Law Librarian Blog

Marybeth Peters Appointed to CCC's Board of Directors

See the Copyright Clearance Center’s press release, Former US Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters Named to Copyright Clearance Center's Board of Directors, for details. [JH]

Getting That Law Job is Not Enough Anymore

The legal employment market has even more insecurity associated with it, according to this article in Fortune.  It appears that getting that law job in a down market doesn't make one set for life.  Firms are beginning to adopt merit-based compensation and promotion standards.  That contrasts with what the article describes as "lockstep promotions" and automatic pay increases for associates, culminating in a partnership after 8 years.  One of the other factors in the Milbank hook-up with Harvard to train associates in the business of law practice was that not everyone in the firm was going to make partner.  Enhancing an associate's career skills works to enhance their attractability for other legal opportunities and, I guess, acts as a consolation prize when the associate is cut loose.

Some of the driving factors to all of this are clients questioning how fees are calculated, and a firm's increased reliance on technology to lower internal costs.  What this means, then, is that getting that job upon graduation isn't the end of the struggle for a law student.  Your career is not assured.  It seems that the law business is not immune to competition for delivering cost effective legal services.  Should the Career Services office need to disclose that?  [MG]

Remember When Automated Factories Were Considered Far-Fetched: IBM's Watson, the Law Firm's New "Digital Associate" (and Digital Librarian)?

In a recent NLJ think piece titled Why 'Watson' matters to lawyers: Computer's artificial intelligence could be a boon to legal research — and might even come in handy in the courtroom, Robert C. Weber, IBM's senior vice president, legal and regulatory affairs, and general counsel, wrote:

Imagine a new kind of legal research system that can gather much of the information you need to do your job — a digital associate, if you will. With the technology underlying Watson, called Deep QA, you could have a vast, self-contained database loaded with all of the internal and external information related to your daily tasks, whether you're preparing for litigation, protecting intellectual property, writing contracts or negotiating an acquisition. Pose a question and, in milliseconds, Deep QA can analyze hundreds of millions of pages of content and mine them for facts and conclusions — in about the time it takes to answer a question on a quiz show.

At IBM, we're just starting to explore about how Deep QA can be harnessed by lawyers. (We're pretty sure it would do quite well in a multistate bar exam!) But already it's becoming clear that this technology will be useful in a couple of ways: for gathering facts and identifying ideas when building legal arguments. The technology might even come in handy, near real-time, in the courtroom. If a witness says something that doesn't seem credible, you can have an associate check it for accuracy on the spot.

By all accounts, IBM is serious about Watson's Deep QA AI's applicability to law. Consequences?  On WSJ Law Blog, Ashby Jones writes about the threat of IBM's digital associates:

anyone who’s worked as a young law firm associate knows that much of what young associates do is grunt work, tracking down cases and scanning through documents. Perhaps Watson won’t replace first-year associates, but it might cut down on law firms’ need to have so many.

Quoted from The Next Threat to Associate Hiring? It’s Elementary, My Dear . . ..

In I, For One, DO NOT Welcome Our New Computer Overlords, ATL's Elie Mystal adds

When will law schools reconsider the way they are training law students, so that their graduates can stay a step ahead of the machines? The deans better come up with something — and fast. “Watson” is too smart to take on six figures of non-dischargeable debt for an obsolete education.

See also Jason Eiseman's video post: What IBM's Watson Means for Law Librarians.

Is Watson too smart for WEXIS? More about Watson on IBM's site. Hey, IBM, can I feed Watson every piece of marketing literature, pricing schemes and licenses I've received from our legal publishing vendors over the course of the last year? For starters, let's see what Watson has to say about WestlawNext?

Come to think about it, if Watson even comes close to reaching its AI potential for law, who is going to need online legal search and professional legal services productivity applications from WEXIS? Remember when humans did the welding in now automated former rust-belt assembly factories? Automated factories were once thought far-fetched fantasies... .

Come to think about it, part two. If Watson can pass the MBE, Watson might be better qualified to teach law in the legal academy than law profs.

We live in "interesting times;" take nothing for granted. Sure some of the above comments can be characterized as "good fun" speculation. But those of us who don't ever come close to qualifying as "digital natives" remember hearing about the hobbyist micro-computing movement going on in what's now know as Silicon Valley, thinking the claims based on processing power and memory capacity was too far-fetched at the then current start of the technology to produce anything useful as we walked over to the Computing Lab to submit our punch cards to the techie at the window for scheduling IBM mainframe time back when we were in library school during the dark ages of late 1970s.

