I’ll Have a Caramel Macchiato and So Will Everyone Else

Last weekend, I attended the annual meeting of the Southeastern Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries (SEAALL) in Clearwater Beach, Florida.  While I could devote an entire discussion to the many things I learned at the conference, I will instead discuss an idea I had en route from the conference, while driving on Interstate 75.  Well, the first idea that came to me, while on my drive, was to stop for some coffee.  This was not unusual for me, as I like coffee very much, especially at Starbucks.  Sprinkled across the state, there are a number of these coffee shops, and I was determined to see other parts of Florida, so I based my stops on the location of these particular coffee shops.  Using my GPS, I located a number of coffee shops to stop at along the way.  While advertising takes many forms, once you have actually entered the coffee shop, you’ll notice that at Starbucks, they tend to promote items on the menu using posters or chalkboard drawings.  That way, if you don’t readily know what a Tazo® Green Tea Crème Frappuccino® is, you might explore that option, and it’s a delicious option indeed.  Upon approaching the register, I noticed that the sign this month was promoting a caramel macchiato, one of the more expensive drinks on the menu.  It was a simple sign, with an attractive photo of two beverages, one with ice and one with steam.  I wondered how effective these simple advertisements were in helping customers select a menu item, or even whether it would make them aware that this was an item on the menu available for purchase (and had been for years).  I decided to ask the barista if he had noticed an increase in sales of the caramel macchiato.  He replied that sales at his store had increased significantly for the caramel macchiato, likely due to the signage.  It wasn’t being advertised as a special for that month; rather the message was just that you could have one, if you wanted, at Starbucks, in the morning or afternoon, iced or hot, as you always could.  After the conference, which was all about law libraries, teaching, service, and scholarship, I had been left thinking about various ways to promote resources in our library, and of course there should probably be a number of different strategies used to disseminate information; but I wondered about the Starbucks method.  Clearly, a retail store does not have the same goals as a library, but we do share some things in common.  Signage is relevant in both contexts, and getting the word out about our offerings is also important.  We’re not interested in sales, but we’d be very happy to let our patrons know about databases that have always been available and have always been great, but might be new to them.

But, when is signage most effective?  I discussed this topic with a librarian colleague, and we came to the conclusion that signage can be more effective when the audience already wants something, as in the case of the coffee shop customer, who has already entered the store in pursuit of something, whether a beverage, food item, or a place to sit for hours to think; or in the case of a library patron, who is looking for information, guidance, or a place to sit for hours to think.  Where is the best place for a sign?  It’s been my experience that signs tend to be missed when people are in motion (although billboards seem to be effective, but it’s likely that there are other explanations for that).  Therefore, signs might be more effective for promotion purposes, if they’re placed where a person will be stationary, at his/her final destination or rest point, in a place where you’d like them to end up, either at the register or at the reference desk.  For example, a sign, simply drawn or visually captivating, placed in front of the reference desk, might be just the right location to encourage a patron to ask about the highlighted resource.  I’m sure there are many other ideas that I could take away from observing the signage at Starbucks (I immediately think about how Starbucks has to make the language of coffee accessible to its customers, a venti white chocolate mocha no whip, what’s that?, as we have similar concerns about terminology in libraries, e.g., interlibrary loan, SuDoc numbers, subject headings, etc.).  I welcome your suggestions.  I probably wouldn’t have had six caramel macchiato beverages this month but for the effective signage at Starbucks, and I am sure that there are others who’ve responded similarly.  In fact, the moment I stepped away from the register to collect my beverage, the very next person put in her order for a caramel macchiato.

Library of Congress Exhibition: “NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom, 1909-2009″

The Library of Congress’s myLoC.gov is a great resource for those of us who don’t live in the DC area. It’s a virtual museum, featuring online exhibitions of many of the Library’s treasures. One of these exhibits is NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom, 1909-2009. 

The Library of Congress has been the official repository of NAACP records since 1964, housing over 5 million items, including many period photographs and documents, some of which form part of this exhibit.  After an overview of the organization’s history, the exhibit is divided into 8 “themes”, each representing an era in the life of the organization. The site also provides links to additional resources, including the excellent Civil Rights Resource Guide. 

