Law Librarian Blog

Was Harvard Law School the First to Ban Student Use of Personal Portable Computers?

Two HLS students were not allowed to use their 25-pound Osborne 1 "portables" to take their final exams in 1982. See Evan Koblentz's Law Technology News story, Harvard Law School Once Banned Portable Computers. Is this the first recorded ban on the use of portable computers by a law school? [JH]

Penetrating the Once Impenetrable WEXIS Market: Fastcase's Android App for Legal Research as an Illustration

I don't know how many of Fastcase's 500,000 paid subscribers use Android devices but those who do now can use Fastcase's legal research app built for the Android OS. Yesterday, the Company announced the launch of the first legal research app for Android phones and tablets here. The app also may attract cost conscious practitioners who have not jumped on the iPhone-iPad bandwagon to Fastcase. Smart move.

Fastcase CEO Ed Walters was quoted in a paidContent article published the day before the Android app roll-out (no, not about the app per se). A snip:

Today, digital technology is letting Bloomberg Law scan and sort a vast pool of law that would once have taken decades to assemble. But while its tools rival those of the incumbents [WEXIS], there is also a bigger question of whether the industry’s underlying business model is still viable.

That business model is based on charging lawyers enormous money to access a tightly controlled pool of information is still viable. It is also highly labor-intensive. Fastcase’s Walters described practices like Westlaw’s technique of reading and annotating cases as a “relic, an anachronism from the age of print … they’re acting as if search engines never existed.”

Fastcase’s own model relies on using algorithms to rapidly sort cases and track precedents. The company sells retail subscriptions for $95 a month and also offers bulk memberships to state bar associations.

Companies like Fastcase are far from displacing the giants, but they do illustrate how technology is allowing not just Bloomberg but upstarts to challenge a once impenetrable market. At the same time, Google and the Cornell-based non-profit Legal Information Institute are making stacks of cases, patent histories and more available for free.

(Emphasis added.) For more, see Jeff John Roberts' Bloomberg’s big bite for billions of legal dollars (June 4, 2012).

Once WEXIS "owned" virtually 100% of the commercial legal search market. It is quite possible their combined market share will be reduced to 50-60% with BLaw, Fastcase and other search providers grabbing the rest of the market from them. [JH]

What is Touche?

Take a look:

For more, see Sebastian Anthony's Disney Touché turns everyday objects into multi-touch, gesture-recognizing interfaces on ExtremeTech. [JH]

Are Search Engine Results Protected by the First Amendment?

According to UCLA law prof Eugene Volokh the answer is "yes." "Google commissioned me to write this White Paper (“First Amendment Protection for Search Engine Search Results“), so I thought I’d pass it along. I wrote the paper as an advocate, and not as a disinterested academic, but I hope some of our readers might find it interesting nonetheless," wrote Eugene Volokh yesterday.

It certainly sounds like it will make for interesting reading. The paper quickly caught the attention of the media. See, for example, Wired's Threat Level post by Kim Zetter, Jeff John Roberts' paidContent post and Lance Whitney's CNET post for starters. {JH]

Kill or Keep Standing Orders: Performing a Little Old School Due Diligence (And who should hire contract lawyers if predictive coding is so smart?)

Will contract lawyers currently performing document review grunt work be fishing for new jobs soon? See Kenneth Anderson's Is Contract Lawyering Doomed by Algorithm? on The Volokh Conspiracy. For a little background on predictive coding, see Sharon D. Nelson and John W. Simek's Slaw post, What’s Hot in E-Discovery? ("The way most lawyers engage in traditional keyword searches is, as others have suggested, the equivalent of 'Go Fish.'").

Here's a thought. Perhaps some of our legal publishers will follow Bloomberg Law's example of hiring unemployed but experienced attorneys for editorial jobs. Sure beats hiring some kids straight out of law school to KeyCite old copy and then push the "send to manufacturing" button to spit out an "updated" pocket part or a "replaced" annual pamphlet edition. Under current legal labor market conditions, there is plenty of "supply" for cheap legal workforce needs. Hell, it might even improve editorial quality. This work can even be contracted out to stay-at-home editors.

Will, for example, Pangea3's job ads state "And other duties as assigned including but not limited to editing TR Legal publications"? For one recent once but no longer web store banner tag-lined "trusted legal resource from..." print title, we found 20 or so additional cases listed in the table of authorities and four less pages of text in the body of the work. I gave up looking for fresh edited content after comparing some 20 pages from last year's to this year's version. Didn't see any content changes but I did observe that this year's version displayed some quirky type format changes which pushed content around. A couple of pages later, I ended my page-by-page review because that was the only difference I had found. Of course, I probably should have compared the 550-plus additional pages but I got distracted by the kill-keep standing order question. 

