 
Even if AALL is nothing more than a vehicle for professional education and development, problematic in my mind unless it changes its name, American Association of Law Libraries Librarians, I attended one Philly program where law librarian panelists made statements that could have been characterized as "anti-competitive" by AALL standards. Had AALL assigned a censors to the session, would the podium mics have been turned off? (Anyone old enough to remember when Mayor Daley cut the sound for the podium during the 1968 Democratic Party convention because the speaker was denouncing the Chicago Police Department's tactics outside the convention hall as protesting turned into rioting?) I also attended another session where the panelists were vendor and jobber reps discussing product development and licensing. Had the same words been spoken by law librarians, I think AALL would have had to unleash its riot police.

I'm thinking AALL really has only two choices left. AALL either

1. retains a law firm that does not have a bend-over stance. One brave soul posed that as a question during the Executive Board Meeting's members forum. You can check the minutes for AALL official response; or
2. increases member dues to pay to medicate our royal family and their courtiers for antitrutism anxiety attacks because the traditional passive-aggressive behavior displayed by many law librarians is being replaced by direct, full, and frank confrontation of the issues publicly.

The hue and cry will just get louder. In medieval times in Jolly Old England, the hue and cry was a sanctioned method for folks who percieved wrong-doing to call on others to help capture those bandits and take them to the local sheriff for their day of judgment because that's how criminal activity was dealt with. In our own Wild West frontier days, our 19th century interpretation of the "hue and cry" was the local sheriff who deputized ordinary citizens for a posse to do the same, although sometimes the niceties of criminal procedure were ignored by hanging the outlaw immediately upon capture. While no one is suggesting hanging any members of AALL's officialdom from the nearest tree, it is clear that some insitutional buyer representatives have and will continue to "tar and feather" our association royalists for their failings.

I'm seeing and hearing this particularly among my cohorts, the Boomer-gen law librarians (who likely remember my reference to the 1968 Chicago convention). Many have decided (1) they have nothing to lose since they are already in positions of institutional authority; (2) they don't want our generation's legacy to remain the status quo; (3) they have long-term memory recall of dealing with AALL, vendors and the way too cozy relationship between them and (4) their past efforts to do something within AALL have been stymied -- some were lone voices calling for change when they were the black sheep of the royal family; others never made it up that far in the royal pecking order.

I might add (5) to the above list. We Boomer-gen law librarians were the legal tech generation of our times but we recognize the expertise of today's legal tech resides in the GenX-GenY law librarians who are coming up the ranks to leadership positions in our institutions. At the moment, if our younger colleagues don't want to squander their expertise, they might as well join some other professional association. I'm thinking legal administrator associations in the private and public sectors might welcome law librarians as special interest groups. Then there is also the ABA which already has a section.

It's time for AALL to justify its institutional existence. It is damn near impossible to separate consumer advocacy from products and services institutional members use, evaluate and communicate their opinions about. While my focus is on WEXIS, this is equally true in the tech services arena. Of course, this assumes that AALL royals really want to catch up to the membership on the issue of consumer advocacy. That's one helluva assumption.

To date, it looks to me that AALL asks our legal counsel, "How do we avoid this issue?" The appropriate issue to present to legal counsel  now is "give us ways and means to serve our membership by assisting their consumer advocacy efforts with sufficient legal muscularity so we won't be the laughing stock at Boston 2012: Muster of the Minutemen (and Minutewomen), like we were at Philly 2011: Cream Cheese, Cheesesteak or Karaoke." If AALL is not dependent on vendor dollars for essential services, as was stated during the 2011 Executive Board meeting, then AALL better be prepared for declining vendor-source revenue. All one has to do is look at TR Legal presence at Philly this year to see the future. I doubt I am the only one thinking that TR Legal may be setting an example. One has to wonder how many other major vendors went back to HQs to talk about downsizing their financial commitments to AALL because TR Legal did.
 
IMHO, the only way to stem this trend is for AALL to reverse its institutional course by allowing all members to apply their professional expertise to all issues that concern their employers for all products and services before shovels tap down the ground on the gravesite of AALL. It's too soon to say "RIP AALL" but it is not too soon to contemplate it's irrelevance.

Just imagine what AALL will look like 20 years from now if our professional organization continues to proceed down the path it has been on for the last 20 years. Well, we’ll just have to wait ‘n see. How many months away is Boston 2012: Muster of the Minutemen (and Minutewomen)? [JH]

Updated GlobaLex Research Guides

August 2011 updated guides available on GlobaLex:

• International Sports Law by Amy Burchfield
• Guide to Legal Research in Belarus by Tatyana Khodosevich & Nadia Shalygina; Update by Nadia Shalygina
• An Introduction to Colombian Governmental Institutions and Primary Legal Sources by Antonio Ramírez and Hernando Otero
• An Electronic Guide to Mexican Law by Francisco A. Avalos and Elisa Donnadieu; Update by Francisco A. Avalos

[JH]

The ABA's Latest Response To Senator Grassley

The American Bar Association, or more specifically, the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, responded to Senator Charles Grassley’s letter of August 9th, which was a response to the Section’s July 21st response to the Senator’s original letter to the ABA from July 11th.  Confused?  For the whole history and correspondence, see my LLB posts Senator Asks ABA Questions About Scholarships and Debt, ABA Responds To Senator Grassley, and Grassley to ABA: I'm Not Going Away That Easily, and A Bit More on Senator Grassley And The ABA.  I make the distinction about who is responding to Senator Grassley as the Section points out in its current response:

As stated in our memorandum of July 20, 2011, the Section is separate and independent of the American Bar Association, as required by the Department of Education’s regulations governing accrediting agencies.

A minor distinction I’m sure, as the cover letter comes from current ABA president William T. (Bill) Robinson III, and the section letterhead strikingly uses the ABA logo as such.  What was that I learned way back in the day when I attended my agency class, something about the appearance of apparent authority?

Senator Grassley’s second letter took the form of 10 questions with multiple sub-questions, not unlike an interrogatory to the opposing side.    The ABA’s, excuse me, the Section’s response comes in a mere four pages, in contrast to the 67 page response to the first inquiry.  The answers are grouped according to the theme of the topic.  A copy is here.

