Law Librarian Blog

Friday Fun: "Everybody is going to love today"

From the YouTube description: "I set my computer to take a picture every 30 seconds to document a normal day of law school." [JH]

Friday Fun: "BE QUIET, THIS IS A LIBRARY!"

As a quick follow-up to OREO's "Whisper Fight" in a Library Super Bowl 2013 commercial, here is The Two Ronnies classic "Shouting in the Library" skit. [JH]

Friday Fun: "It's a Green Book"

And how often have we heard a patron say "I remember the book was [insert color]"? [JH]

Friday Fun: The Corporate Amplication Device of AALL's "Vendor Partners" and Their (But Not Our) Business Plans

If loudness equals power (and it does), how do law library institutional buyers get loud enough to drown out the nonsense of our association's so-called "vendor partners" while AALL officially knees down before the altar of vendor business plans to offer sacrifices as well as to alter, as in to castrate, to spay, their own library, not vendor, member institutions' business plans? Both are something other library associations refuse to do because they neither sacrifice nor try to silence castrate their member insitutional buyers' business plans. They loudly advocate for their institutional buyers and patrons.

Our so-called vendor partners are "whales." So far AALL is nothing more than "whale louse". [JH]

Friday Fun: TED Onion Talks Session on Using Social Media as a Marketing Tool

From the YouTube description for this episode in The Onion's Onion Talk series of TED Talk spoofs:

The world's most successful companies know that social media is a powerful marketing tool, and Cameron Hughes knows how to make social marketing even more effective: by never injecting an ounce of effort into it.

[JH]

Friday Fun: Info Antics, Not Metrics; Say It Ain't So, Seto

Quoting from Theodore Seto's (Loyola Law School, Los Angeles) Where Do Partners Come From?, 62 Journal of Legal Education 242 (Nov. 2012):

You are a hiring partner. You need to spend your recruiting dollars as efficiently as possible. Which law schools offer the largest pools of potential future partners for you and your firm to explore?

You are applying to law school. Your long-term ambition is to become a partner in a national law firm in a certain city. Which schools may increase your chances of realizing that ambition?

To date, no published study has attempted to answer the question: Which law schools produce the largest numbers of partners at national law firms? This article is intended to fill that gap.

To fill that gap, how? According to Pepperdine Law Prof Robert Anderson's Witnesseth: Law, Deals & Data blog post, Bloated Is Better for Law School Rankings, here's how:

The new Theodore P. Seto ranking of law schools is in large measure a reincarnation of the notorious Thomas M. Cooley’s Law School’s ranking of law schools.

Ouch! See also Anderson's Where Partners Really Come From... and A Last Word on the Seto Rankings. In some respects, Anderson's take on Seto's ranking is mild compared to what Paul Campos has to say in his deconstruction of Seto's article at Partnership or death? and A few more points about the Seto partnership study.

Instead of a reference to Shoeless Joe Jackson, here's Weezer. [JH]

Friday Fun: Info Antics, Not Metrics; When Counting Mickey Mouse Clicks Trump Content Analysis

Recently, fatally flawed number crunching antics that appears to be unique to tax profs when they venture outside of their realm of expertise have been in the law prof blogosphere spotlight. For example, Chicago Law prof Brian Leiter comments on the latest release in Paul Caron's ritual of publishing law prof blog traffic rankings :

Breaking Development: Actual Law Blog Makes the "Top 5" in Traffic Rankings... ...of blogs by law professors.  The honor goes to a blog on patent law, no less!  Meanwhile, the key to having a popular blog remains simple:  be a right-wing crazy or blog about philosophy.

In other words, only one of the so-called "Top 5" ranked blogs based on Caron's info antics has anything to do with publishing legal content and analysis by law profs. Just being a "law prof" is good enough. Let's add that studies have shown that about 50% of web traffic, including blogs, can be attributed to robots, etc. Meaning only about one-half of logged traffic can be attributed to humans.

Then there is Caron's latest mouse click counts for his SSRN download ranking for tax profs. Paul Campos spots the problem when raw data trumps content analysis:

[Being a tax prof] Seto's high ranking is solely a product of the fact that three quarters of his SSRN downloads come from three papers that have nothing to do with tax law (this fact is significant in this context because tax papers are written for a highly specialized audience).

Law professorial ego being what it is, Mickey Mouse info antics such as the above examples do drive traffic to TaxProf Blog for hot diggity dog faculty lounge fodder. No doubt there will be more in 2013.

But as Elie Mystal noted in his Non-Sequiturs feature for Jan. 3, 2013 about Caron's TaxProf Blog post, The 25 Most Influential People in Legal Education:

I didn’t make this list of the 25 most influential people in legal education. That pisses me off. I’m going to start writing about how people shouldn’t trust legal educators because law schools are only interested in profits and not the employment outcomes of their students. That’ll show ‘em!