I'm leaning towards "kill." Our practitioners can do at least as good a job checking latter case history and treatment as some nameless over-worked and under-supervised editorial assistant. Heck, our practitioners will even remember to check for and then will understand federal and state statutory changes. The only matter that awaits a final decision on my part is whether or not to kill each title one at a time or issue a kill order for all of them at the same time.

I'm thinking the latter because customer service reps are pretty busy dealing with Account Receivables requests over the fiasco caused by the acquisition of this title. It is pretty damn bad when well-meaning customer service reps who are trying to do a good job have to deal with "customer experience and education" like we mere customers do. (Note well current subscribers, once you get past the due diligence this Company's AR department wants you to perform for it, the post-acquisition subscription renewal rate has only been jacked up about 25 percent -- just might not be worth it.) Perhaps that company should have outsourced its due diligence? What if it did?

My hunch is you know the identity of the publisher and the poor souls dealing with their own AR department. Did I mention that the admitted incomplete examination mentioned above was for the latest annual pamphlet edition of a secondary legal title published by the folks in the Land of 10,000 Invoiced "New Editions"? Ah well, mailed print sale brochures from "TR Westlaw" for once "updated" loose-leaf print titles that have been pamphlet switcherooed now only indicate that they are "replaced annually." Only those loose-leaf titles that haven't yet experienced a format switcheroo carry the "updated" tag. But remember

"customer feedback ... clearly preferred the pamphlet [format] for updates for certain kinds of products."

 Perhaps "replacements" would have been a better word choice.

What does "new" mean? Perhaps TR's legal department issued a CYA directive to the Company's print ad copywriters. Hell if I know. Is "Replaced Edition" a more accurate tag than "New Edition" on WestMart page displays? To borrow from a Clintonian push-back, it all depends on what "new" means. For me, "new" means keep or kill a standing order. Since I buy many multiple copies of many annually "replaced" titles for our little county law library collection plus office copies for my statutory users, the time will come when it very well just may mean kill them all.

We're not just dealing with "replaced" editions of overpriced court rules anymore. Click on the "customer feedback" link above for some generalities about where this form of "predictive coding" is heading. [JH]

ALA TechSource's Workshop on Gadgets in the Library: First Session Starts Tomorrow

Jason Griffey will be presenting a two-part online workshop called "Gadgets in the Library: A Practical Guide to Personal Electronics for Librarians":

Session 1: Tablets and eReaders
Thursday, May 10, 2:30pm – 4:00pm Eastern

This session will cover the following topics:

• Why do we care?
• Operating Systems vs Devices
• iOS & Android
• Circulation & Policy

Session 2: E-Readers, continued and Future Tech
Thursday, May 24, 2:30pm – 4:00pm Eastern

This session will cover the following topics:

• More on eReaders
• 3D printing and hackerspaces
• Discussion on best practices
• Wrap up

Registration information.

Last week, Griffey posted Experiences Become Expectations on the ALA TechSource blog. One snip:

Our patrons are increasingly coming to expect that our resources will be available and easily used on their devices. Libraries are the democratizers of information. As information is increasingly amorphous digital content, we need to be familiar with the containers that give our digital bits form and substance. Being democratizers of technology, as well, ensures that everyone has the ability to use the latest and greatest in electronics.

NB: The ALA TechSource Editor's note:

This post is adapted from the introduction to Jason Griffey’s new Library Technology Report “Gadgets and Gizmos: Libraries and the Post-PC Era.” Jason revisits the technologies that he highlighted in his 2010 report. And he beats himself up a bit over it. Help him let go of the past; excuse him from predicting the future; and join him in discussing the gadgets your patrons are using today... .

Got webinars? ALA TechSource online workshops are fairly regular occurrences. Many, like "Gadgets in the Library" for example, IMHO are relevant to law libraries. It might be worth considering an ALA membership because AALL webinars on law library matters are few, far between, and not part of any discernible concerted effort to utilize 21st century communication mediums to offer programs on topical education and professional developments on a regular basis.

For an association that expends so much time, effort and money on its primary vehicle for education and professional development aka the 20th century model of annual meetings, it just might be worthwhile to reform our association's institutionalized focus because, well, it is the 21st century, right? [JH]

Value and Utility Propositions for Enhanced Law eBooks: Marx vs. the Other Guy

We all know that CALI's executive director John Meyer is a pinko commie (or commie pinko) and that CALI is home base for the Red Menace because "[o]ur premise is that if it's educational, you've got to give people the freedom to repurpose the material for educational goals. If anytime you have to ask yourself, 'Does this make us money,' then you're not really serving educational goals." Quoting from RIP pCasebooks, 1871 - 2021 (Do note John's comment to the post.) Now comes more commie open access propaganda from Elmer Master, CALI's Director of Internet Development:

The future of the book is the open web, not some platform silo. Only putting books on the web will unlock the potential of books and it is easy enough to do.