"Every silver lining's got a touch of grey." Time for the Grateful Dead. "We will get by." [JH]

Friday Fun: Early Adopters Prepare for Latest Must-Have Apple Gadget, the iHand

First adopters are already cutting off their hands in preparation for the release of the latest must-have Apple gadget, the sleek new iHand, reports the Onion News Network. [JH]

Apple Fans Chopping Off Hands In Anticipation Of New iHand

What's Wrong with One of These WEXIS Screen Captures?

The following screen captures from two very expensive online legal search vendors also known as Westlaw and Lexis were taken at 1:00 PM Eastern time, February 17, 2011 CE. [JH]

FCIL-SIS Now Accepting Applications for the 2011 FCIL Schaffer Grant for Foreign Law Librarians

The Foreign, Comparative and International Law-Special Interest Section (FCIL-SIS) of the American Association of Law Libraries is now accepting applications for the 2011 FCIL Schaffer Grant for Foreign Law Librarians. The FCIL Schaffer Grant for the http://www.aallnet.org/events/ in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (July 23-26, 2011), provides a waiver of the AALL Annual Meeting full registration fee and a grant of a minimum $2,000 to assist with accommodations and travel costs.

Applicants must be law librarians or other professionals working in the legal information field, currently employed in countries other than the United States, and with significant responsibility for the organization, preservation, or provision of legal information. The application deadline is March 1, 2011. The Grant Committee will not consider late or incomplete applications.

Details regarding the FCIL Schaffer Grant for Foreign Law Librarians as well as the application form can be found at: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/fcilsis/grants.html

Please feel free to contact the 2011 FCIL Schaffer Grant for Foreign Law Librarians Selection Committee Chair, Teresa Miguel at teresa.miguel(at)yale.edu or another committee member (Ms. Lucie Olejnikova, lolejnikova(at)law.pace.edu and Mr. Roy Sturgeon, rsturgeo(at)tulane.edu) if you have any questions about the 2011 FCIL Schaffer Grant for Foreign Law Librarians. [JH}
 

Kindle eBooks Get Pagination While Keepers of Official Citation Style Offer Advice on How to Cite eBooks

"To provide guidance for the e-book world, the three major keepers of academic-citation style—the Modern Language Association's MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, the American Psychological Association, and the University of Chicago Press, publisher of The Chicago Manual of Style—have taken steps to answer the question of how to cite e-books," writes Tushar Rae for The Chronicle. See E-Books' Varied Formats Make Citations a Mess for Scholars: Kindle, Nook, and other devices put the same text on different pages.

Betanews reports that on Feb. 7, 2011 Amazon pre-released a software update for Kindle e-readers running the 3.0 software which adds page numbers that match Kindle books with their print counterparts. See Kindle gets real page numbers; better note, highlight & review sharing. [JH]

49 Conn.Supp. 613: Accurate Case Law on Westlaw?

In case you missed Chris Graesser's late yesterday afternoon heads-up on law-lib, here it is:

FYI, Westlaw changed the text of this Conn. Case [49 Conn.Supp. 613] even though the official reporter has not. Someone petitioned to have their name excised from the case. The court administrator denied the petition, but Westlaw went ahead and changed it. Just an illustration of how we can't necessarily assume that Westlaw, Lexis or any other online reporter are providing the authentic version of case law.

It's also an illustration of Nick Holmes' point that we need free access to good law data. See his Accessible Law post on VoxPopuLII. [JH]

Making Mobile Services Work for Your Library: ALA TechSource Workshop on March 9th

Cody Hanson, Web Architect and User Experience Analyst at the University of Minnesota Libraries, will be the instructor for an upcoming ALA TechSource workshop on providing library services for mobile devices. It sounds like an interesting follow-up to LawLibCom's Feb. 11, 2011 episode on mobile technologies for libraries. If you missed it you can find LawLibCon's archived episodes on the Law Librarian Conversations home page and on iTunes as a podcast.

This ALA TechSource Workshop will be conducted on Wednesday, March 9, 2011, 2:30pm – 4:00pm Eastern. Topic covered:

• The landscape of mobile device usage and smartphone adoption
• The mobile OS marketplace
• Strategies for assessing your library's mobile-friendliness
• Strategies for beginning to offer mobile services
• Issues of concern for libraries in mobile information access

You can register for his ALA TechSource Workshop ($50.00) at the ALA Store here.

