iPhoneJD

Jeff Richardson at iPhone J.D. comments on Law Firm Mobile’s recent study showing only 42.5% of AmLaw 200 firms have mobile sites–this, after the ABA’s 2013 Legal Tech survey stated 90% of attorneys use smartphones. Global 100 firms fare even worse: only 39 Global 100 firms have mobile sites. This is perplexing data–the legal industry is characterized by its competitiveness, why are so many firms choosing to willfully disadvantage themselves by not having a mobile site?Continue Reading Majority of AmLaw 200 Firms Do Not Have Mobile Sites

BostonPublicLibrary

Appearing March 7th in The New York Times, Katharine Q. Seelye’s article “Breaking Out of the Library Mold, in Boston and Beyond” (available here) examines how renovations of large, public libraries exemplify how the roles of public libraries and public librarians have drastically changed. Public libraries are moving far away from being dusty book repositories, and toward being airy, open social centers designed with the omnipresence of electronic devices in mind. And, as this role-shifting and repurposing has occurred, public library usage is spiking upward across the county; Boston’s central library alone saw an increase of nearly 500,000 physical visits in 2013.Continue Reading How Are Public Libraries Changing?

The world is addicted to social media. It’s safe to assume that if you’re reading this, you probably use Facebook orTwitter—you might be obsessed with social media and post pictures of your to-be-devoured food and your workout schedule on a daily basis or maybe you dabble in it to keep tabs on your loved ones. No matter the level of your involvement, you are familiar with how the services work, but are you doing everything you can do to make your tweets and posts as impactful as possible?
Continue Reading The Science of Social Media

Last week, business technology and market research firm InsideLegal put together a graphical chart detailing what various sized law firms spent their tech budgets on in 2013 (available here). The data is coming from ILTA/InsideLegal’s Technology Purchasing Software Survey, a wonderful, free, and highly informative resource both organizations collaborate on and release annually (the latest edition, released in August of 2013, is available here). The data, notably, is organized by the number of responding firms, and not the overarching dollar figures of money spent by the particular firms; it gives insight into how various technological purchasing trends affect different sized firms. The data illustrates many situations where new hardware or software is vigorously embraced by firms of a particular-size but not by other firms of a different size. For example, smaller-sized firms are much more likely to purchase tablet computers. Why would this be?
Continue Reading InsideLegal Lessons: Examining Technology Purchasing Trends by Firm-Size

Recently released, the ILTA Technology Survey offers information professionals great insight into how lawyers are interacting with technology at their firms. The organization, made up primarily of firm IT and KM professionals, produces an annual technology survey, and, thankfully, releases it for free (the AmLaw Tech Survey and the ABA’s Legal Technology Survey Report will

In re-researching case management apps for an upcoming presentation, I again stumbled across RLTC: Evidence. Its web-site, accessible here, lists all the wonderful features of this particular case management app: many file formats are supported, users can add annotations to existing files, the app can project onto a tv or monitor via Apple’s SVGA

On Thursday, November 14th, Google Inc. won a major court battle regarding its Google Books project. The federal district court in New York City ruled the Google Book project falls under the protection of fair use. Google, through collaborations with research libraries across the country, has digitized over twenty million books, making large portions of

From On Firmer Ground:

Recently while speaking at the Ark Group’s Best Practices & Management Strategies for Law Firm Library & Information Service Centers conference in New York, I said something that seemed to really resonate with the audience. I was talking about methods for driving resource utilization and optimization, when I shared my opinion that there is little room in the law firm information industry for passive librarians. What we need to survive and thrive as a profession, I postulated, are true activist librarians. Judging by the discussion after my presentation and the tweets I saw online, my point hit home.
Continue Reading iBraryGuy Talks about Activist Librarians!

I was surprised to read an article on CNN today regarding the move by Yahoo!’s new CEO to end work at home opportunities for the company’s employees.  Marissa Mayer, herself a known work-a-holic, is pulling the plug on this privilege in the interest of fostering greater collaboration among Yahoo! employees.  This in the interest of