Legal information workers of the world unite! In The Future of The (Case)Book: Open and Closed Platforms, Elmer makes an important point:

Anything that you can do on the web, you can do with a book. As an author, reader, student, teacher, scholar; anything is possible with a book that is on the open web. The potential for linking, including external material, use of media, note taking, editing, markup, remixing are opened without the bounds of a specific reader platform. A book as a website provides the potential for unlimited customization that will work across any hardware platform.

This Marxist inspired argument does assume that locking down an eBook to one or more specific commercial platforms reduces the utility of the eBook. Nothing is stopping an author of an enhanced law eBook from citing to and linking to any source unless the commercial publisher and/or e-bookseller refuses to allow that.

Sound far-fetched? Seth Godin, the bestselling author of 13 books, reports that Apple

is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are [Amazon] links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.

What if one of our commercial law vendors insists on substituting the vendor's database links for the worker's provided links to open source law? What if the author cites and links to secondary source titles not available in the vendor's database because they are published by a competitor?  Here's where the law eBook value proposition of bourgeois economics comes into play. We'll have to just wait to see how this plays out in the commercial enhanced law eBook space.

Watch out attendees of Some Assembly Required. I'm thinking a full-blown commie manifesto is coming. (Do note that the above link embedded in the word "manifesto" is to text provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.) The "men in black" at CALI's annual meeting this year may be agents of potential buyers of TR Legal's law school publishing division.

Customization as repurposing content for a specific educational purpose. Today's forthcoming eBook formats include enhanced capabilities for interactivity but, and not intending to put words in Elmer's mouth, I believe his most important point really is that the book-on-the-web offers customization opportunities for the course instructor who adopts the work and student end users. The key here is the open web where context can be provided with an Creative Commons license. In terms of instructional purposes, fair use may allow customization by scraping eBook content to tailor text for e-course packages profs create and enhance for a specific reading list based on utilizing all available e-content in all available forms. That, however, may not be as easy to do as the open web platform.

Of course, the licensing model for law eBooks may not even allow fair use for educational purposes by way of customization or current (as in not yet hacked) platforms that may make it damn hard to do so. While CALI is a corrective for for-profit ventures in this market space, the commercial publishers for law eTextbooks -- commercial casebooks, treatises and study aids -- in enhanced eBook formats will be the dominate product source for this market.

The other guy's name is Adam Smith. Despite CALI's noble goals, many (most?) law profs do like to get paid for their labor when they write law books. The greatest earnings potential remains in the distribution channels offered by our commercial legal publishers. Let's add that commercial publishers have put a lot more of the editorial production work on the shoulders of authors but they have not yet tasked them with eBook conversion coding.

Imaging, for example, the cringing experience of a IT staffer's reaction to a law prof who says "I want to unlock the potential of my new book by putting it on the web or eBooking it and I hear that is 'easy enough to do.' So I want you to create an e-commerce site on the web for my book or format the text for all eBook reader apps for me so I can sell it to everyone." Remember when law profs ask their tech staffs to create their powerpoint presentations for them? Is this next?

Law school IT staff alert! In the commercial space, there are p- and e-Book publishers you can send your law faculty to investigate. One that come immediately to mind is Tulane law prof turned indie publisher, Steven Alan Childress' Quid Pro Books.

Sure there are plenty of law profs who participate in CALI e-text publishing programs. They should be commended. Creative Commons permissions or an ownership model for commercial eBooks which allows repackaging of e-Content that does not consider customization to be a derivative work under copyright law may seem far fetched but my hunch is that some of our major legal publishers will eventually allow some sort of customization and not just for educational purposes. Doing otherwise eventually will be about as futile as one of our vendor's long ago attempt to stop photocopying based on copyright claims.

End note. With I had tip to Sarah Glassmeyer's tweet, there is another commie plot afoot in the education field. The first ever Open Education Week is taking place March 5-10 2012. The purpose is to raise awareness of the open education movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide.

This campaign might want to take a close look at the FCC and US Department of Education's “challenge to states and companies to ensure every K-12 student has a digital textbook within five years.”

This ambitious plan “to help K-12 schools transition to digital textbooks” in the next 5 years is laid out in the Digital Textbook Collaborative. The plan builds on the FCC’s National Broadband Plan and the Department of Education’s National Education Technology Plan and includes “membership” from a range of technology companies, publishers, schools and associations—from Apple to Verizon, Blackboard to McGraw Hill, San Diego Unified School District to Freed-Hardeman University.

Quoting from Nancy K. Herther's Etextbooks Attracting Involvement of the FCC, Education Department, and Higher Ed. [JH]

The MIT School of Law Model: What if technology infusion alters the traditional curriculum?