Hat tip to the ALA TechSource Blog post which notes that Hanson's issue of Library Technology Reports on this topic will be forthcoming later this month. [JH]

Top Law Schools for SCOTUS Clerkships and Tenure-Track Faculty Appointments

From Leiter's Law School Rankings:

SCOTUS Clerkships: "This study covers the 2000 through 2010 terms (the 2000-2007 results are here), and reports the total number of clerks hired from each law school by a justice of the Court."

Law School Faculty Appointments: "This study identifies the law school alma mater (J.D. only) of tenure-stream academic faculty at 43 leading law faculties who graduated since 1995."

[JH]

Borders Releases List of Stores Closed in Bankruptcy Proceeding

Just sad.  Here's the list of locations and addresses:   Download Borders-closings.  [MG]

ABA Tells States to Lay Off Legal Clinics

The ABA House of Delegates passed a resolution on Monday supporting the independence of clinical education programs.  Resolution 100A was passed as a response to attempts by the Maryland and Louisiana legislatures to limit the activities of legal clinics associated with universities that received public funds.  These took the form of probing into client lists or information normally perceived as confidential, or limiting the forms of suit the clinics could initiate on behalf of their clients.  The legislative attempts were a reaction to often successful pollution control suits brought against high profile defendants who had lobbying connections to the legislature.  The Maryland and Louisiana efforts failed.  

The ABA resolution is laudable as a statement that legislatures and other players should lay off interfering with a legal clinic's operations.  I sadly suspect, however, that even as a policy statement coming from an organization with the stature of the ABA, there will likely be future attempts to do exactly the same thing if a large company gets annoyed by a clinic led lawsuit.  

The legislatures in question had a number of options at hand, such as weakening pollution laws on behalf of the aggrieved companies.  That would have been politically untenable I suppose, so trying to limit the clinics was the more expedient solution to the "problem."  Legal clinics benefit law students by giving them something akin to real world experience in practice, something they rarely get in their substantive law classes.  One of the lessons could conceivably be losing when the cause isn't justified under the law.  That's a risk analysis the clinic undertakes (or should) before it files a suit.  It's the same analysis any lawyer would undertake before filing suit.  

From my perspective, the laws under which clinics file their actions are written for everybody to whom they apply.  The courts are perfectly capable of sorting out who is in violation, or if a suit is unmerited.  It shouldn't matter if the suit is brought by a public entity, a legal clinic, a private citizen, or whoever.  If a legislature doesn't like the fact that a suit is successful, it should change the law so the outcome is different and not interfere with the ability to bring the suit.  More power to the ABA and its resolution if it adds to the body of common sense that opposes these clumsy attempts to limit the application of law.  [MG]

Print Format Switcheroos: Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis Respond to CRIV Questions

Check out the written replies to the below-listed questions in CRIV chair Rob Myers' Reasons behind the Rise of Print Format Changes Implemented by Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, The CRIV Sheet, Feb. 2011 at 5.

1. What is the main force that drives a decision to change a publication’s print format to another print format?

2. How are titles selected to undergo a format change?

3. If a format change is based on customer feedback, what is the process for collecting and evaluating customer feedback?

4. Is there a place on your website where librarians can find out ahead of time about upcoming format changes (and the likely date the change will take place)? If not, would you consider creating such a place (e.g., a cataloger’s corner)?

5. Is a list of titles that have undergone format changes or will be undergoing format changes presently available? Would you be willing to supply a copy of the list?

6. If there is not a list, is there a way for libraries to determine which titles may be undergoing a format change (i.e., any title that is not already a multivolume loose-leaf set will become a loose-leaf set in the case of LexisNexis, or any title that is a loose-leaf with annual supplement will become an annual pamphlet in the case of Thomson Reuters/West)?

7. Would it be possible to disclose exactly what has been updated in a revised edition, supplement, or loose-leaf update? (There are ways this could be done, including a more detailed explanation of sections affected/content added in the filing instructions, or by requiring publishers to give an estimate of the percentage of new content in a given update.)

8. Are publishers aware—or is any consideration given—to the budgetary impact format changes have on libraries and library staffs? (The impact is limited not just to the cost of the material but also includes time and money involved with cataloging, labeling, and processing the new material and withdrawing or labeling the prior material “superseded” or “not current.”)

9. Is there any other information you would like to share that would help librarians understand the need and rationale for changing a title’s format?