Yup, One has to take the risk of ego-brusing by stating an original opinion about something to be influential in any way, shape or form. Good luck trying to find that in TaxProf Blog posts or SSRN "scholarship" in either tax or legal education authored by the "Blog Emperor".[JH]

Friday Fun: How Many Legal Vendor CEOs Will It Take to Change a Light Bulb in 2013?

Five CEOs at Lexis L&P?!

Most of our major legal vendors have more VPs than one finds in the banking industry. Their portfolios of responsibility change so frequently (OK, at least their titles do change -- VP of X becomes VP of Y) that I've begun to wonder how much of invoice-paying law librarians payments goes toward printing new business cards. But five CEOs, really?

This reminds me of an old joke:

How many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb?

Six. One to change the bulb, and five to form a society to preserve the memory of the old light bulb.

Starting the New Year Off. Oh wait. It took six, not five Episcopalians. Lexis L&P may need to hire some superhero as the CEO of the Incredible in 2013 to change the Company's light bulb. I probably should reference The Hulk based on the below video clip. But that stimulates images of the WWE. [JH]

Friday Fun: Giving Scalia the WordRake Treatment

WordRake is a text editing add-on to Microsoft Word that was created to help improve the quality of legal documents such as contracts, memos, briefs and even court opinions. Bob Ambrogi gives a Scalia opinion the WordRake treatment at The WordRake Editing Program Takes on Scalia, Kagan and El Pollo Loco. [JH]

Friday Fun: Career Advice from Justice Sotomayor

"I went to school and studied law and then became a judge." Hat tip to DC Dicta. [JH]

Friday Fun: Guilty or Not Guilty, Stats on Law & Order Episodes

Hat tip to Overthinking It, "where we subject the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve," for its two year crowdsourced effort to collect and analyze the outcomes of all 456 Law & Order episodes. For details, visit The Law and Order Database: All 20 Seasons. [JH]

Friday Fun for a Good Cause Supported by BLaw Staffers: Saluting Legal Icons With Mustaches for Movember

OK, so it's the end of November but it is well worth recognizing that the staff of Bloomberg Law is contributing to a worthy cause. From the YouTube text (video below): 

Each year, during November, a charity called Movember encourages men to grow mustaches to raise money and awareness for men's health issues, specifically prostate and testicular cancer initiatives.

Because of the unique relationship, throughout history, between the American lawyer and the mustache, we salute some of the most famous attorneys to wear a lip rug.

William Howard Taft
Donald Verrilli
Eric Holder
Jan Schlichtmann
Johnnie Cochran
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Alan Dershowitz
Douglas H. Ginsburg
Clarence Thomas
Adam Reposa

The staff of Bloomberg Law is carrying on in this grand tradition of legal cookie dusters. We've been growing our lip toupees all month long in support of men's health. Visit Bloomberg Law's Movember page.

[JH]

Friday Fun on Wednesday: How to cook a turkey like it's 1956

It's better with "real butter." [JH]

Friday Fun: Legal Research, the Silent Movie

This video was YouTube posted on Jan. 12, 2007. Some things have changed since then but not irrelevant hits produced by sloppy research. {JH]

Did Hank The Cat Come In Third In The Virginia Senate Race?

I usually stay away from writing about politics.  The country is polarized politically, more so after last Tuesday’s election results.  There is one election result that caught my eye that is worth mentioning however.  The race for the Senator for the state of Virginia resulted in the election of Tim Kaine over George Allen.  According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hank the Cat likely came in third with possibly as many as 29,000 write-in votes.  We are used to close elections where a handful of votes could swing a major election.  Allen v. Kaine v. Hank anyone?  It’s a great day for feline-Americans everywhere.  I don’t know who might have come in fourth or fifth, but I’d feel pretty stupid by losing to a cat.  I would expect Hank to celebrate his showing with a round of catnip.  Unlike human catnip, it’s legal.  [MG]

Friday Fun: Replace Your Dusty Old Print Edition of EB with This "Definitive Encyclopaedia"

Namely The Onion Book of Known Knowledge: A Definitive Encyclopaedia Of Existing Information (Little, Brown and Company, October 23, 2012). "With hundreds of entries for all 27 letters of the alphabet, THE ONION BOOK OF KNOWN KNOWLEDGE must be purchased immediately to avoid the sting of eternal ignorance." It should come in handy when working the reference desk on Saturdays. [JH]

Friday Fun: The Onion Voter's Guides to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney

The Onion Voter's Guide To Barack Obama

The Onion Voter's Guide To Mitt Romney

JH

Friday Fun: "I'll blow your mind, show you how to find."

Students and faculty from the University of Washington's Information School get their groove on in this clip titled "Librarians Do Gaga." [JH]

Friday Fun: My Roommate, the Law Student Who Needs to Get a Life

And what happens when the roommate gets "all lawyerly" because the sink is filled with dirty dishes. [JH]

Friday Fun: Engineering the Legal Info Factory?