Infuse, defined:

to cause to be permeated with something (as a principle or quality) that alters usually for the better

In Training students for the technology infused law practice of the 21st Century, Daniel Martin Katz, Michigan State Univ. College of Law, identifies a skills set law students will need to be competitive because they are in short supply: "technology, computational data analytics, finance, informatics, economics, accounting, human computer interaction, supply chain mgmt, etc."

To make our students competitive (hopefully thereby restore the Return on Investment associated with the JD) will require legal education to move away from its significant liberal arts / humanities bent and look more like polytechnic research and teaching operation... .

Conceptually, Katz calls this the MIT School of Law model.

I have argued that the arbitrage opportunity in the market for legal education is for an institution(s) the move toward an “MIT School of Law.” In other words, an MIT style institution would do just fine in the market for legal education (in the long run perhaps better than HYS? [editor's note, HLS?]).

If you are an employer – hiring a lawyer for the 21st Century – please ask yourself this question: do you want a student from an MIT Style institution or some sort of liberal arts school? Of course, the market will ultimately decide this question — but I would place my bet with an MIT style legal institution.

Katz underscores technology and high end data analytics skills as being in very limited supply. This sort of expertise infusion in the legal academy's traditional liberal arts / humanities curriculum dovetails nicely into the skill set of 21st century librarianship even if a total transformation to an MIT style legal education is fanciful.

The Challenge. "You, all of you, are the librarians of the future. Am I right? Is this the dawn of the great age of librarians? That's up to you," writes T. Scott Plutchak in Breaking the barriers of time and space: the dawning of the great age of librarians, J Med Libr Assoc. 2012 January; 100(1): 10–19 (highly recommended). See also Achieving the “Golden Age of Librarians” — An Ambitious Project of Deep Redefinition.

Looking closer to present day realities, if today's purveyors of professional legal services were to offer their full range of law practice solutions to law students nationwide at their typical wholesale pricing for indoctrination objectives, my hunch is that the current cadre of legal skills profs would need today's law library staff to help evaluate their utility for a "practice ready" legal skills focused law school education that is technology infused. [JH]

2012 CALI Conference Call for Speakers: Seeking people with strong opinions, great ideas, interesting projects and useful advice

Some Assembly Required is the theme for this year's Conference for Law School Computing (held at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego, Thursday – Saturday, June 21-23, 2012). Recently John Mayer issued a call for speakers, observing

For 22 years, the CALI Conference has organized its schedule at nearly the last minute in order to bring the most relevant and up-to-date presentations to attendees. This year is no different and we are looking for people with strong opinions, great ideas, interesting projects and useful advice.

(Emphasis added.)

The deadline for session proposals is Friday, April 6, 2012. In his call, John adds

We are going to use community voting to help with selecting sessions again this year. Your votes let us know which sessions you would like to see on the conference agenda. Starting on Monday February 27, 2012, voting will be opened and will remain open until Friday April 27, 2012.

Details, including how to submit a proposal for the 2012 CALI conference, are available in John's CALI Spotlight blog post.

One thing I miss by not working in academic law libraries anymore is not being able to attend CALI's annual meeting. While certainly not a techie, CALI conference sessions are always interesting because the speakers and attendees are actually engaged in the process of experimenting and implementing change. Could that be why CALI is seeking "people with strong opinions, great ideas, interesting projects and useful advice" to offer proposals for its annual meeting? Yup. [JH]

Thomson Reuters' OnePass-YourAss Scheme, Part Two: "There are times when verbal ingenuity is not enough."

Just because some OnePass account holder gets a pop up in WestMart's eCommerce online purchasing system which says in effect "I am authorized to make this purchase" doesn't cut it when Thomson Reuters has made absolutely no attempt to verify that statement. That OnePass account holder may think he or she is authorized to buy because he or she has this nifty OnePass user account but will learn that is not the case after racking up an institutional charge that results in an in-house "Banzai" meeting with this buckaroo.

"Hey, hey, hey — don't be mean. We don't have to be mean. 'Cause, remember: no matter where you go... there you are." Hell, even Amazon has a better system. I can buy something on Amazon, charge it to my personal credit card or established institutional line-of-credit account depending on well, you know, I am buying something for me or my library. I can also instruct Amazon where I want the stuff shipped as in to home or office and that ship-to is not tied to my billing selection. Of course, there is another solution. It is a bit extreme but in this Shed West Era of print cancellations and there being no sacred cows requiring both WEXIS search services, just kill off TR Legal search but remember you will also have to kill off all OnePass-ed "solutions" services, too.

So here we are. Once upon a time, West reps were selling CDs to individual attorneys that showed up on their institution's billing account without prior approval from whomever actually had the authority to spend the institution's $$. Then billing to West institutional accounts was restricted. Now TR Legal is stealing a sales tactic from the bad old days and applying it again.

