I had the pleasure of working with the folks at PacerPro this year to explore the power and direction of their SaaS model for managing and monitoring federal litigation. To merely  say that efficiency is the core on which their flagship product is constructed would do it a slight disservice.  There is much more to the platform and its potential than that. What resulted from my investigation is a white paper that details what PacerPro brings to the table and what it can do for law firms of all sizes.
Continue Reading White Paper: PacerPro – Real Time Solution for Real World Problems

Visualizations continue to crop up in legal research software. This trend has been occurring for a handful of years now, and has been a topic I’ve spent a lot of time researching and talking about. The question is, can a visualization make a specific area of legal researching easier, faster, better, more relevant, etc? We

Re-imagining the civic role of libraries in our technological age is an intriguing subject to me. So, when an article sidebar espouses the innovative ways public libraries have reinvented themselves in order to play a central civic role in their various towns and cities, my ears perk up and my eyes open. I just wanted

Continuing its innovative approach to docket research and retrieval, PacerPro has announced the release of its exciting new litigant profiling functionality. Attorneys and researchers seeking to look beyond just the dockets to the bigger picture of a litigation are sure to be pleased. The platform’s already intuitive and simple approach to docket research becomes even more robust and integral with this new capability.
Continue Reading PacerPro Expands with Litigant Profiling

Cardozo

“Is this guy the second coming of Benjamin Cardozo, or is he a blithering idiot?”

The above quote may or may not be an actual line of dialogue spoken to me by an attorney during a recent judicial profile request. Though typically not as colorfully submitted, requests for judicial profile searches are ubiquitous. This is logical: there are 600+ federal judges swinging gavels around out there, way too many for a single attorney to become familiar with. And, each one of these individual appointments has his or her own personality quirks and idiosyncrasies (they are humans after all), variables that can easily play a role in a case’s proceedings. This creates a need for descriptive information about a judge’s judicial temperament, procedure, and–to take the above example, intelligence. And, the ideal source for this specific information has to be supplied by people attorneys can trust. Isn’t it shocking to find out this source may be…other attorneys?
Continue Reading Judicial Profiles Show Judges are Humans Too

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“3D Bar Graph Meeting”, (c) Scott Maxwell

The term “jargon” has complicated social meanings. Jargon primarily refers to specialized language used by a specific group of individuals; conversely, this means individuals outside of the in-crowd don’t know what the heck is being talked about when jargon starts to be tossed around. Secondary dictionary definitions attribute vaguely morally-loaded values on the term, as per dictionary.com: “unintelligible or meaningless talk or writing; gibberish”, “language that is characterized by uncommon or pretentious vocabulary and convoluted syntax and is often vague in meaning”. These negative connotations suggest people don’t like or trust jargon, presumably because of its ability to exclude. But, we have a productive option: to find out what the jargon being used actually means.
Continue Reading Predicting the Future with Analytics

emot-applauseiBraryGuy is excited to announce a new crowdsourced feature starting in October.  Let’s hear your APPlause!

It seems like there is an app for everything these days. Just within the realm of information alone, there are apps for staying updated on the news, conducting research, managing your time, communicating with your team, and even billing for the good work you do. These are just the tip of the technological iceberg! At iBraryGuy, we do our very best to share reviews of some of our latest and greatest app discoveries. Yet we cannot help but wonder what you are using.
Continue Reading Starting in October: Tell us your favorite apps – get featured!

SecretaryOfState-PA

One of the great things about the U.S. is the uniqueness of each individual state. Beyond cultural, political, historical and artistic variances, this truism (fortunately or unfortunately) applies to Secretary of State corporation search interfaces. Each state’s agency handles the design and offerings of their interface their own way—some allow for free corporate status reports, free corporate documents, and free searching, while others find a way to charge for each step in the process of obtaining company information.
Continue Reading A Compilation of Secretary of State Sites: Making State of Incorporation Searches Easier

GovTrackLegiScan_Logo_2

As legal information professionals, I am sure you have received requests to track proposed legislation. Changes in statutory law are obviously fundamentally important to the practice of law. The potential for legislative change creates an information need requiring a method of monitoring the status of proposed legislation as it bounces around the legislature. Thankfully, monitoring proposed laws/bills can be done electronically. In fact, there is an abundance of software and services that can accomplish this task. In the past, I have turned to subscription services to set these tracks up. Using a Westlaw, Lexis, or Bloomberg BNA is fine and will do the job of tracking legislation for you, but the drawback to these services is they cost money. Notably, there are alternatives on the web that track legislation, and do so for free.
Continue Reading Tracking Legislation: GovTrack.us & LegiScan