Jason the Content Librarian

Anyone paying attention to the blawgosphere has heard about Virtual Law Partners an attempt at a new-ish (depending on who you ask) model for a virtual law firm. You may have heard about it at Law.com, or on one of many blogs.

I’ve read the comments, heard from the well wishers, the doubters, naysayers, and generally curious, and proclaim myself… somewhat undecided. Although I am in favor of anyone willing to go out on a limb and try something new, and I think this endeavor could tell us a lot about the future of legal services.

Lawdragon also has some more info on this virtual law office and other models.

I will say one thing in all the discussion that I’ve found particularly disturbing is the seemingly immediate dismissal of much (maybe even most) staff overhead as an unnecessary expense.

The Wired GC makes an interesting comment along these lines in today’s post about Virtual Law Partners:

The business model is bracing for VLP lawyers and clients. The lawyers get to keep more of the revenue they generate. This lets them make more or work less, or a combination of both. And the clients get as good or better service, without paying more for things they don’t want (over-staffing) or need (expensive offices in high-rent cities).

As Legal Research Plus noticed, there is no librarian. And although I will focus on library services, I would argue that it’s not necessarily true that the client gets good or better service without adequate law firm support services. Of course I am biased because I am a librarian in a law firm. But I like to think that I am able to prove my value to attorneys, staff, and clients all the time. On multiple occasions attorneys have been praised by clients by the value I have been able to add to services provided to clients, in some cases delivering my services directly. But it’s more than that. I also think I help attorneys do their jobs more efficiently and effectively and thus improve the bottom line for attorneys and clients, and have been able to quantitatively prove it as well.

And this is strictly client work. This does not even take into consideration the role librarians can play in business development, competitive intelligence, marketing, and other parts of firm information management.

To their credit they have a paralegal on staff already, and seem to be looking for other “legal specialists” which could include paralegals, librarians, marketers, recruiters, or other legal professionals who might be able to add value to the firm. They could also outsource this work as necessary which could be another way to go.

And there is a difference between overstaffing and appropriate staffing. A virtual law firm may certainly change our notion of what is appropriate/adequate staffing levels for law firms. But I’m not sure that they will be able to keep staffing levels as low as they are hoping if they’re going to add partners at the rate Craig Johnson suggests in an interview at The Wired GC.

The bottom line is that I would warn anyone creating or jumping to a virtual professional services firm to be careful not to minimize the role support staff have played in their success.

On a larger level of analysis I am interested to see how this proceeds. From staffing, billing, marketing and other perspectives they seem well placed to explore some new boundaries for law firms.

As I mentioned in a post earlier this week, I’ve never really gotten into online virtual worlds like Second Life, and I’ve certainly never gotten into MPORGs (Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games). However posts this week from Libraryman, The Shifted Librarian, and Terri at Creative InfoPro have piqued my interest.

Apparently there is now a Libraries and Librarians Guild in World of Warcraft (WoW).

The problem is that I’m not completely sure what the significance of that is. Libraryman suggests that this guild may help newcomers to WoW overcome the steep learning curve, which has been a barrier to my participation in MPORGs. Terri at Creative InfoPro suggests another game called Entropia Universe which I’d never heard of but looks pretty interesting. I’ve also seen some chatter about PMOG which might be a little better suited for me.

The real problem is value. These games seem like they can really suck out a lot of time, so what’s the value of them? And it doesn’t have to be an educational value, which I’m starting to see more of in Second Life. And while there may be professional value for public librarians who use gaming to expand library services and presences in virtual worlds, that’s not my current situation. It’s ok if they’re just fun, entertainment value is valuable. But I haven’t figured out which game might deliver that.

The time investment is a big issue also. There may be weeks at a time when I may not touch my computer outside of work. I need a game that I can drop for a few weeks and pick up later.

But again, maybe with the creation of a specific guild in WoW now’s the time to try it out, or at least start some research finding a game that’s right for me.

If you’re reading this and have a plug for a game that should be on my shortlist please let me know.

Or maybe I’ll just follow Joshua’s advice and settle for a nice game of chess.

