LII Announce

Wednesday, LII Director Tom Bruce did a guest appearance in Paul Lomio’s Advanced Legal Research class at the Stanford Law School.  Just like the substitute teachers we had in middle school, Bruce attempted to cover his ignorance of the subject by entertaining the class with movies:  West’s recent marketing piece featuring Bob Berring, and a sneak preview of a new 3-minute video describing the LII’s mission and history (and it’s pretty good, if we do say so ourselves).  A lively discussion of the issues raised by these two very different ideas about why we have legal information services and who uses them ensued.  Students know a lot….

If you’re interested in these issues, you might want to look at the public discussion on slaw.ca (a bit hard to find all of it in one place), at Bruce’s response here, and at an earlier blog post responding to the same arguments from West employee Dan Dabney.   On YouTube, you can also find videos describing the 17-year history of the “volunteer” LII movement worldwide (1,2,3) featuring the Canadian and Australian LIIs — de facto national resources for law in their respective countries.

We’re on the wrong coast.  We’re travelling. Doing presentations. Teaching classes. Talking about the future of legal information.  Too many exciting and unusual discussions are taking place…. so we almost completely missed our customary tweeting and announcement of Supreme Court oral arguments this week.  Better late than never, we suppose: so check out the excellent LIIBULLETIN writeups here.

Last night, LII Director Tom Bruce met with an assortment of Cornell alums for a lively discussion of the ways in which public access to legal information is affecting the legal profession and the relationships between lawyers and clients.  Our friends from Justia.com came along.  Interest was high and interaction lively.

A special shout-out to Mike Margolis and Margolis and Tisman, LLP for hosting this event.  We are hoping to show up in the Bay Area twice a year, with events and discussions open to all our friends,  so let us know if you’d be interested in attending.

In today’s correspondence:

I am an instructor in an international business management program at a university in The Netherlands.  I teach business courses and business-context English courses mostly to German and Dutch students.

May I use the Wex bankruptcy (and perhaps other) articles as part of a free handout distributed to students in my English lessons?  I am doing a module on financial issues (the crisis and related aspects) and want to use bankruptcy and related issues, (and most of all the language used to present these topics) as backdrop material to teach fluency in vocabulary, grammar, and so forth, as well as to introduce them to financial issues.

And as always we’re happy to help….

We promised more, and now it’s over in Tom Bruce’s b-screeds blog:  more on the Berring kerfluffle.  Other good statements on the subject have appeared in SLAW.

The LIIBULLETIN has just published analyses in 4 more upcoming Supreme court cases, to be argued next week.  The roster includes the much-watched Bilski patent case.

In a video interview sponsored and distributed by the West Group,  law librarian and information scientist Bob Berring of Boalt Hall at Berkeley says he doesn’t think “volunteer” legal publishers will be around very long (it’s been 17 years now,  Bob, and some days we feel every one of them).   The funny thing is, we don’t disagree with all that he says — there are things that a high-priced service can do that we never will be able to, and we said so very explicitly in our response to a West Group employee some months back.  We greatly admire the editorial value West adds to what it publishes — and we believe that there should be open-access alternatives for those who want to know what the law is, but can’t  or won’t pay the price for such beautifully-enhanced information.

We’ll have more to say about this in a forthcoming blog post.  For now, as Professor Berring seems to suggest, we’ll just run along and play.  After all, what would a big company like Thomson/West have to worry about from the likes of us “volunteers”?

[ We encourage comments on this, both here and on our Facebook page ]

The LII is looking for a programmer to join our very small staff in Ithaca, NY.  The alphabet-soup related to qualifications and the official job description are here.  We are collegial, entrepreneurial, occasionally clever, and well-respected in the business. And we are very, very busy.  If you’ve got experience with legal text, XML,  and Drupal we’d encourage you to talk with us.

(the updated URL is https://cornellu.taleo.net/careersection/10164/jobsearch.ftl# — some have reported trouble with the bit.ly abbreviated version)

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments in 8 cases next week.  As always, our LIIBULLETIN publication has analyses for you.  Get them here.

Just an hour or two after the Law Revision Counsel’s office released their version, we have updated versions of Titles 12 (Banks), 13 (Census), and 14 (Coast Guard) of the US Code online.

Why does it take a couple of hours?  Well, software ain’t perfect — and ours converts an extremely complex encoding used for typesetting into valid XML, then creates the online HTML version from that.  We don’t release it automatically.  Instead, it gets a once-over from LII XML wizard Dave Shetland before it goes out.  The error rate is low — but we find that when the software blows up, it tends to do so dramatically, so a spot-check is necessary to ensure that our audience gets what it needs accurately and as soon as possible.