Whether you’re a teacher, a student, or someone interested in our nation’s history, this exhibit provides an excellent introduction to the NAACP and its place in 20th century American history.

NY Library builds itself a Fab Lab

In March, MAKE’s Phil Torrone argued that libraries should retool to become hackerspaces. The Fayetteville Free Library in Fayetteville, NY is doing just that. Here’s the story from KQED’s Mindshift:

 

Earlier this year, MAKE Magazine’s Phillip Torrone wrote a provocative article asking “Is it time to rebuild and retool libraries and make ‘techshops’?” In other words, should libraries join some of the other new community centers that are being created and become “hackerspaces” or “makerspaces”?“Yes!”, says librarian Lauren Smedley, who is in the process of creating what might just be the first maker-space within a U.S. public library. The Fayetteville Free Library where Smedley works is building a Fab Lab — short for fabrication laboratory — that will provide free public access to machines and software for manufacturing and making things.

So far, the Fab Lab is equipped with a MakerBot, a 3D printer that lets you “print” plastic pieces of your own design. The potential for 3D printers to revolutionize manufacturing as we know it is huge: imagine being able to design and then manufacture — or “print” — whatever you want. Moreoever, imagine the tools of manufacturing being in the hands of everyone, not just giant factories (and remember, since this is a public library, this is really putting the technology in the hands of everyone, not just those that can afford a membership at a traditional hackerspace).

 

via Audrey Watters@KQED

Higher Education Charging High Prices For Food On Campus

Much to the surprise of no one who actually eats here on campus, the price of food on campus is apparently much higher than it is in the surrounding community. In his article for his school paper, the Statesman, Bryan Carroll discovered that while rolling through his local Student Activity Center that the prices for regular food items was generally much higher than they would have been off-campus. For instance, he notes how a half-gallon of milk was being sold at a school convenience store for $3.37 where as the exact same product was being offered at a nearby Target for $2.19. Oreo cookies were a whopping $8.27 on-campus versus $2.50 at Target.

Generally, he noticed an average markup of about 42 percent on grocery items.

Arguably, the point could be made that given the basic (and purest) interpretation of supply and demand this is merely a sound decision to take advantage of the reduced competition and great location. And I suppose that you could also mark this as a learning experience for students to become more aware of comparison shopping. I think, though, maybe it’s not so nice to take advantage of sleep-deprived students with exorbitant markups when they are already paying such a premium to attend school and live on campus already.

via The Statesman

The “Car Parts” Theory of Legal Research

A Theory

For a while now, I’ve been working on a theory about how legal research works. Using legal research tools is a hard paradigm to share with new law students, even ones who have experience with undergraduate research. It may be, as Anne Elk, A. Elk [Miss], put it, “My theory, that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine,” (Cough. Cough, cough), but I’d be thrilled if you steal, uh, borrow it, use it—and tell me what you think.

Cars

Every make of car—Honda, Toyota, Chevy, Ford—has parts that do the same things: alternators, starters, fuel injectors, fuel pumps, for instance. But parts from a Toyota won’t work in a Chevy, and so on. That’s because the parts do the same things, with different shapes and sizes and connectors. And remember: All those parts are supposed to connect: fuel injector, fuel pump, gas tank. But if you want your car to work right, all the parts have to connect together properly.

Research tools

There are a lot of different projects you might be doing legal research for. You might be working on a memo for LSV; a pleading or brief for an employer, moot court, or mock trial; or a seminar or law review paper or research for a professor. Like cars, all of the projects are similar, and go forward in similar ways. But, also like cars, they look different (trucks, economy cars, sports cars, SUVs) and have different uses.

And you will find a lot of different “things” (sources of law, or just “sources”) when you do legal research: constitutions, cases, statutes, regulations (kind of “junior statutes”), and lots of different types of secondary sources, like law review articles, legal encyclopedia articles, digest summaries, and case annotations.

These “things” are found in different research tools, in books and online: annotated statutes, case reporters, journals, legal encyclopedias, digests, and American Law Reports.

All of these research tools have the same parts. The books have tables of contents, indexes, and tables of cases. The Web resources have basic and advanced search functions, tables of issues and articles. But the parts don’t work exactly the same way… because just like an alternator from a Chevy and a fuel pump from a Honda, neither the resources nor the parts themselves are interchangeable.