"Treat us good, we'll treat you better. Treat us bad, we’ll treat you worse." I'm thinking TR Legal believes most institutional buyers just won't be won't be paying much attention to their OnePass-YourAss system. Bull. In these times of close monitoring of spending, even a $12 charge to a library account gets spotted. Of course, not all institutional buyers pay that much attention or are as knowledgeable in how Thomson Reuters tries to conduct business until the Company gets caught.

Today's TR ProView eBooks will end up being just like yesterday's CD-ROMs. When we invoice-playing institutional buyers see statements that include the $$$ charges for unauthorized purchases (plus their multi-years commitments to and good 'til cancelled licensing terms) by way of OnePass-YourAss all hell will break out again.

"In my experience, nothing is ever what it seems to be, but everything is exactly what it is." Hello TR Legal, we know you really meant it when you told lawyers in a nutshell that they needed their heads examined if they know their law librarian's name a couple of years ago. We know the marketing objective to increase sales is to sell directly to the attorney (pBooks, eBooks, even, god hell us, perhaps someday personalized WLN plans in institutional settings) by way of WestMart. Hell, I've got no problem if any attorney foolishly wants to spend his or her money to buy one of your products or services but I seriously doubt any institutional buyer wants that personal purchase to become an institutionalized expense.

I offer three off-the-top of this aging and decrepit Boomer-Gen law library director reasons:

1. There is no verification mechanism in place;
2. Institutional buyers just might want to make volume purchases at a discounted price; and
3. You know damn well, no institutional buyer representative wants to start his or her week off with the following to-do list.

Monday:

• OnePass Account Holder Jim Smith's license for X is set to expire. Does he want to keep it? What is the price inflation rate?
• OnePass Account Holder Bob Daleo's licenses for X and Y are set to expire. Does he want to cancel one or both of them? If not, what is the price inflation rate?

Tuesday:

• One Pass Account Holder Mike Suchsland's license for A is set to expire. Does he want to keep it? What is the price inflation rate?
• Remember to check with OnePass Account Holder Peter Warwick to see if he still wants us to shell out for SuperLawyer or has simply forgotten about that.

Wednesday:

• Check to confirm that Friday's request that former OnePass Account Holder Tom Glocer's account and all things tied to his account has been vaporized.
• One Pass Account Holder Mike Suchsland's license for B and Z is set to expire. Does he want to cancel one or both of them? If not, what is the price inflation rate?

Thursday:

• One Pass Account Holder Deirdre Stanley's licenses for C, D, X, Y are set to expire. Before checking with her, log into her account to see if her license for A was vaporized because Jim Smith thinks it is too expense although Mike Suchsland "loves" it. (Note to self: did we get a credit?)
• OnePass Account Holder Jim Smith's license for C and E are set to expire. Does he want to keep them? What is the price inflation rate?

Friday:

• Check (again) to see if the glitch to Jim Powell's OnePass account has been fixed yet.

"A battle won is a battle which [Thomson Reuters] will not acknowledge being lost." TRI's year-end financial report and webcast about that starts at 8:30 AM (Eastern) tomorrow. I doubt any of the execs will be highlighting this OnePass-YourAss scheme to guarantee a revenue stream for its cash cow, TR Legal.

Of course, I could be wrong. They just might be that arrogant to still think TR Legal's US legal customer base really, really needs what TR sells so their customer base will swallow OnePass-YourAss. Hell, someone may even follow the well-scripted response that "we've surveyed our customers and they think this is great!"

"Know that, as in life, there is much that many have looked upon but few have seen because, as my father told me and his father told him, you will come to learn a great deal if you study the insignificant in depth." The investment community knows that. Remember folks, what really matters to the investment community isn't one-off revenue. It's all about organic growth of recurring revenues (read subscriptions and licenses). TR Legal paid the price for maintaining its historical rate of print supplement price inflation during what is known as the work-in-progress Shed West Era.

TRI's OnePass-YourAss scheme with its tie-up to institutional accounts, its multi-year commitments to its coming line of ProView eBooks designed to be sold to individual attorneys with that later-on standing order component and the automatic eBook price inflation rates we will see in a couple of years, is designed for one and only one reason. That reason is not "consumer surplus," an economic term of art for consumers happy to get more than what they expected. Nope, the strategic objective here is increasing its lost revenue stream for recurring revenues. However...

"Those in a hurry show only that the thing they are about is too big for them."

[JH]

ABA House of Delegates Vote in Favor of Supporting the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

Resolution 102B, supporting UELMA, was approved by a voice vote, "though a significant number of delegates voted nay," reported Debra Cassens Weiss in the ABAJ News. Did the youngsters shout down the oldsters? Well at least it passed. As the ABA report that accompanied the resolution stated:

UELMA addresses the critical need to manage electronic legal information in a manner that guarantees the trustworthiness of and continuing access to important state legal material.

