LII Announce

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.

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.

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 ]

Tom Bruce is planning a trip to San Francisco and Silicon Valley in early November.  He’ll be giving a talk on November 3, though he claims  it will be more conversation than lecture.  He wants to discuss how the LII — and other open-access law sites — are used by their viewers.  Since the audience for the talk is expected to be lawyer-centric, he’ll focus on what clients are doing with the information they find on sites like the LII. Are clients engaging lawyers in the same way that patients engage doctors after reading WebMD and other medical sites?

Surprisingly, that’s something we know very little about — and would like to know much more.  You can help by attending the talk, or simply sending Tom your thoughts on the matter at tom () bruce (at) cornell () edu.  We’re in the early stages of investigation with this, and any information you can offer would be most helpful.  The event is sponsored by the Cornell Law School Alumni Association, and you can sign up here.

Court-records privacy maven Peter Winn talks about Bentham and privacy in VoxPopuLII.  A video of a talk on court records that Peter gave at Cornell a few years ago is here.

As we do twice each year, we’re asking for your help in keeping this free service free. This year, we’ve gone to an abbreviated June fundraising campaign (two weeks instead of a full month) and a much less obtrusive ask on each page of the site (a dynamic header as opposed to popups). It’s low-key, but no less important: we count on you to help.

If you’re so inclined, you can donate here. We hope you will.

We’ve long complained that Google’s search paradigm encourages behavior not unlike that of a slot machine addict.  You put in some terms, you pull the handle, you see what you get, you put in some terms, you pull the handle… pull the handle… pull the handle… oh, sorry.  Got lost there for a moment.  The problem with the slot machine paradigm, of course, is that you can only change your bet (by changing terms) or get someone to rig the machine (by changing the underlying algorithms).  The feedback you get from the machine is, perhaps, not so useful.

Over in VoxPop, Julie Jones looks at the question of better interfaces for legal research –  a  step away from the slot machine, and toward something better.  Have a look.

A working definition of “legal information” is a hard thing to come up with.  LII friend Robert Richards is trying to do just that, and we think that our readers and supporters can help him.  Please take a look at his Web page on the subject, and offer your thoughts.

Making sense of web statistics is hard. We tend to rely on them only to make relative judgments about our impact, and to get a general sense of what people are doing with our collections — but sometimes their connection with the real world is clear.

On January 20th, Inauguration Day, use of the LII’s edition of the US Constitution more than doubled — an increase of more than 10,000 multipage visits, or about 50,000 page views.

Normally we’re asocial here at the LII — our idea of a social-networking site is isolatr, as befits our somewhat withdrawn and geeky image.   But we recognize that a lot of you do have friends, and you like to send them stuff.  As of today, we’ve made that a lot easier to do with our Wex and LIIBULLETIN collections.  You can e-mail articles, and share them via an assortment of major social-networking sites like del.icio.us and Facebook.

We’ll be adding this feature to more collections as the year goes on.  Right now, our US Code and caselaw collections operate in their own frameworks, which makes this more difficult to do, but we’ll be upgrading them later in the year.  And we are thinking very hard about the relationship between legal information and Web 2.0 applications — particularly around questions of crowdsourcing, authority, and expert participation.

You can expect a lot more from us on this in the coming year.  For now, we hope you’ll take advantage of our first, small step in this direction.  Happy New Year!