But—and this is important—just like a working Honda’s fuel pump and gas tank, the parts are also connected, forward and backward, by the references and citations.

Connections

Use connections. The alternator connects to the battery. The connection runs both ways—and won’t work either way unless there is a connection.

Citations aren’t just something you have to use the Bluebook to figure out how to format. Look at the citations in the “things”—sources—you have, and use them to find other sources. Looking at citations in your sources, and the different sources they cite to, lets you figure out what all the sources you have to say about each other. Sources are written by people (obvious, I know). People disagree. Some disagreements get resolved—when a higher judge disagrees with a lower one. But some don’t—when two judges at exactly the same level, or in different states, disagree.

Reverse Engineering

Oh, about the Bluebook. Think of it as being the shop manual for your car. One use for a shop manual is to figure out how to put a new fuel injector in your car. But you can also use the shop manual to take the car apart, or find a part number for the new cylinder-head gasket or fuel-tank float you need.

You’ve been taught, or learned, to use the Bluebook to look up how to format a Georgia Supreme Court citation, for example. But if you have a citation that you can’t completely figure out, but you’re pretty sure is from Michigan (because it has “MI” or “Mich.” in it) or Colombia (“Colom.”, ditto), use the Bluebook’s tables to look up the citation format. (There’s a general rule of thumb here: As a favorite writer of mine put it, “[W]hen faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.”)

Other Places to Look

There are different shop manuals for different cars, right? Some jurisdictions have their own “shop manuals.” Florida, for instance, has two: An official one, Fla. R. App. P. 9.800, “Uniform Citation System,” and a semi-official one, the Florida Style Manual, that Fla. R. App. P. 9.800(n) tells you to use if Fla. R. App. P. 9.800 doesn’t have the citation style you need.

Postscript

I really like this “theory” (an extended metaphor, really), for its usefulness and concision. I also think it’s very pedagogically interesting. I plan to do some research on that aspect for a follow-up blog post. Anyway, that’s my theory. Please let me know what you think—post a comment, or email me at silvermanmi@nsu.law.nova.edu.

Is Teaching Cost-Effective Legal Research (Im)Possible?

An interesting blog post appeared on the Dewey B Strategic blog (the blog subhead: “Risk, value, strategy, libraries, knowledge and the legal profession”), posted by attorney and DLA Piper Director of Research Services and Libraries Jean P. O'Grady, on May 5, 2011: “The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Research Training.” It may be impossible to teach cost-effective legal research using Westlaw and LexisNexis in the manner the author describes. That said, I think the problem Ms. O’Grady is addressing is as much an result of her approach as it is a reflection of reality.

I think that there are (at least) three problems with Ms. O’Grady’s blog post. First, the tone of Ms. O’Grady’s blog post is rather negative: It criticizes, but suggests no better approaches. There may be a straw-person problem here as well: I don’t really recognize or understand the extremely detail-oriented model of cost-effective legal research instruction she discusses. She mentions that her solutions to the problems she diagnoses will be in a subsequent post, so I hope she describes her model further then. Second, her post is oriented toward large law firm research, and takes a trees-for-the-forest approach. And third, Ms. O’Grady seems never to have worked outside of BigLaw firms (that is, firms ranked in the American Lawyer 100, or of similar size), where the vast majority of lawyers do (see some numbers on firm size, below). Her approach to legal research and to cost-effective legal research teaching, reflects this: if more information, be it legal research or cost effective rules, is good, then more is better. BigLaw litigation tends to be massive, with massive discovery, trial–and legal research–budgets.

Law Practice and Overly-Expensive Memos

According to our Westlaw educational representative, there are some frightening numbers associated with computerized legal research. BigLaw firms spend approximately $150,000 a month on their Westlaw accounts. By comparison, if it were even possible to buy the equivalent of law-student Westlaw access, that sort of account alone would cost about $100,000 a month.

Such huge legal-research budgets presents a false picture of legal research in the real world of lawyering. As one of the commenters on Ms. O’Grady’s post, Chicago-Kent Law professor and Director of the Legal Research and Writing Program Mary Rose Strubbe (who practiced for four years with a small law firm doing complex federal litigation), wrote, “you imply that all or most lawyers are working at large firms, with librarians. In Illinois, for example, far fewer than 20% of the licensed lawyers work at private firms having more than 25 lawyers.”

