JUST IN CASE

Law Firm Compensation By Level, Not Lockstep

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:05:22 EST

New York Times editorial (rethinking the legal industry) (4/1/09)

Lawyer's Guide to Governing our Firm (ABA, 2009): print OhioLINK resource

Podcast talk about Law.gov

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:59:01 EST

Law librarian Richard Leiter will devote this week's show on The Law Librarian, his blogtalkradio series, to a discussion with Carl Malamud, of Public.Resource.org about Law.gov, digital preservation, and open access issues.

Andrew Plumb-Larrick

Librarians as key to open-access law reviews...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:20:01 EST

Tom Boone, of Loyola L.A., has a useful post on his personal blog regarding the challenges of implementing the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, in which a group of directors of major law libraries called on law schools to move to publishing law journals solely in an online, open-access, format. The Durham Statement was drafted by a group of library directors meeting in November of 2008 at Duke Law School. Additional directors, law school CIOs, and other librarians subsequently became signatories to the statement, including our own Kathy Carrick.

Tom's post usefully reminds us, though, that promoting meaningful and robust subject access to journal content requires more than merely asking our journals to kindly publish online.

Andrew Plumb-Larrick

Tempest in a legal-information teapot?

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:00:57 EST

The posting on a Thomson Reuters blog of videotaped comments by Bob Berring, U.C. Berkeley's long-time law librarian, distinguished professor, and former interim dean, have created something of a stir among followers of the legal-information marketplace. In the comments featured on LegalCurrent, a blog by West's parent company Thomson Reuters, Berring expresses measured but profound skepticism of the viability of both directly government-hosted free legal information and of free legal-information efforts based on "volunteer" efforts (i.e. not based on a commercial vendor's model). There has been a fair amount of online commentary in response to this video, and I've tried to articulate a few of my thoughts about the role of the emerging free sources, below.

29th Annual Charleston Conference

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:17:41 EST

Today is the first day of the annual Charleston Conference, a gathering of librarians and publishers. Items of interest in the program this year include programs and presentations related to the challenges of the current economic climate, the (re)emergence of eBooks as a hot topic in the field, and the re-negotiation of the Google Book Settlement (about which there should be substantial news extremely soon).

California Courts challenged by copyright and "public" access in case filings

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:30:34 EST

Erika Wayne and Paul Lomio at Stanford's Legal Research Plus blog have been following a dispute regarding the California Supreme Court's practice of providing appellate briefs to Lexis and Westlaw, without the permission of the litigants or their counsel. Their batch of recent posts provides updates, and also links to reportage by the California legal press.

The Supreme Court Database

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:12:08 EST

The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth database) has a new website, http://supremecourtdatabase.org. In addition to giving users access to coded Supreme Court cases from 1953 to 2008, the site provides user with analysis tools.

Law Alumnus, Class of 1918, in November 1, 2009, Washington Post

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:10:07 EST

Public Affairs books has recently published The Great Depression: A Diary by law alumnus Benjamin Roth. Roth graduated from Western Reserve University School of Law (Class of 1918[?])and worked as an attorney in Youngstown while he kept the diary, which has been extensively excerpted in Slate-offshoot The Big Money and written up in the Washington Post. From the Post: "His diary, excerpted on The Big Money, has just been published as a book -- "The Great Depression: A Diary."