The Section notes that law student default rates on student loans are lower than those of undergraduates and acknowledges that unemployed law graduates face challenges in repaying those loans.  The answer to this is action by lenders to give more information the prospective students and train law school financial aid administrators.  The accreditation Standards and interpretations now require law schools to provide debt counseling at the beginning and end of the educational program.  The Section doesn’t have an established a benchmark for what is an unacceptable default rate because it is low, but will consider revising the Standards and report to the Department of Education on that effort before the summer of 2012.  In any event, the Section says, states do not admit defaulted students to the bar.  

I suppose that doesn’t account for those who default after passing the bar.  In any event, the Section seems to be saying that while it expresses concern, the default rate is low enough that it’s not a real problem.  If this were a courtroom we would call this a question of fact.  Neither side has established the details of that fact. 

Senator Grassley questioned the background and composition of the Section members and specifically that of the committees and inspection teams.  He implied, I believe, that academics were overly represented in the organization.  Not so much is the response.  The Section complies with the Department of Education governance requirements.  Hey, we have judges, lawyers, and bar examiners of various genders, racial, ethnic, and geographic categories.   We’re diverse.  Diverse is good.  Eleven of the twenty-one members of the Section’s Council are not employed by a law school or involved in the governance of a law school.  I believe that qualifies as more than half.  Moreover, there are ethical and conflict of interest rules by which all members must abide.  

The next part of the response focused on how law schools managed scholarships.  There has been criticism that law schools give money to students in the first year and then use a grading curve to pull money from those who don’t make the cut for a continued grant in successive years.  The Section “is moving” to require law schools to provide more information about this via the annual questionnaire which will be published by the ABA.  The Section “is considering a proposal” to amend the Standards to require schools to publish scholarship data on their websites.  

The last part of the response covers the legal employment market.  The Section says it doesn’t regulate that and as such, it does not conduct economic research.  Antitrust law, it believes, prevents it from placing a cap on the number of law, though setting more rigorous standards would not.  The law school accreditation standards, however, are already rigorous, and they require law schools to provide career services.  The Section “is currently working” on a revision to the Standards requiring law schools to “affirmatively demonstrate that they are devoting satisfactory ongoing efforts to assist students in finding jobs to promote student loan repayments when a school’s placement rate falls below a specified level.”

A lot of the language in the response indicates concern and action but is exceptionally vague as to what form that action would take.  I get the distinct impression that the Section wanted to say as little of substance as possible in this public response to Senator Grassley.  Rather than leave it at that the Section expressed a desire to take this matter out of the public record.  Here is the memorandum conclusion:

In closing, thank you for your continuing interest in law school accreditation Standards.  We renew our request for a meeting with you and Section leadership to address any remaining issues you may have.  Please feel free to contact us again if we can be of any further assistance.

My impression is that the ABA and the Section will make law schools sweat the little things, such as an academic law library director’s status as a faculty member, while looking the other way and whistling when it comes to consumer and economic issues.  One is easy and one is hard.  Can you guess which one is which?  I have the further impression that law students and graduates are not the focus of the accreditation process.  As long as the factory is ok we don't have to look too closely (bar passage and employment rates aside) to the product it produces.  

I actually have a little sympathy for the Section as it is probably not used to being challenged in this way.  At the same time I like the idea of holding accreditors of law schools to justifying their standards and actions by someone with enough gravitas to pull it off.  Perhaps that conversation the Section is seeking with Senator Grassley might take the form of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing at some point.  That would be a hoot.  [MG]

Why must AALL annual meeting program proposals be submitted a whooping 10 months ahead of the event?

I think if one checked other associations, you will find AALL probably has one of the earliest deadlines for program proposal submissions for ass'n annual meeting planning. One doesn't need earthquakes and hurricanes to pose this question: Why must annual meeting program proposals be due a whooping 10 months ahead of the event? So while some of us await for what we can only hope will be a retraction of AALL's official "NO" response to Caren Biberman's justified request for a mere five day submission extension because of an act of god, chew on the whole 10 months thing. A later deadline would also allow for submission of proposals that may be more relevant to events that had occurred ahead of our annual meeting.

I think the response from AALL would be that AMPC has a lot of work on its hands reviewing 300 or so proposals and must meet in late October to get started. That's easily rectified by going to a peer group track scheduling model. Academic, Public and Private sector groups could be given slots to fill in the program schedule. Under the direction of each group's elected officials, separate peer group mini-AMPCs would review and select proposals for scheduling their slots and a general AMPC would do the same for slots allocated for all other programs. Conflicts in programming? Now, how hard would it be to avoid that... . If there is so much work, dividing it up would also allow for pushing the September 15th deadline back.

Our profession is living in interesting times, times where important events happen after September 15th of each year. I'm assuming our AALL officials are living in these times, too. Perhaps that's a wrong assumption. However, in this age of modern communications there is no good reason for having a deadline 10 months before our annual meeting even if AALL doesn't want to follow up on the above-mentioned suggestion for dividing the labor for reviewing program proposals. AMPC doesn't have to meet in October and can work together in a virtual environment if AALL is too worried about losing it grip on our annual meeting. Unless, of course, AALL's official policy is that nothing significant happens in our profession after September 15th.

We all should have, to quote Caren, "zero patience" with how our annual meeting programming is administered. Kudos to last year's AMPC members for the hard work they did but that was the result of individual efforts. We need to institutionalize this to gain momentum so that it is not utterly dependent on who AALL officials select to be on the Committee. Unlike Caren, we should not need an act of god for having zero patience with the current state of affairs. Well, we may need an act of god to get reforms made. 

AALL's Knee-jerk "No" Responses. Is "yes" to membership requests even in AALL's official vocabulary? Being a born and bred Chicago native, I think the next time Chicago experiences a severe snowstorm we all should call AALL HQ. When the phones aren't answered because of that act of god, perhaps we need to email our AALL officials because our AALL staff were scheduled to be at work. [JH]

So what that there was a Hurricane and Earthquake--Adherence is More Important

I will start this post by admitting that after the events of the last week I have zero patience.  We, on the East Coast, have dealt with two very unusual events for us, an earthquake and then a hurricane.  I can only speak for myself but those two events have caused me to lose at least four days between work and personal time.  Days when I might have otherwise accomplished things.  Like perhaps in my spare time writing the two program proposals I personally have committed to for the next AALL Conference.

With the deadline looming (September 15th) and work about to ramp up with first year associate training planning and other projects and some personal commitments I thought, let me suggest to AALL that they give us a little more time to complete these proposals.  I didn't think an extra 5 days would be such an unreasonable request.  That would have given me (and of course everyone else) an additional weekend to finalize everything. 