10. Thomson Reuters has included a customer survey questionnaire when shipping a new pamphlet formatted title. While this is appreciated, it seems to put the cart before the horse as the product has already undergone the format change. Will Thomson Reuters actually revise a product back to its previous format if it receives enough negative responses?

Thomson Reuters' reply to the last question:

We are comfortable that we capture enough customer, author, and editor feedback before any title undergoes a format change and are confident that this feedback effectively reflects customer preferences.

In other words, the answer is "no." [JH]

Guide to Stripping DRM from eBook Formats for Personal Use

Tired of eReader-dependent DRM-ed eBook formats? Ebook Formats, DRM and You — A Guide for the Perplexed identifies the tools and steps to execute to strip out DRM using Calibre. Not hard to do.

Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 users who don’t want to use Calibre can use the DeDRM AppleScript, see DeDRM AppleScript for Mac OS X 10.5, 10.6. Windows users who don’t want to use Calibre will need to install Python and PyCrypto and use either the DeDRM_WinApp tool or stand-alone tools. See Windows, Python, Ebooks and DRM.

Hat tip to Charlie Sorrel's post on Wired's Gadget Lab. [JH]

There is No Constitutional Right to Cite Unpublished Opinions

The federal courts liberalized their rules several years ago by allowing citation to unpublished opinions released after January 1, 2007.  Opinions prior to that date are still un-citable in the federal courts.  The states, on the other hand, still have rules that bar citation when an opinion is designated as unpublished.  California's rule to this effect is challenged from time to time.  The latest failed attempt comes via an unpublished opinion from the Northern District of California issued at the end of January.

The case is Lifschitz v. George.  Attorney Eric Lifschitz brought this suit on First Amendment and Due Process grounds, alleging that the rules bar him and other attorneys from petitioning the government by denying the use of unpublished opinions.  The District Court ruled that the First Amendment allegations are sufficient enough to get past the standing requirement of alleging an injury.  However, that is about the best Lifschitz gets from the Court.

The Judge rejected the prior restraint and right to petition the governments arguments as she notes that there is nothing in the rule preventing counsel from arguing the ideas and concepts contained in unpublished opinions.  Counsel simply may not cite them as authority or precedent under the rule.  Moreover, the California Supreme Court has the authority to organize its precedent in an orderly fashion by deciding which decisions are precedential and which are not.

The violation of due process was alleged by citing the rule allowing the  petition to the California courts for a change in publication status as too burdensome.  The rule requires a petitioner to ask the court to publish the opinion within 20 days after it is filed.  That time frame, it is alleged, is too short a time to determine whether the case would be a valuable precedent in future litigation.  California argued that there is no constitutional right to cite unpublished opinions.  The Court agreed, stating further that even if the right existed, the 20 period for determining publication status was reasonable.  The case was dismissed with prejudice.  Download the Lifschitz Case (10-02107).  [MG]

Why is someone going to pay $700 to have a lawyer prepare a will when they can get it for $49 online?

That question was asked by Frederic Ury, president–elect of the National Conference of Bar Presidents, during the American Bar Foundation-sponsored panel discussion on "The Future of Lawyering" at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Atlanta last Saturday. Quoting from Mark Curriden's ABAJ story, Future of Law Panel: Change With the Times or Find Another Line of Business. For more, see Jim Levy's Legal Skills Prof Blog post, ABA panel on "Future of Lawyering" says law schools need to rethink legal education. [JH]

News Flash: AALL Officially Announces When the Vendor Colloquium Will Take Place

Yup, in about two weeks from now. The Vendor Colloquium is set to take place on  February 28 - March 1, 2011 at the "Lodge in Oak Brook." Being a born and bred Chicagoan, I think our association is referring to the following location:

Enter this once-private retreat to experience an Oak Brook hotel unlike any other. The Hyatt Lodge at McDonald’s Campus offers exemplary amenities in an unparalleled setting. Featuring the renowned event venues of Hamburger University, acres of lush forestry filled with an outdoor team challenge adventure course and extensive choices for fun, our Oak Brook IL hotel is ideal for VIP meetings, team-building exercises, weekend conferences, or simply as an intriguing escape from your average getaway.

Who's picking up this tab? Will the attendees receive an AALL bag full of team-building goodies? I'm thinking yoga mats printed with the AALL logo... .

According to the recently posted agenda, the Law Librarian of Congress, Roberta Schaffer will be the keynote speaker and Maureen Sullivan, an "organizational development consultant" will serve as "facilitator." Don't know about you but this is sounding very much like "retreat." Also, don't know about you but the last time I was required to participate one of those "retreats," day two was cancelled because the "facilitator" simply couldn't "take it." In this case, I'm sure she is well paid to stay the course, to not turn into a hamburger patty.