[JH]

An Idiot Proof Guide to Creating eBooks

Wait, well, I shouldn't really call it idiot-proofed because this idiot ran out of time last weekend to confirm that. However, thanks to CALI Director of Content Development Sarah Glassmeyer's eBook Publishing for Dummies post, I can reality check that characterization. OK, that really isn't the title of Sarah's post. Now, I know there are plenty of how-to books "out there" but because I wasn't all that interested in creating eBooks until reading Sarah's post, I haven't bought any of them. I'm thinking I may not have to now.

With a know-how hat tip to CALI's Elmer Masters, Sarah explains step-by-step how to create an eBook from a MS Word source document into EPUB and MOBI formats using open-source text conversion tools. If I'm not mistaken, Sarah's Making eBooks for Fun and No Profit post details the basic process CALI uses. I can say that in terms of reading comprehension, the guide is idiot proof by my personal criterion. If I can understand this, no doubt you can too. Thanks Sarah. [JH]

RIP pCasebooks, 1871 - 2021: 150 years is a long run but the time is ripe for a change

"From entrenched businesses, such as Wolters Kluwer, to a nonprofit, like the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, there is agreement that physical textbooks and particularly traditional case books will, sooner or later, become educational relics alongside fountain pens and manual typewriters," writes Evan Koblentz in Apple, Publishers, Open-Source Dictate Law School Textbook Evolution (Legal Technology News, Jan. 25, 2012).

When? CALI Executive Director John Mayer thinks it will take about a decade.

"Certainly the print side of the business is going to be on the decline, but it's going to take a decade. Paper has served us well for a century. It doesn't go away overnight," Mayer continued. "The casebook is dead. It's time to break the thing up into small, repurposeable materials," he noted.

Damn right, John. Of course, that's not why TR Legal is trying to sell off its law school publishing division now, right?

Book format, whether print, online, or e-book, isn't a factor in our decision.

Quoting from an email by TR Legal's General Manager for Law School Publishing, Chris Parton, sent to Law Technology News.

One can view TR Legal putting its traditional law school publishing division on the auction block as a logical continuation that started with selling off BAR/BRI to Leeds Equity Partners in April 2011. "Let's just get the hell out of this entire legal education market!" Good luck with the attempt to sell the law school publishing division. When TRI couldn't get the $$$ it wanted for Health, the Company took down the For Sale sign. Will history repeat itself?

Of course, one can also view the asset divestiture as a means to a new end, namely, inventing a 21st century legal education product line, one that "grow[s] from its core of subscription-based research and reference products, workflow solutions, software and services" by way of very, very, very tight integration. (Yes, quoting text from TR Legal's "we're gonna bail on you, law profs" notice out of context.) It could become the new normal for law student indoctrination.

Hell if I know but I seriously doubt law school students will be carrying all that many law pBooks to class in 10 years. By "all that many," I am not just referring to pCasebooks. See the comments by Kristine Clerkin, General Manager and VP, Legal Education, Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, at Apple, Publishers, Open-Source Dictate Law School Textbook Evolution.

Whoa ... wait a minute ... what's stopping TRI CEO Jim Smith from launching Eagan Law School Online, "a trusted legal education from Thomson Reuters"? (Think law profs earning $25 per hour). On that scary note, let's close this post with another quote from CALI Executive Director John Mayer published in the Legal Technology News article:

Our premise is that if it's educational, you've got to give people the freedom to repurpose the material for educational goals. If anytime you have to ask yourself, "Does this make us money," then you're not really serving educational goals.

John, you pinko, you commie ... ! [JH]

Jerome Rubin, 1925 - 2012: Passing of a Pioneering Giant in Electronic Publishing History

At a 1989 gathering of publishing giants, Jerome Rubin made an unpopular forecast: Technology would render the book obsolete. He argued that the expansion of computerized databases would decrease the need for printed books, a pronouncement based on firsthand experience.

Quoting from the Los Angeles Times obituary for Jerome Rubin, who died on Jan. 9, 2012.

The firsthand experience referred to goes back to the early 1970s when Rubin, a practicing corporate lawyer, was asked for his advice on a new computerized legal research system under development. Rubin (image right) left his law practice and become part of the development team that launched Mead Data Center's Lexis database search system in 1973. The Washington Post reported that he once said:

The key was to ensure that the database was simple to use, Mr. Rubin said, because “lawyers can’t type, and only 15 percent can spell.”

I don't know about spelling proficiency, but back in those days, lawyers certainly didn't type even if they knew how to. At best, they dictated a tape recording. At worse, they dictated to a secretary.

After working for Mead Data Central for about a decade, Rubin was hired by Times Mirror Co. as a vice president of a specialized publishing division in 1982. He was promoted to chairman of professional information and book publishing in 1989. He served in that position until 1992. That's when Rubin joined MIT's Media Laboratory where he led a consortium called News in the Future.