I took it upon myself to write Kate Hagan (AALL Executive Director) and Darcy Kirk (AALL President) an email requesting that AALL extend the deadline to September 20th to give us that additional weekend and suggesting that "I think it would be viewed as AALL being very compassionate and flexible if you were to do this."  I pointed out that while academic librarians are encouraged to submit proposals for programs by their employers, private law librarians are not.  In fact for private law librarians anything done for the profession is generally outside their job and as a friend said to me tonight a  "labor of love." 

Now I will say that I received a very swift and nice phone call from Kate Hagan asking if there was anything she could do short of extending the deadline.  And she did make her case that the Committee meets in October and has usually 300 proposals to review.  So that would put more of a burden on them.  According to the Important Dates to Remember on the AALL Annual Meeting Site that meeting is in late October.  And I am certainly not trying to minimize the work done by the AMPC, I do recognize its a huge job.  But I truly believe, given the circumstances, extending the deadline would be the right thing to do.  I made my case to Kate during our phone call and she said she would discuss with others and get back to me.

I received an email this evening telling me my request had been considered but that AALL would not change the deadline.  Why?  What I was told was that they had been advertising the date since early June and they want to adhere to the date.

So I leave it to my colleagues to decide if adherence is more important then flexibility.  Not in my book.  And yes, I am sure this blog post will make me persona non grata.  And I am sure some will suggest I could be writing a proposal instead of this blog post.  But as I said I have little patience left.

Caren Biberman

Did Facebook Respond to Google+ By Implementing New Privacy Controls?

Don't know but Facebook did implement some new Google+ like user controls without using the words "privacy" or "Google+" on August 25th. See Facebook's Making It Easier to Share With Who You Want and the ACLU's analysis of the changes, You've Been Tagged on Facebook—But Now You're in Control. See also the recently released ACLU Guide to New Facebook Privacy Controls. [JH]

Duke, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and Emory To Offer Orphan Works Electronically

I wrote at the end of June about the decision by the University of Michigan Libraries to give campus access to electronic versions of orphan works scanned by Google from the school’s collection.  See University of Michigan To Allow Campus Access To Digital Orphan Works for more information.  Paul Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, was not happy with the move.  The Michigan access has not been challenged so far and there are no reports of orphan works owners storming the campus with torches, pitchforks, or subpoenas.

That may or may not have encouraged what comes next.  Duke University, along with Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and Emory University are about to do the same thing according to a report in the Charlotte News and Observer.  The books to be made available are copies of orphan items that appear in the print collection.  The plan is to post a notice about titles for 90 days.  The titles will remain online if no one comes forward.

I like the idea that libraries are pushing the issue of electronic access to orphan works.  Google can’t do it because the pending settlement issues concerning orphan works are unresolved.  As Judge Chin rejected the last settlement, he stated that Congress needs to act to allow Google to display orphan works.  Google wants to play nice with the publishers so it can’t push the issue unless all talks break down and the case actually goes to litigation. 

While I can’t see a lot of pent up demand for an electronic copy of "Lecture On Bees," a 1925 title by E.R. Root, cited in the News and Observer story, I like the idea of the collective libraries’ decision to go forward with access.  The source libraries are not part of the litigation.  They can be independently sued by a rights holder and will defend by claiming fair use, should that happen.  Universities are risk-averse by nature.  The fact they are willing to do this means the university and library administrations believe fair use allows this.  [MG]

Time for AALL to "Interfere" in Licensing: An Approach for Petitioning State Governments

Initially I thought the title of this post would be "Time for a Model Act on Fair Use Preservation in Licensing of Electronic Content?" Certainly UNC Law's David Robert Hansen has provided a working draft for consideration by the NCCUSL in his A State Law Approach to Preserving Fair Use in Academic Libraries [SSRN]. But hold on for a minute. Hansen's work also provides a framework for consumer advocacy that echoes in one of our association concerns, namely "fair use." It also provides an illustration of what a national AALL Library Consumer Advocacy Caucus could do by serving as a clearinghouse of information individual institutional members could if they so choose use to petition their state governments for legislating a necessary corrective to model licensing agreements. In saying so, I am merely expressing my own opinion, not that of the Library Consumer Advocacy Caucus which is still trying to get an official okey dokey from AALL officialdom.

In A State Law Approach to Preserving Fair Use in Academic Libraries, Hanson writes

Contracts can do funny things to the balance of rights granted by Congress in the Copyright Act. For public institutions that spend large amounts of money on copyrighted content, contractual restrictions on users‘ rights are especially problematic given the needs of academic library patrons. In recent years, academic libraries have experiences a dramatic shift in acquisitions practice, from purchasing physical copies of works to licensing access to those works. With this shift toward licensing, academic library users‘ rights under federal copyright law have been diminished. In particular, these restrictions have narrowed the scope of fair use, a right whose free exercise is important to academic freedom and equity across institutions of higher education. These contractual limitations alter the delicate balance‖ of author and user rights, and have garnered significant criticism in the literature. Thus far, proposals to restore the balance have not been effective because they are either too ambitious (as with federal preemption) or too weak (as with model licenses). This paper proposes a solution that falls between those two extremes, and which may be useful to rebalance the rights of content owners and users with respect to other academic uses as well.

Hanson's hypothetical Educational Fair Use Preservation Act would render any licensing provision between rights holders and an IHE that modifies or eliminates fair use for users void. While it addresses the issue in the context of public academic libraries, Hansen observes:

Academic library users are not, however, the only group of users that are negatively impacted by licensing restrictions on rights like fair use. As the digital distribution of copyrighted works becomes more common, consumers are presented with the same problems as those in academia. Because contracts—creatures of state law—are what enable these problems, serious thought should be given by states courts and legislatures to modifying state contract law, either for individual classes of users (as this paper proposes), or for consumers in general.

Amen to that. [JH]

Round-Up of Law Practitioner Blogs

Denver Divorce Attorney Blog
http://www.denverdivorceattorneyblog.com/
http://www.denverdivorceattorneyblog.com/index.xml
Discusses family and divorce cases, news, and legal opinions in Colorado. Published by Plog & Stein, PC
Examines divorce news, opinions and related matters in Florida. Published by Whitney Lonker, of the Apple Law Firm PLLC

Arizona Criminal Defense Attorney Blog
http://www.arizonacriminaldefenseattorneyblog.com/
http://www.arizonacriminaldefenseattorneyblog.com/index.xml
Discusses criminal law news, case and related matters in Arizona. Published by James E. Novak.
 