Some 40 folks will be in attendance. According to my very quick back-of-the envelope calculations the headcount is:

Library Institutional Representatives: 12

• 4 Public Sector (2 county, 1 state and 1 federal court library but no federal or state agencies)
• 4 Private Sector (Law firms but no corporate legal department librarians)
• 4 Academic Law Library Sector (3 public law schools and 1 private law school)

Vendor Representatives: 16

• BNA: 3
• Hein: 3
• LexisNexis: 3
• Thomson Reuters: 4
• Wolter Kluwers: 3

Stakeholder Representatives: 5

Stakeholders being representatives, one each, from the Association of Legal Administrators, CALI, Cornell LII, Supreme Court of Ohio, and Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Actually a VP of Thomson Reuters is listed as a "stakeholder" for the Legal Marketing Association but I have counted him as a TR representative. Call me cynical.

AALL Officials and Employees: 5

The usual cast of characters including our president, vice-president, vice-president-elect, executive director and official compensated vendor liasion.

Of course, some of the selected library institutional representatives once served in official AALL capacities but let's not hold that against them because some are actually fed up with the current state of affairs. There are several institutional representatives, "stakeholders" and vendor representatives (but not all) who may discuss matters about the current state on the provision of commercial and open source legal resources in an open and frank manner but this cast of characters has a couple of noteworthy omissions.

Where are the innovators? Those folks who are in the midst of transforming legal information services and products like eTrade transformed financial services. In particular, I thinking about Fastcase's CEO Ed Walters and AALL's unofficial persona non grata stakeholder Carl Malamud of Law.Gov. I'm also wondering why no corporate legal departments are represented? Why no federal or state agencies, too.

I'm also thinking that instead of hiring a professional facilitator, wouldn't it have been better to hire an indusry analyst like Outsell's David Curle to serve as moderator? Wouldn't someone with a well-informed perspective on the state of the professional legal services vendor industry better serve this event than someone  whose expertise is, well, "how do you feel about that?" If our association is going to spend money, let's invest it wisely.

But, perhaps, most importantly, why is this a behind-closed-doors meeting. It's the 21st century but there is no mention that this event will be webcast live or even archived for later viewing. Our association knows about this Internet thing, right? Who is afraid of real-time tweeting as the event proceeds. I serious doubt it is the vendors, at least not the ones who will be explaining the 21st century new normal. The event "should be interesting" but we who represent our institutions by membership in AALL who will not be in attendance will never know. Perhaps some will tweet the proceedings.

At best, I expect we will read a summary of the proceedings, one that is sufficiently uninformative to allow us to form our own conclusion. Of course, this event could have been held at Philly 2011 for all to attend but our association is trying to address issues in a timely matter. Ah well, the worst recession since the 1930s started in late 2007 and we have been dealing with the budgetary consequences since at least 2009. What's a year or two or three for our association to deal with this. 

Chicago's O'Hare or Midway Airport. And after this meeting, it's back to Chicago for the Spring 2011 Executive Board meeting from March 24, 2011 to March 26, 2011 at the Union League Club in Chicago. No yoga mats for that one. [JH]

New Edition of Legal Research Methods in a Modern World

Legal Research Methods in a Modern World: A Coursebook, 3d ed., by J. Paul Lomio, Henrik Spang-Hanssen and George D. Wilson (DJØF Publishing, Feb. 2011) has been published. This coursebook is the first legal research guide that addresses the internationalization and globalization of both the new curriculum for law schools (especially in the U.S.) and the changing practice of law. From the book's companion website:

Legal Research Methods in a Modern World: A Coursebook is a revised and expanded edition of "Legal Research Methods in the U.S. and Europe", 2nd edition. With the inclusion of chapters on China, Russia, England, and on researching foreign law generally, the title has been changed to reflect the broader scope. It is intended to be used as a coursebook for several alternative courses on legal research.

As for American legal research, it explains the impacts and effects of the major changes and developments that have occurred very recently, including the introduction of Bloomberg Law, WestlawNext and the revolutionary Law.gov movement.

You can check out the Table of Contents here. Copies will soon be available from Amazon and International Specialized Book Services.

