Competitive intelligence (CI) can be especially valuable to private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms, which often operate somewhat in the dark within their industry segments. Holdings in newly-forming or niche industries have few public companies or established business models to provide adequate references for benchmarking and other meaningful insights.
Continue Reading My latest for LAC: CI considerations for PE and VC firms
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
Access to the most current and reliable information is a prerequisite to sound decision-making and innovative thinking.
Yet too many knowledge workers are tasked with finding information on their own, on the open internet, and increasingly that includes workers who often are not experienced or trained in doing information research and content discovery.
We all
Though I have been accused of having “grizzly bear” hair by a certain toddler who shares a house with me, I have not been hibernating for the winter. I would not hold it against you if you thought that was the case, though–it has been a couple of months since I’ve posted a blog. But
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a godsend to law librarianship. My undergraduate professors would be slowly shaking their wizened heads at me for starting a piece of writing with a “universal superlative,” but, count literary composition as just another thing the internet has changed forever. As transient and mutable as the internet is, however,
The Cool Tools Café program at this year’s AALL Annual Meeting showcased–like it always does–many great presentations concerning implementing technologies to improve library offerings. For those unfamiliar with the format of the Cool Tools Café, the program features a variety of demonstrations set up in different stations inside a large conference room—attendees are given free rein to wander around and scope out the various presentations on technologies. Standing out among these was the presentation conducted by CUNY Library Associate Professor & Emerging Technologies Librarian Alex Berrio Matamoros; Alex’s presentation regarded law librarians using screencasting software as a teaching tool.
Continue Reading Screencasting in the Library
The Cool Tools Café program at this year’s AALL Annual Meeting showcased–like it always does–many great presentations concerning implementing technologies to improve library offerings. For those unfamiliar with the format of the Cool Tools Café, the program features a variety of demonstrations set up in different stations inside a large conference room—attendees are given free rein to wander around and scope out the various presentations on technologies. Standing out among these was the presentation conducted by CUNY Library Associate Professor & Emerging Technologies Librarian Alex Berrio Matamoros; Alex’s presentation regarded law librarians using screencasting software as a teaching tool.
Continue Reading Screencasting in the Library
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
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
Though I have detailed its flaws, PACER’s existence as the centralized interface containing electronic access to Federal court dockets and documents makes our jobs as law librarians much easier. State courts, on the other hand, are the wild west of electronic docket and document access.
Continue Reading Quickly Check the Availability of State Court Electronic Docket and Document Access With CourtReference.com