Florida Bankruptcy Lawyer Blog
http://www.floridabankruptcylawyer-blog.com/
http://www.floridabankruptcylawyer-blog.com/index.xml
Examines bankruptcy cases, news, and opinions in Florida. Published by Law Offices of Justin McMurray.

Jacksonville Foreclosure Lawyer Blog
http://www.jacksonvilleforeclosurelawyerblog.com/
http://www.jacksonvilleforeclosurelawyerblog.com/index.xml
Discusses foreclosure news, cases and related matters in Jacksonville, Florida. Published by The Law Office of Garrett J. Strahl.

Kansas City Whistleblower Lawyer Blog
http://www.kansascitywhistleblowerlawyerblog.com/
http://www.kansascitywhistleblowerlawyerblog.com/index.xml
Discusses whistleblower news, cases and related matters, reports in Kansas. Published by Brady & Associates

Los Angeles Probate and Trust Lawyer Blog
http://www.losangelesprobateandtrustlawyer.com/
http://www.losangelesprobateandtrustlawyer.com/index.xml
Discusses probate news, cases and other related matters in California. Published by Law Offices of Jan Morrison.

EDUCAUSE Policy Analysis of Pending Data Privacy Legislation

EDUCAUSE has released Data Privacy Legislation: An Analysis of the Current Legislative Landscape and the Implications for Higher Education. 18 bills have been introduced in Congress on data privacy.

These privacy bills generally fall into three distinct areas: comprehensive online privacy protection, geolocation and mobile devices, and data security and breach notification. If enacted, many of the bills have implications for data collection, storage, and use that could affect higher education and campus IT operations and academic research.

Hat tip to DigitalKoans. [JH]

Even More Law School Unhappiness

Law schools are easy targets for lawsuits these days, what with students suing their schools for fraud or faculty suing their administrators when collegiality is replaced by bad blood.  One of the latest comes against the University of Pittsburgh, which is being accused of age discrimination.  The case was filed recently by William J. Brown.  He had taught at Pitt since 1968, and was tenured when he left for Duquesne University to become Director of the Graduate Tax Program for the business school.  He was invited back to Pitt in 2006 to fill in for other tax professors who were on leave. 

Brown won the Excellence in Teaching Award on his return.  He expressed an interest in one of the tenure track positions for that opened up for tax instruction, and alleges that he was blocked by administrators who expressed concern that the median age of the faculty had increased.  Pitt hired a much younger person for the tenure track position that Brown wanted.  The result is the lawsuit at hand.

I can’t say whether Brown can prove his allegations.  I’ll point out that if this was in fact a concern, it’s not as if U.S. News has a ranking category for average faculty age.  I doubt that prospective law students care about such things.  I always thought that schools were more concerned about whether their faculty wrote or how many times an article was downloaded from SSRN.  I guess the moral of the story is that once tenure is granted, never let it go. 

More coverage is in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette and the National Law Journal.  [MG]

Creating a Total Package to Compete with Wolters Kluwer in the 21st Century: BLaw+BNA and BGov+BNA in the Specialist Law, Regulatory and Business Marketplace

Assuming a majority of BNA former and current employee-shareholders tender their shares, an assumption that must take into account that many current employees are union-represented, Bloomberg, a company not known for acquiring other companies, will have made its largest acquisition in its history. The $990 million price tag represents 3 times BNA's 2010 revenue of $331 million and a whooping 36 times BNA's 2010 net income of $27.61 million. The share buy-back price for BNA employees and retirees during the Company's most recent opportunity was $17.50. Bloomberg's tender offer share price is $39.50. You can do the math. Should BNA shareholders take the offer made by privately owned Bloomberg? No publicly owned company could or will offer a better premium.

The major media and financial press correctly calls the obvious -- the acquisition of BNA by Bloomberg will beef up Bloomberg Law's legal publishing business. Most, however, point to enhancing BLaw's competitiveness with WEXIS by this acquisition. I don't think so, at least not yet, at least not by this acquisition.

WEXIS is competing in the generalist legal market. BLaw+BNA will offer serious competition to Wolters Kluwer in the premium legal market, that niche market, albeit a large one willing to pay for quality, which offers specialized produces and services to legal, regulatory and business consumers over and above what WEXIS offers. We've always had this bifurcation and now it will continue to exist post-acquisition: TR Legal vs. Lexis and CCH Wolters Kluwer vs. BLaw+BNA.

Whether BLaw likes it or not, and based on conversations with BLaw execs, "not" in terms of characterization, my sense is BLaw's online legal service is primarily viewed by BLaw's current user pop as a premium, specialist service by business and law consumers, a market niche. Like it or not and based on official statements and private conversations with BLaw execs, "not," secondary legal content in print, online and eBooks was needed for BLaw to be a full-fledged player in this market. Bloomberg's tender offer for BNA indicates it has recognized this. Why reinvent the wheel when you can acquire a company that has the catalog and the brand strength needed?

The only observation I read that goes beyond referring to WEXIS in reporting on this potential acquisition is one stated by Reuters Breakingviews' Jeffrey Goldfarb in Bloomberg LP spares no expense on first big deal:

Bloomberg also wants to broaden its power beyond the nation’s financial capital to its political epicenter. It launched Bloomberg Government earlier this year. But employee-owned BNA, started 80 years ago, has already stealthily established clout among lawmakers, regulators and lobbyists. And though its areas of coverage generally represent a departure for Bloomberg, there should be sufficient overlapping interest from its existing audience of financial professionals to help justify the premium.

That's a damn good point and should be factored into the equation: Acquisition = (BLaw+BNA) + (BGov+BNA).

Reportedly, Bloomberg will operate BNA as a standalone subsidiary, at least for now. I doubt that will last very long. It is just a matter of when BNA becomes a "brand" under BLaw (think "Matthew Bender" for Lexis Legal & Profession or "West" for TR Legal, assuming the "West" brand name has any long-term staying power in TR Legal's grand scheme of things) or disappears under the BLaw corporate masthead (think Wolters Kluwer for brands once known as "CCH," "Aspen," etc.). 

What's more important than how the products are branded is the editorial quality provided by BNA. Since the recession hit, the largest employer of laid-off associates in NYC has been BLaw. While they may be damn more qualified than hiring recent law school grads for editorial production, BNA's authorship model -- hire recognized practitioner-experts to write treatises and retain long-term in-house subject experts to produce serial and online editional content -- better be maintained if Bloomberg want to maximize its substantial ROI. 