In announcing the publication of this new edition, Paul Lomio notes in his Legal Research Plus post that "[n]ew to this edition, in addition to other updates, is the inclusion of research exercises that we have found most useful from [our advanced legal research class]. I did not include the answers — because I hope to continue to use these exercises — but I would be very happy to share the answers and my thoughts on approaches with other instructors of legal research." [JH]

Harvard to Train Milbank Associates

News came from Cambridge last week that associates at prestigious firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadly & McCloy will be sent to Harvard Law for yearly training on business, finance, law, management skills, client relationships, and other practical aspects to the business of law.  The program will run eight days a year for seven years.  Mel Immergut, Chairman of Milbank, is quoted in the Harvard press release as saying “We believe that our clients need lawyers who have been trained in both business and law at the highest level, with a real-world practical understanding of the commercial problems that they face.”  Harvard Law Dean Martha Minnow is quoted as well:  "Ultimately, this will benefit our own students, since our faculty will be able to incorporate the latest real-world perspectives into what they teach.”  And then there is this statement from the press release:  "Through this program, Milbank associates will develop the multifaceted expertise and skills that general counsels expect their legal advisors to possess."

Doesn't this imply that lawyers freshly minted from law school aren't getting the basic practical skills they need to go into practice while in the program?  Doesn't this also imply that law faculty tend to focus on substantive law and not the practical skills graduates need in the real world?  Far be it for me to question the quality of a Harvard education.  The school is ranked very high for obvious reasons. 

It still makes me wonder if this is what a top firm has to do to get its associates up to speed, then what does that mean for graduates of the lesser lights in the law education business?  It's a common statement from firm librarians that new associates are lacking in research and writing skills.  The culture at firms is for the associates to learn the lawyering skill on the job, to varying degrees of satisfaction.  The real question is if a school like Harvard can set up a program to teach these things after the fact, why can't at least some of these skills be taught in the regular curriculum?  Or maybe there should be an optional semester after the bar exam that focuses in on practice skills and setting up or settling into practice.  It might make an easier transition from law school into the real world for some students.  [MG]

CALI Dues Goes Up -- and Up Again (but at least they told us)

The Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, popularly known as CALI, announced a dues increase for its members this past week.  In July of this year, dues will jump $1250 from $5000 to $6250.  There will be another jump of $1250 in 2012, making the 2012 dues a total of $7500.  This caused a bit of concern among the bill payers out there that deserves some mention.  Afterall, it is a 50% increase over the course of two years.

At the CALI breakfast meeting at AALS in San Francisco last month, a few of the Board members mentioned that dues were going to be discussed at their board meeting.  I told them then, and I will say it again, I support a dues increase.  That being said, I was surprised at the large percentage increase. Can you imagine a vendor raising its prices by 50% over two years... Oh, wait.  You don't have to imagine, do you?  But there are some big differences.

First, CALI isn't quite a vendor.  CALI is a consortium to which most law schools are members.  Second, members get a lot of good 'stuff' for their dues.  CALI really is the only organization who is actively pursuing, testing, and building advanced tools and content for the purpose of legal education.  And, believe me, we need all the help we can get.  Third, they are not just increasing due to support past efforts.  CALI is going to provide us with MORE services than we already get.  How often does that happen these days anyway?  Fourth, they told us!  It is just Februrary and we already know what the bill is going to be for the next two years.  I really appreciate the heads up because I usually just get a bill with a larger dollar amount from vendors.  No explanation, no 'thank you' for your support, and no explanation of why the bill went up. 

Yet, it still is a 50% increase.  It is true that 50% of $5000 really is not an extraordinary dollar amount in the scheme of things.  Though, I will admit, the dollar amount is creeping a bit high.  

One suggestion on the list servs was to offer schools an a la carte menu and let them purchase only what the school perceives as needed or desired.  I would rather see some sort of sliding scale to ensure that all law students and professors have the opportunity to take advantage the opportunities that CALI offers.  Though librarians have a good idea of what CALI resources people will use and not use (thanks to the statistics that CALI provides), curtailing access to possibilities hampers the bold and creative.

Perhaps the dues could be a percentage of what the school spends on library acquisitions for any given year.  Or maybe it could be a per student charge.  Or, perhaps CALI can offer credit to schools that contribute to the eLangdell e-casebook project.

Many libraries are struggling and I think a big raise like this can cause problems.  One board member suggests making your situation known to John Mayer (Exec. Director) if you will experience problems meeting the new membership dues.  As I start working on our library budget this week and sweat over my guesstamits for price increases from certain vendors, I will be grateful for the early heads up that CALI gave us this year.(VS)