By the early 1990's, automation was well established in the newspaper industry. Reporters and editors had a decade-plus experience in drafting content online via internal networked information systems. Union concerns with radiation emissions from CRTs had been resolved in the 1980s. Production had advanced to where some but not the entire industry had implemented in-house created automated pagination systems. A new normal in newspaper industr driven by information technology stimulated "what's next" questions in the industry. Content creation was electronic. Print production was electronic. Transmission of news content to Nexis, DIALOG, AOL and other e-vendors was generating at the time substantial additional profits as a by-product of what was initially viewed as a technology that improved newspaper industry labor productivity.

Rubin's News in the Future project at MIT's Media Laboratory examined future technologies in the news business. His work there led him to co-found E Ink at the age of 72(!). The company was devoted to developing what was then called "electronic paper" for publishing. If you own a Kindle, Nook or Sony Reader, you are reading an eBook on an eReader that uses E Ink's display technology.

Rubin was instrumental in bringing to the commercial marketplace both full-text online legal research and eReader display for eBooks and other electronic content. He was one of the giants in the electronic publishing industry.We take full-text legal searching for granted now and, by the end of this decade, we will be taking enhanced Law eBooks for granted. His legacy is the world of information options and opportunities we live in today. [JH]

Gov. 2.0 in 2011

Check out Alex Howard's review of Gov. 2.0 in 2011 on O'Reilly Radar. [JH]

Free Passes for Law Bloggers Who Want to Attend LegalTech New York, Jan. 30 - Feb. 1

A reminder from Bob Ambrogi:

[L]egal bloggers are eligible for free passes to attend the LegalTech conference in New York, Jan. 30 to Feb. 1, 2012. This is a full-access pass, covering all programs and the exhibit hall. Also again this year, LegalTech is hosting a Blogger’s Breakfast on Tuesday, Jan. 31, at 9 a.m. in the Petit Triannon room at the New York Hilton.

For details on how to reserve your free pass, see Bob's Free Passes to LegalTech for Law Bloggers post. [JH]

"Going Mac" in the Legal Industry is Gaining Ground

According to the 2011 Clio Apple in Law Firms Survey results, summarized here, 46.5% of respondents said they chose Apple hardware over PC options because the technology was more reliable and secure. Usability ranked next at 33.8%.  Familiarity due to home use of Apple/Mac products was 9.8%, and aesthetics and design came in fourth at only 3%. 76.5% of law students said that when they graduate, they plan on choosing a Mac platform for their office. Of particular interest in that 25.3% of respondents had switched to Mac within the past year.

About this year's survey findings Clio CEO and Co-Founder Jack Newton said: 

Apple hardware and devices – especially the iPad and iPhone – continue to capture the attention and dollars of lawyers, cloud-based applications have won attorneys’ confidence and gained more traction.  With the majority of law students planning to use Mac apps in their law practices upon graduation, we can reasonably predict a longstanding trend toward continued expansion of Apple products within the legal industry.

763 people participated in the survey, 80% of which were practicing lawyers and 20% of which were law students or non-lawyers.  76% of respondents were lawyers at firms with 10 attorneys or less. [JH]

SOPA/PIPA vs a Crowdsourced Alternative, the OPEN Act

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and U.S. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) recently released a public draft of the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act as a bi-partisan alternative to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA). You can view the Issa-Wyden public draft at www.keepthewebopen.com. The site also provides a Section-by-Section Explanation for the OPEN Act and a FAQ regarding the ITC and OPEN. Much more interesting is the opportunity to use a new crowdsourcing platform called "Madison" that allows everyone to comment and collaborate to craft an even better draft of the OPEN Act before it is formally introduced.

About the OPEN Act, see Techdirt's Alternative To PIPA/SOPA Proposed; Points Out That This Is An International Trade Issue. The Techdirt post includes what is called a draft framework for discussion by the OPEN Act's sponsors titled "Fighting the Unauthorized Trade of Digital Goods While Protecting Internet Security, Commerce and Speech" which closes with the following statement:

We intend to make public a draft of the legislative text of this proposal in order to enable the public to provide us with feedback and counsel before the proposal is formally introduced in the House and Senate.

A key provision of the public draft of the OPEN Act would provide the International Trade Commission with the authority to issue cease and desist orders against websites found to be dedicated to infringement. The public draft is now available via Madison here. What do you think? See, for example, Jonathan Zittrain's A SOPA compromise is floated.