In addition to acquiring print and online resources, both Bloomberg and BNA brings something valuable to the table. Marketing, a weak point in BNA's corporate structure, could be significantly enhances by a heavy dose of Bloomberg expertise. Sale force, a weak point in BLaw (and BGov), could be significantly improved by a heavy dose of expertize from BNA's account reps.

While we law librarians have a long history of criticizing the consequences of merger mania in the legal publishing industry and rightly so in the context of the anti-competitive consequences of the WEXIS duology in the generalist legal publishing market (sorry TR Legal and Lexis if your egos are bruised), I could not see a long future for BNA as a separate company competing against the likes of Wolters Kluwer. BNA simply does not have the investment capital needed for the 21st century New Normal. Top-notch editorial quality and an experienced sales forces is not enough these days. The specialist legal, regulatory and business market could have ended up having just one player providing the "total package" -- online, print and eBooks -- Wolters Kluwer. Not now; at least not if BLaw+BNA and BGov+BNA garners a majority of BNA employee and retiree owned shares from Bloomberg's tender offer.

One additional consequence not mentioned in the major media is a matter of corporate focus; Wolters Kluwer's Euro-centric focus will have to be adjusted. The Company will have to stop taking its current US subscription base as a given. In other words, a Bloomberg-BNA combination will ratch up competition in the US speciality legal market.

Wait 'n see. The tender offer will begin on Sept. 8. If successful, it will be the end of an era for BNA but the beginning of a new one for Bloomberg. I don't view that as a "bad thing;" I view it as necessary. 2012 could be very interesting. [JH]

For some additional commentary and analysis, see

1. Simon Chester's The Significance of the BNA Purchase on Slaw, and
2. Greg Lambert's Bloomberg Law Finally Steps Off Manhattan on 3 Geeks.

Friday Fun: Congress Considers Cutting 12 States from the Union to Reduce Spending

The Onion News Network's Brooke Alvarez gets reaction from ordinary Americans. [JH]

Girls (Strike out that) Law Profs Gone Wild

The once anonymous "LawProf" blogger of Inside the Law School Scam has identified himself. As most readers of LLB know, Mark Giangrande reported that he is Colorado Law prof Paul Campos. I don't know if the WSJ Law Blog broke the story but Nathan Koppel's interview of Campos with a Aug. 22, 2011 datelined post, A Q&A With the Creator of 'Inside the Law School Scam', probably was the most widely read post:

WSJ: Why have you written the blog anonymously?

Campos: I didn’t want it to degenerate into an ad hominem conversation. I’ve written on many controversial subjects and have gotten vociferous criticism from authority figures. I wrote an article in The New Republic about how law schools are cooking their employment statistics.

WSJ: Why did you eventually decide to offer hints about your identity?

Campos: It is ironic but my anonymity had given rise to a junior high “Gossip Girl” contest of figuring out who I was, which was even more detrimental to actual debate than straight, ad hominem invective.

Noting that some law prof-bloggers intended to find the information needed to "out" him, Campos recognized his days of anonymity were numbered. In Anonymity, the critical perspective, and taking things personally, Campos wrote on August 19, 2011:

Anonymity isn't my style (this blog is the first anonymous thing I've ever published , and I've published a lot), but I thought I would give it in a try in this context, for at least a little while, as a kind of stylistic experiment.  Anyone who does genuinely critical work soon learns that the classic knee-jerk response on the part of those who don't like the criticism is to attack the messenger rather than the message.  So I thought it be worth authoring this blog more or less anonymously, at least for awhile, to try to keep the focus on the substantive criticisms. I also didn't want to give the impression that these criticisms are directed at my law school in particular: they most certainly aren't. I'm talking about systemic and structural failures, rather than those of particular institutions (let alone particular individuals).

But the law school world being what it is, this has proven more difficult to do than I anticipated.  Law students and lawyers are all familiar with the kind of emotional regression that tends to take place in law school, where the social atmosphere often resembles a particularly gossip-ridden junior high school (Indeed one of my most strident public critics has constructed an entire legal academic career around trafficking in junior-high level gossip). So I'm not sure how much longer maintaining formal anonymity will make sense in the context of this project.

That said, it's still striking how much law professors personalize criticisms that are in no real sense personal, but rather systemic. If most law school teaching is bad and most legal scholarship worthless this can hardly be a result of anything but the results of a system that takes lots of bright, ambitious, otherwise-accomplished people and turns a very large number of them into bad teachers and poor (or perhaps more accurately pseudo-) scholars. If, under present circumstances, we law professors as a group are in many ways scamming our students, that isn't because law professors just happen to be people of poor moral character, but rather because we have, despite our best intentions, ended up embedded in a scam-like social structure.

On Content in the Law Prof Blogosphere. I've read some but certainly not all of the posts critical of the content published in Inside the Law School Scam including posts by law profs who think blogging has no scholarly value but proceed to criticize Campos for being unscholarly. I've also read some of the blog posts Campos published as "LawProf."

So let's just recognize what the content of Inside the Law School Scam is -- it is commentary authored by one law prof who has been a member of the legal academy for a sufficient length of time to have a first-hand perspective to speak his personal opinion about his profession and its institutional setting. Like many of his cohorts, Campos has been a law prof for two decades and joined the legal academy after a very brief stint practicing law.

In any newspaper, the content of his blog posts would be found under the heading of "columnist,"signaling think-pieces in the op-ed section. If "blogging is thinking out loud," which in my opinion, that is all it is, one law prof's commentary and opinions on the legal academy as he sees it. I can think of no law prof blogger critical of Campos who has not also engaged in such activity in the law prof blogosphere.

On Aug. 20, 2011, Campos wrote in An apology:

The whole point of this blog is to help continue a conversation that should have started much sooner than it did about the financial viability, educational and professional value, and ethical status of contemporary legal education.  This is a conversation that requires contributions from all parts of the legal profession in general, and the legal academy in particular, and again, it is heartening to note that, despite the substantive disagreements which exist on these subjects -- which are of course considerable -- and whatever reservations people may have about matters of tone and professional etiquette, that conversation is starting to take place in a sustained and serious way.  (I chose initial anonymity in an effort to keep the argument focused on the substance of the debate, rather than on the hierarchical status and personal qualities of those participating in it.)

Anonymous Commentary in the Law Prof Blogosphere. A comment to Mark's LLB post observed:

So far, most of the arguments against Campos simply say "he's a jerk." I still haven't seen much in the way of substantive engagement with the issues he raises.