The final award, the Session Law (Librarian) award is going to the most memorable, best, or my favorite session at the conference.

Winner: Energize! Teleporting to Second Life: Exploring the Legal and Library Communities in a Virtual World, presented by D. Prano Amjadi, Kate Fitz, and Meg Kribble

I have to admit that I haven’t really gotten into Second Life at all, and in fairness this presentation is not likely to make me more geared towards trying it out. But it was still a well done and effective presentation. The angle it took of discussing Second Life from its potential for education was very helpful.

All the speakers were well prepared and gave good talks. There was even a presentation from a fourth speaker from within Second Life which was very well done. There was also a video discussing forays into Second Life by library students at San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science.

Honorable Mention: Cool Tools: Energizing Law Librarianship with Web 2.0, presented by Victoria J. Szymczak, Kincaid C. Brown, Deborah Ginsberg, Barbara Ginzburg, Jewel Makda, Bonnie Shucha

This session gets honorable mention for the interesting format. It included a presentation by several panelists, after which there were small breakout sessions. People could roam around the room listening to parts of several breakout sessions, or they could listen to an entire breakout session if they wanted to. This was a very interesting format, and a great way to break up a 90 minute time block.

The You Look Nothing Like Your Avatar award goes to the person/people I was most excited to meet after connecting with them online.

Winner(s): in no particular order Tom Boone, Meg Kribble, Bonnie Shucha, Jim Milles, Sarah Glassmeyer, Katie Brown, and Lyonette Louis-Jacques.

The name of this award may need some work because I’d seen photos and kind of recognized everyone. But the point is the same. There’s something very different when you meet someone online versus meeting them in person. Now when I read the blogs listed here it will kind of be like a movie scene where I hear their voices while reading.

The Let’s Get The Band Back Together award for the best group, committee, team, or person to work with at the conference or leading up to the conference. I enjoyed working with all the different committees, caucuses, and groups, but the choice was obvious.

Winner: The Local Arrangements/Advisory Committee

I can never remember if it’s local arrangements or local advisory committee, but it was a great experience. Local arrangements for this meeting had its own particular challenges as I’m sure they all do. Having many hotels and activities across the river from the convention center, and local law librarian politics seemed to make this a particularly difficult planning situation.

My own responsibilities (the website and blog) were not quite as challenging as some of the other committees like Hospitality and Registration, but we had our issues to deal with as well. And one person told me it was the best website and blog for an AALL conference. Maybe they were just being nice… well it was nice of them to say it.

Chair Tami Gierloff was fantastic. Her staff at Lewis and Clark including Rob Truman, Kathy Faust, and Alana Carson were great also. Special mention also to Maryruth Storer, Laurie Daley, and too many other people to mention. Everyone worked hard on this and I think it all worked out in the end. I’m almost a little sad that it’s over.

Honorable mention: The TSLL editorial board

This was the first TSLL board meeting I was able to attend and it made me wish I had been there for the other meetings. It seems like the publication is going in a good direction and has solid leadership going forward as Brian Striman transitions out of the editor role.

The “Mean Girls” award is not a reference to actual mean girls, but rather the movie Mean Girls. This award is for the event I wasn’t looking forward to going in, but attended based on recommendations, and ended up enjoying.

Winner: CONELL Speed Networking

I’ve been working in law libraries for over four years now, but this was my first AALL conference so my boss and I decided that I should attend the Conference of Newer Law Librarians (CONELL). I was actually looking forward to the CONELL program generally until I found out about the Speed Networking (kind of like speed dating, but profession oriented). I don’t mind events where networking is expected, but I don’t usually like when networking is an assigned task.

But the speed networking event was enjoyable. I think maybe the novelty of it was what made it enjoyable. I also enjoyed the Fist Timers & Fellows connect event at SLA, possibly because they made the networking event a more interesting game rather than a straightforward story swap. Whatever the cause, the speed networking event was well done and well worth the effort.

The whole CONELL program in fact was enjoyable from the dine around to the end. By the end of lunch I was sorry I would not be able to attend the tour with the other attendees, even though I’ve been to the Columbia Gorge many times. I would definitely recommend CONELL to newer law librarians and conference first timers. Kudos to the CONELL planners.