End Note. Wouldn't it be interesting if someday all formally introduced federal legislation was crowdsourced and all contributions became part of the legislative history? Wouldn't need groundbreaking technology to do that... . Well until then, we still have Stephen Colbert. [JH]

Stop Online Piracy Act

Lawyers and Firm C-Level Types Oftentimes are No Smarter Than the Ordinary Consumer: The Case of Mobile Phone Monitoring

Yesterday LLB's Mark Giangrande reported on the hidden mobile phone montioring software provided by Carrier IQ that is installed in millions of mobile phones, including most modern Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones. See Your Phone Is Spying On You But You Weren't Supposed To Notice. ("Doesn’t President Obama use a Blackberry? Maybe someone should tell him about this.")

Hat tip to Wired's Researcher’s Video Shows Secret Software on Millions of Phones Logging Everything for the link to the below YouTube video by Trevor Eckhart. Wired's David Kravets comments:

Cringe as the video shows the software logging each number as Eckhart fingers the dialer.

“Every button you press in the dialer before you call,” he says on the video, “it already gets sent off to the IQ application.”

From there, the data — including the content of  text messages — is sent to Carrier IQ’s servers, in secret.

By the way, it cannot be turned off without rooting the phone and replacing the operating system. And even if you stop paying for wireless service from your carrier and decide to just use Wi-Fi, your device still reports to Carrier IQ.

Apparently, even https queries are logged. 

On rethinc.k, Jason Wilson writes about this in the context of lawyers using Carrier IQ enabled mobile phones:

[I]f you are a lawyer using a “smart phone” you probably don’t know what kinds of contractual concessions you’ve made. In short, you’re an idiot. And thus the title of this post, which is you’re fucked.

Deride the luddites all you want, but they won’t be crying when you’re the first lawyer to find him or herself on the wrong side of a third-party subpoena because you were too lazy to read a 100-page EULA.  The shit this kid Eckhart says (and shows) he found scares the crap out of me, particularly when I think about some software program tracking my login/passwords for secured accounts. If you, as a lawyer, don’t see this as a problem for both yourself and your clients, then you’re a fucking idiot.

Wilson is referring to the below video. For more, see Wilson's Why lawyers are fucked post. [JH]

Browsing On A Sunday: Lobbying SCOTUS, The Legal Cloud, And Defending Law Faculty Idealism

The idea that deep pockets can affect congressional action is hardly a new one.  What surprises me, however, is this account in The Hill, describing lobbying attempts to affect the deliberation of the Supreme Court as it considers the constitutionality of the healthcare reform law.  These take the form of media campaigns designed to sway public opinion on the law.  The Supreme Court is mostly immune to these actions, though it’s hard to imagine that the Justices never watch television.  Another new partisan tactic is raising the debate on whether several of the Justices should recuse themselves from the consideration of the case.  Justices Scalia and Thomas, for example, had dinner with challengers to the law.  Justice Kagan was part of the administration when the law was pending.  If history is a guide, all nine Justices will weigh in.  Amicus takes on a whole new meaning in this context.

Somewhere back in February of 2010 the LLB reprinted with permission an article from BNA called Privacy and Data Security Risks in Cloud Computing.  BNA now reports on an Iowa State Bar Association ethics opinion concerning the storage of client data in the cloud.  Iowa says it’s ok, provided a lawyer perform due diligence as to the mechanism and security of the storage.  The concerns raised include whether the lawyer will have unfettered access to the data, including a back-up in case the cloud is down; whether the lawyer has a clear understanding of the reputation of the storage company and the terms of the contract to store data; and what happens to the ownership of the data if the lawyer does not pay the required fees.  Other practical concerns include who at the company has access to the data and passwords, whether third parties can get to it, and whether the lawyer controls the encryption scheme.  Expect to see future ethics opinions (or court cases by aggrieved clients) as reality meets standards.

Noah Feldman defends law professors in light of the article in the New York Times that paints faculty as out of touch with the legal practice class.  He notes in Bloomberg how former and current law professors dominate politics, including Justice Anthony Kennedy, Elizabeth Warren, Cass Sunstein, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and of course, President Barack Obama.  Law professors, he says, tend to compare the ideal with reality and become frustrated with the way reality works out.  Faculty members do not want to accept “messy compromises” that exist in reality.

Because they tend to like logical principles, law professors are also big believers in the power of reason to prevail. If they could just get the public to see things clearly, they tell themselves, results would surely improve.

Well, Professor Feldman, as many of the faculty you cite who are now part of government, they have all had to deal with those messy compromises dictated by politics.  Justice Kennedy, for example, tends to be pragmatic despite being labeled a conservative.  Presidents Clinton and Obama surely understand negotiating deals that are less than ideal but pass into law.  If anything, it seems they have not let their law faculty past affect too much their roles in government.

Law professors consider having an impact on policy to be a plus. One test of the value of a legal scholar’s ideas is whether anyone in the real world bothers to listen to them.

Indeed, though even philosopher-kings had to exercise power at some point.  [MG]