Yup. I personally think choosing to post anonymously was a distraction from responsing to Campos' commentary with law prof blogging reply-back commentary. In An apology, Campos adds "it's good to see that in just the last day a couple of law professors whose work regarding problems in contemporary legal education I was already familiar with, and admire, have engaged substantively with issues I'm discussing." Unfortunately, prior to revealing his identity, that was not the typical law prof blogoshere reaction.

Campos joined the legal academy some two decades ago after a brief stint practicing law. He fits the typical tenured law prof profile of his generation. He could sview the hue and cry about the legal academy not producing "practice ready" graduates as a threat to the status quo but he does not.

In The Tenured Law Prof Turned ‘Scamblogger’ Reveals Himself, it sounds like ATL's David Lat wants to elevate Campos to hero status.

Should Professor Campos’s authorship of Inside the Law School Scam come as a surprise? In hindsight, perhaps not. The universe of law professors writing negatively about the legal academy is not huge. For a law prof, saying that the status quo in legal education has problems constitutes a declaration against interest.

Some commenters on our prior post mentioned Professor Brian Tamanaha, who wrote this critique of legal education, “Wake Up, Fellow Law Professors, to the Casualties of Our Enterprise.” Aside from Professor Tamanaha, the other major critic of the law school system — and by “major critic” I mean “major critic,” not someone arguing that the current scheme is imperfect and needs some minor tweaking — would be Paul Campos.

Yes, Tamanaha has repeated criticized the legal academy and in additional posts. See for example the following:

Are Law Professors "Selfless" Teachers and Scholars Engaged in "Public Service"? The Fight Against Change in Law Schools (March 30, 2011){"Frankly, these claims about what we do as law professors are embarrassing. I'm not selfless. Exceedingly few of the many law professors I know strike me as selfless. This is a fantastic job, for which we are generously compensated. Law school deans--many of whom earn between $200,000 and $400,000--are definitely not selfless. We don't model selflessness for our students. And the truth, contrary to Hansen's above assertion, is that many law professors engage in scant interaction with law students, so we do very little modeling of any kind outside of the classroom.")

The Irresponsibility of Law Schools (Oct. 18, 2010) (Law schools thus responded to the worst recession in the legal market in at least two decades by letting in more law students.)

Tamanaha's posts fall into the category of "commentary" about the current state of affairs in the legal academy, critical commentary. But other law profs have done the same and not merely in the vein of "minor tweaking." (Citations omitted but a sampling can be found under the Law School News & Reviews and Law Firm News & Views tags for LLB posts.)

Campos identifies several additional law profs in Law school politics and the English language. However, I disagree with his assessment that "the number of law professors who were talking about these issues in any sort of serious and sustained way could be counted on the fingers of one hand." Since the MacCrate Report, Roy Stuckey et al., Best Practices for Legal Education: A Vision and a Road Map (Clinical Legal Education Association, 2007) and particularly the Carnegie Foundation's Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007), the issue of legal education reform has been a topic of much debate in the law prof blogoshere as well as in the legal literature (mass media and law journal articles). The critical chorus is substantially louder than the apologists for the status quo who appear to be hiding in their offices under their desks hoping this controversy will just wither away. And it might if it is left to the ABA law school accreditation czars. But see, Mark Giangrande's post, Grassley to ABA: I'm Not Going Away That Easily and my Who Ultimately is Master of the Domain? (ABA responds to Senator Boxer's request for information).

Lat writes "How are Professor Campos’s fellow law professors reacting? We’ve collected some links at the end of this post. It’s fair to say, though, that the general consensus is negative, at least among law profs. (Not surprisingly, law students and practicing lawyers, like Scott Greenfield, feel differently.)" ATL also launched a poll asking readers about their opinion about Professor Campos "aka LawProf of Inside the Law School Scam." Not surprisingly, 75% view Campos favorably or very favorably.

Is "Thinking Out Loud" in the Blogosphere Heroic? However, Lat appears to want to make Campos out to  be some sort of "major critic." I don't think so. In this case ATL needs to do its homework. Just because ATL finds a kindred spirit for its own criticism of the legal academy, doesn't make Campos heroic. Do note, I do not recall Campos ever claiming this status in any Inside the Law School Scam posts I have read. Campos has even admitted that he is a late arrival to the party debate about reforming legal education:

I certainly never intended to give the impression that I was the first person in the legal academy to raise these issues. (Indeed, as I've noted a couple of times, until about 18 months ago I was embarrassingly clueless about many of the most basic economic facts regarding law school budgets, student debt loads, and the employment situation for recent graduates, even at my own school).

Also note, some of the law prof bloggers criticizing Campos have also b-slapped ATL around a time or two or three. Personally I find both blogs interesting reading if their content is accepted as intended, namely commentary.

Law profs are an opinionated lot and by that I mean they have opinions about many matters outside their special areas of legal expertise. I think it comes from being practitioners of critical analysis. Certainly one area of expertise is could be law school administration; the policies and decisions made in the context of law faculty being some form of self-governance. Some, many, whatever, law profs like to think they are running the show, at least until they are criticized for the status quo. Campos readily admits to being clueless about such matters until some 18 months ago. Ah, that would be about the time the ABA started reviewing accreditation standards.

In A Few Thoughts on “LawProf” and Law School Scam Blogs, Orin Kerr writes

The law school scam blogs often overlook the important difference between a law school’s administration and its teaching faculty, and their arguments sometimes miss the mark because of it. In my view, the blogs have some legitimate complaints about the lack of transparency at some law schools; of the way scholarships are structured; and the way tuition is set. Those are important issues. We should talk more about them. But for the most part, decisions about those issues are made by the law school administration instead of the teaching faculty.

...

Building on [the] above, I think the scam blogs should see professors as natural allies on these issues instead of natural enemies. Some of the blogs envision professors as enemies because the professors seem to have a sweet life and students aren’t finding jobs. They reason that professors are scamming students by getting their sweet life based on the students’ suffering. But many of the students are suffering right now mostly because of the weak economy for lawyers. The professors don’t control that economy today any more than they controlled it five years ago when the economy for lawyers was booming.

More broadly, I think there’s less of a gap between the interests of the professors and the students than the blogs imagine. A lot of the professors share the same concerns that the students do. They want law school to be the best value, and to give the best education, and to train students to get the best careers. They’re frustrated by the status quo, and they want to they are open to new ways of doing business. Setting up a bogus faculty-vs-students narrative draws eyeballs to a blog. But it also alienates the group that is most able and willing to enact reforms that could actually improve things.