I very much enjoyed my first AALL conference, and I feel very professionally energized, particularly after the Bloggers meetup. I’ve been trying to do a little more with this blog, and have been struggling with how to accomplish and most importantly how to find the time to accomplish the various things I want to do with this blog.

One thing I’ve been trying to figure out is how to spice up the blog a little and I’m going to start by giving my post AALL thoughts through a series of awards. So, in the grand tradition of the The Dundees I will present my own post-AALL wrap-up awards. So keep a lookout over the next few days for these awards.

Originally saw this on Kevin O’Keefe’s blog, then again on the KM Space blog by Doug Cornelius, Martindale.com appears to be using LinkedIn’s API to allow users to tap into their LinkedIn connections while viewing firm and attorney information.

I agree with Doug that this is a great development for Martindale. But is this a case of too little too late?

With services like Avvo getting good Google rankings for attorney profiles, attorney specific social networking sites like Legal OnRamp and LawLink, and the general popularity of LinkedIn, one wonders what niche Martindale will be able to serve. There’s also competition from sites like JD Supra, which just got a nice write up on Law.com.

I will be anxiously watching to see how Martindale evolves over the next few years, and how all these services will play a part in how people find attorneys online.

This weekend the AALL 2008 annual meeting starts in Portland. Word is there will be about 2,000 attendees, and this will be one of the best attended AALL conferences in recent years. I look forward to meeting many law librarians, vendors, and other visitors. If you see me skulking around the conference please say hello.

If you’d like to meet me on purpose Saturday and Sunday are good days to catch me:

Saturday July 12

Sunday July 13

I’ll be at the rest of the conference as well, but my schedule is a little more fluid. You can always email me: jasoneiseman at gmail dot com if you’d like to meet up in Portland. See you there.

Last week, while I was recovering from what could best be described as an intellectual hangover after the SLA conference in Seattle, Kevin O’Keefe from LexBlog released a web tool called LexMonitor.

As Kevin describes it:

There has been a lot of coverage of the launch. Binary Law, KM Space, Law Firm Web Strategy, were just some of the bloggers to comment on the launch. Some reviews, like the one at Simply Justice, have been harsh, although to be fair the author retracted some of the harshest comments.

I think the service is good, potentially very good. Any feedback I’d have at the moment has already been suggested by some others.

Like Steve Matthews, my favorite part of the site is the threaded discussions. The ability to see all the blog posts on a certain topic, and the user interface for how they pulled that off is great. I also enjoy that they’ve used RSS for everything. Any information monitoring site that I’m going to use regularly simply has to have lots of RSS options, and LexMonitor has it. I can subscribe to a search, a channel, a discussion, and tags. Just very well done.

I will simply say that it is a great start for the site, and I can see it becoming increasingly useful.

Some of the more interesting discussion can be found in the comments of the Binary Law posts and harks back to an earlier post on that blog dealing with a similar discussion, namely the legality and ethics of using other people’s RSS feeds without permission.

For me this whole discussion is somewhat similar to the discussion of RIAA’s file sharing crackdown. In my opinion, in some instances the RIAA has been legitimately injured, in others they have been over zealous in their prosecution. But overall they have done far more damage to their reputation and brand, and in reality may profit at least a little from file sharing.

Allowing people to use and share your RSS feeds, even for profit, even without your permission is not very different.

Some people may step over the line of what you consider ethical, but as long as an aggregator credits you as the content creator they are assisting in building your brand and reputation. If you are making money off of your own site then they are actually expanding your money making potential. Will some users just read your content from the aggregator? Yes. But some will visit your site, click your links, buy your products, or whatever it is you want them to do.

I know there may be legal implications which I’m not fully aware of, like how trademark owners have to diligently protect their mark. But the legal implications of such actions must be weighed against your personal or corporate brand and reputation.

Meanwhile, if you’re reading this, feel free to include my feeds in any sort of aggregator you see fit. And if it’s worthwhile let me know and I’d be happy to check out your project (but you don’t have to).