So here we have a statement of deflection based on some sort of misunderstanding about who really runs the legal academy. It's not law profs; its their appointed deans and university administrators. Kerr is a pretty smart law prof, one who routinely expresses his own opinions frankly on the one of the best damn law prof blogs, The Volokh Conspiracy. Perhaps, he has never voted "yes" to increasing the the number of tenure or tenure-track faculty slots at his law school or at least has never voted "yes" because he was motivated to reduce the all important faculty-to-student ratio metric used in the US News rankings. But "setting up a bogus faculty-vs-students narrative [that] draws eyeballs to a blog," really? The Volokh Conspiracy is one of the most eyeballed blogs in the law prof blogoshere planet. It is not topic-specific and can be a vehicle for discussing this issue, one that would be widely read,

"Alienating" Potential Law Prof Allies, Really? Kerr explains

Students may not be fully aware of the difference between the administration and teaching faculty, but it’s a pretty important one. If you’ll let me paint with a very broad brush, the Dean and Associate Deans run the law school and determine the school’s policies while the professors teach their classes, grade their exams, and write their articles. The kinds of law school policies attacked by the scam blogs are mostly in the realm of law school administration. The professors who make up the teaching faculty usually learn about these things when they read them in the New York Times or Above the Law just like everybody else. That doesn’t mean the professors should escape criticism. But there’s a big difference between the guilt of creating a bad policy and the guilt of not learning that the policy exists where you work.

Campos picks up on Kerr's post in To what extent are law faculty innocent bystanders?:

This is, as far as it goes, a fair point.  But how far does it really go? That comes down to the answer to the question of the extent to which this arrangement -- in which law school deans make, in conjunction with university central administration, most of the big decisions about the cost structure of legal education, while in effect telling the faculty not to worry our pretty little heads about such things -- is something that's imposed on faculty, as opposed to chosen by them, if only by passivity and inertia.

In a nutshell, Campos is telling his colleagues, "time to wake up from your dogmatic slumber!" While admitting that he too has been slumbering. If law profs truely are allies, get over being "alienated" and assume responsiblity.

There Are No Innocent Bystanders. As I have mentioned before, I believe "'truth" is an existential process of unveiling. It is not what one person says. It is the result of exchanging full and frank professional opinions publicly available for all to read... . It is the result of the disclosure of issues that must be addressed and are addressed by multiple professional assessments. There are no innocent bystanders. People will be held accountable for their institution's behavior, their own statements or lack thereof and their own behavior, or lack thereof. We all have seen this regularly in the context of AALL and vendors but it is not an isolated example. It is also present in the legal academy and its accreditating body with respect to changing a model for legal education that was established and institutionalized in the late 19th century and has gone to such extremes that it is no longer relevant but still entrenched in the 21st century.

Folks can marshall empirical evidence for either side of the legal education reform argument "objectively" (assuming ELS scholars know the limitations of their stats -- some do, some don't; Bill Henderson, for one, does a damn good job on this topic) but writers can publish commentary based on their perspectives which also contribute to the process of unveiling.

Law Profs Gone Wild. Campos is thinking out loud in the blogosphere. I agree that there have been some ad homenim attacks about what he has written in the law prof blogosphere. It's law profs gone wild time as they too think out loud. This reaction is the sort of stuff anyone who has worked in the legal academy knows goes on in the faculty lounge all the time.

A fair amount of the negative law prof reaction to what Campos is saying is because of how he is saying it. In Law school politics and the English language Campos responds:

One thing that has displeased a number of my colleagues throughout the legal academy is what they consider the excessively shrill tone of some of my posts, which have lacked that delicacy and circumspection that marks a well-bred gentleman's discourse, whenever he engages in the unpleasant task of suggesting that all might not be for the best in this the best of all possible worlds.

...

In a crisis of the magnitude to which legal academia is suddenly awakening (one which, of course, law school graduates have been keenly aware of for years now, including well before the present recession, as many of the comments on this blog attest) there is a place for dispensing with intellectual circumlocution, and simply saying things in a straightforward fashion, even though toes will be stepped on and egos will be bruised.

Is there anything wrong will a full and frank conversation? I certainly don't think so. Let's just say that Campos is not following the passive-aggressive behaviorial norm expected from members of the legal academy.

In the WJS Law Blog interview, the following question was asked and answered by Campos:

WSJ: Which of your posts have attracted the most criticism?

Campos: Among academics, the posts about how bad most legal scholarship is. Most law faculties have a lot of people who are reputedly lawyer academics, but they are neither. They know very little about the practice of law and they are not trained as academics in anything like an adequate fashion to do serious academic work. You have something that is neither less filing nor tastes great. So, students end up paying a lot for something they are not getting: an intellectually rigorous experience. Of course, I’m not saying that there are no good academics or lawyers in American law schools.

I'm thinking that struck a nerve with those law profs still enjoying their dogmatic slumber. But, if so, his response resonates with members of the bench and bar who find law journal scholarly publications irrelevant and debt-laden law school grads wondering why they are not "practice ready."

If one views Inside the Law School Scam as commentary, then the content of the posts can be thought-provoking. See, for example:

• The Road to Serfdom (Aug. 24, 2011)
• To what extent are law faculty innocent bystanders? (Aug. 23, 2011)
• Legal academia and the problem of bad faith (Aug. 22, 2011)

Ah well, once again welcome to the law prof blogosphere, Professor Campos, As the World Turns: Welcome to the Blogosphere Inside the Law School Scam. [JH]

Opening: Director, Harris County Law Library, Houston

Harris County Law Library: The Director of the Harris County Law Library is responsible for the administration of the Harris County Law Library which is located at 1019 Congress in downtown Houston, Texas. It serves the judges, attorneys, and litigants of Harris County, Texas. Harris County is the third largest county in the United States. The Law Library has a current staff of eight, and a current annual budget of about $1.5 million. It is a division of the Harris County Attorney’s Office, which provides general oversight and interaction with other county departments including the Budget Office and Commissioners Court. The Director is a practice group level manager in the Office of the County Attorney, participates in County Attorney manager meetings, and reports to the Chief of Staff for the County Attorney.

Duties:  Responsibilities include, but are not limited to, managing the overall operation of the Harris County Law Library, long-range strategic planning, budget development and implementation, acquisition of legal subscriptions and new technologies, supervision of the library staff, and management of the day-to-day operations of the Law Library.The Director will be expected to:Develop and facilitate relationships between relevant stakeholders, including government officials, other law libraries, and local bar associations; Maintain a modern, high quality library that serves both lawyers and non-lawyers with a proper balance between electronic and non-electronic resources; Publicize and promote the Law Library; Oversee training programs for the public, including lawyers and non-lawyers.

Qualifications:  Applicants should have a Masters Degree in Information or Library Science from an ALA accredited graduate school and a J.D. Degree from an ABA accredited law school. Excellent analytical, organizational, interpersonal, oral and written communication skills, a customer-service orientation, and strong people-skills in interacting both with patrons and staff are essential to be successful on the job.

Salary: Depending on experience and qualifications. Includes standard Harris County employee  benefits.

Closing Date: Open until filled. To ensure consideration, submit resume by September 15, 2011

Application Procedure: Please submit your resume via email to:

Robert W. Soard
Chief of Staff/ Executive Assistant County Attorney
Office of Vince Ryan Harris County Attorney
1019 Congress, 15th Floor
Houston, Texas 77002
Phone: (713) 755-3489
Fax: (713) 755-1553
Email: robert.soard(at)cao.hctx.net

Google Drops Some Content and Search Features

Google has made a number of quiet de-enhancements to its news and search services recently.  One, highlighted by ebrandz.com is that the Google News Archives search is no longer available as a direct search, nor will there be any new content added to the project.  Google had digitized many old newspapers from microform and offering them as free search results.  The content that currently exists should still be available through a general search and through the Advanced Search option in Google News.  The latter offers a search box option retrieve articles against a date range.

The Genealogy In Time website laments the loss for obvious reasons, and puts the blame on a combination of complaints from newspaper publishers and a shift of publishers to the Apple iPad platform.  Never mind that much of this material is not in copyright any more.  The site suggests that anyone who knows a newspaper by name and date can use this page to browse.  Some of the content goes way back.  Issues of the Glasgow Herald start at January 17, 1806 and end at February 17, 1990.  That's 42,868 issues.  Results appear as resizeable images.  The quality of each image, not unexpectedly, varies, though most are readable.  Anyone who has ever used microforms of older documents would not be surprised at this.  Google does have a link on the page where users can flag images as unreadable.  I'm not sure that would mean anything now with the discontinuance of the archive project.  It is, as they say, better than nothing.

Another search enhancement that seems to have disappeared is Google Government search.  There was a dedicated search page that was hardly promoted by Google at the url http://www.google.com/unclesam that now redirects back to the main search page.  It was useful as the native search in some government web sites is woefully inadequate for finding materials.  I'm talking to you FCC, FTC, et al.  Google Government search was a nice alternative that weeded out the non-government junk.  The alternative now is to use the Advanced Search page and limit search to a specific domain such as .gov or fcc.gov.  

While we're on the subject of advanced search in Google, note that the option for Advanced Search no longer appears on the main Google page.  You can still get there by going to http://www.google.com/advanced_search.  The option still appears next to the search box on a results page for a previous search.  Advanced Search has been vastly dumbed down simplified in its filtering options, suggesting that Google thinks its omnivorous general search is good enough.  The filter that limits search by domain or site is still there for the time being.  I'm not sure I would call any of this progress.  [MG]

Bloomberg To Acquire BNA!

I've written that I thought Bloomberg Law should acquire BNA. In Philly, I even asked BLaw execs if I would get a "finder's fee" if "we could make that happen," LOL. It just makes sense. BNA only has about 1% of the world market and Bloomberg Law is light on secondary legal literature. Its topical analytical reports were replicating what BNA has done for years and BNA's treatises are "quality-proven" by being written by practitioners who have a vested interest in "getting it right" because their reputations are on the line (and oftentimes with supplements drafted by ABA sections; unlike "By Editorial Staff" working in an information factory) in business and law practice areas BLaw is targeting for its online user pop. So two premium legal publishers are joined as one. Too soon to say what will happen to BNA but not too soon to say, watch out Wolters Kluwer, your world has changed! 

Greg Lambert is I think the first to report in the law librarian blogosphere that Bloomberg is going to acquire BNA for $990 Million. Well, damnit all to hell, there goes my retirement nestegg! See Greg's posts, Bloomberg & BNA — Q&A's Related to Acquisition and Breaking News: Bloomberg is Acquiring BNA for $990 Million for details. [JH]

Friday Fun on Thursday: Because my head is in the cloud and I forgot what I was going to blog about today

From The Colbert Report: "Technology turns people into empty flesh terminals that rely on it for all their ideas, memories and relationships." [JH]

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Opening: Electronic Legal Information Specialist, Bilzin Sumberg, Miami, FL

Description: Bilzin Sumberg Baena Price & Axel is seeking a tech savvy Legal Information Specialist with strong interpersonal skills.  Reporting to the Director of Library and Knowledge Management, the successful candidate will conduct basic legal research as well as advise and assist in developing and maintaining the Library's technology applications.

The ideal candidate will be responsible for a multitude of duties, including but not limited to:

• Content entry, maintenance, and continued development of key areas of the firm's SharePoint Portal
• Training and promoting efficient use of research tools including, Westlaw, WestKM, Westcheck, Onelog and the firm's SharePoint Portal
• Responding to patron requests by identifying and locating information to meet their needs, including analysis and synthesis information to solve problems under tight deadlines and fluctuating work loads
• Troubleshooting and monitoring electronic library resources usage and providing reports using Onelog password and resource management system
• Coordinating vendor trainings and demonstrations
• Receiving/Processing library mail, routing library materials
• Performing and understanding all duties of the library staff including Cataloging, Interlibrary loan, Serials (EOS Library system)
• Providing monthly reports of library metrics in key areas
• Providing back-up for due diligence research librarian

Desired Education, Skills and Experience:

• Masters degree in Library and Information Science from a program accredited by the American Library Association
• Strong Technical Skills
• Excellent organizational skills, attention to detail and strong written and oral communication skills
• Experience with basic legal research
• Knowledge of EOS library catalog
• Experience and familiarity with use of document management systems and knowledge management
• Proficient in Microsoft Office and SharePoint applications
• Experience working in a law library/corporate library setting preferred

Competitive Salary and Relocation Assistance Available 

Read more about the library here.

Interested candidates should submit a resume, cover letter and salary requirements to Jackie Fleites, Director of Human Resources, at jfleites(at)bilzin.com.