These numbers are close to Florida’s. According to the Florida Bar’s 2010 Economics Survey, 65% of Florida attorneys work in firms of 1-5 attorneys, and 77% work in firms of ten attorneys or fewer. (DLA Piper, according to their website, has “4,200 lawyers located in 30 countries and 76 offices.”)

Given the costs of computerized legal research, it is extremely unlikely that small-firm lawyers have access to resources even approaching those available at BigLaw firms–unless they go to a library with free (limited) Westlaw or LexisNexis access.

At the run-of-the-mill small law firm, unlike BigLaw firms (which almost certainly pay a flat rate for their legal research), when a lawyer does legal research using Westlaw or LexisNexis, the meter is running. This can have frightening results. The $1,300 to $6,000 memo is real. A student of University of Arizona Law reference librarian and adjunct assistant professor Sarah Gotschall ran up about a $6,000 legal-research bill (but at least got an iPad for the $800 he eventually had to pay out of pocket). A friend of mine did it to the tune of $2,000. Even I spent $1,300 doing some in-house research, unaccustomed as I am to having to account for the cost of Westlaw access.

Granularity and “Easing In”

A major problem with Ms. O’Grady’s approach to cost-effective legal research training is this: She thinks that the solution to trainee lawyers learning cost-effectiveness is to give them a lot of detail. So much so, in fact, that she cites the number of databases that Westlaw and LexisNexis have between them, about 100,000–and implies that new legal researchers should ideally have some idea about the pricing of all these available modes of research.

How can newly minted legal researchers be expected to do this? They don’t understand some of the resources they are accessing, and certainly not their importance. New lawyers have all heard about the importance of running their cases through a citation index, but what percentage have internalized the importance of making sure all the cases they rely upon are good law? (It may take a courtroom loss for that to sink in.) Given that, how can a new lawyer figure out whether the importance of a resource justifies its cost? Law students and new lawyers should be “scared straight” slowly, and, to begin with, given a framework for understanding the costs of Westlaw and LexisNexis legal research. But that framework shouldn’t be more complicated than “This is expensive—BOO!”, with the “BOO,” of course, being the $6,000-memo story and its equivalent.

Citation Indexing

The most important example of the importance of a resource justifying its cost is, of course, citation indexing. And unfortunately, this is one area where there is no way around the Westlaw and LexisNexis duopoly. Their databases are the only ones set up for making sure that a case is still good law. Fortunately, the cash prices for this per case are not too excessive: $15.00 to Shepardize a case–cheap compared to losing a case through incomplete research. (KeyCite pricing varies by type of material.) Fastcase apparently gets asked about this a lot, and has talked about it internally. And, to speculate, doing so would let them put a big wedge into the duopoly. But that kind of database analysis, perforce done at least in part by hand, is obviously a huge undertaking. Access to ALR or forms or even headnotes is nice. But if a case is not good law, then much of the research that involves it is worthless.

BigLaw–Part of the Problem

Ms. O’Grady several times suggests that there are two sides to this dispute: The terrible information vendors, who are the true culprits in the spiraling, pathological cost of computerized legal research, and us, the virtuous law firms bearing the brunt. She even says so in a bold-faced statement: “Subscribing to the myth of cost effective research training keeps the focus off the true culprits and keeps us from demanding a real solutions [sic].” But how can BigLaw be expected to help solve the cost-effective legal research problem–boycott Westlaw and LexisNexis? The BigLaw machine would stop–obsessively over-researching issues, and the attendant huge amounts of time for which their model allows client billing, encourages Westlaw and LexisNexis, not discourages. BigLaw is part of the problem, not of the solution—for the moment, not even potentially.

Market forces may solve or help solve this–but only when the full-fee model that BigLaw firms hew to are replaced by different practice models and more sensitive billing models, as the economy changes. (The Economist ran an excellent article recently about how law firms are becoming more nimble and international, changing focus more rapidly, and retrenching, on May 5, “A Less Gilded Future.”)

A Conclusion and Some Solutions

Ms. O’Grady’s analysis is interesting and relevant. Nonetheless, she does have issues: a rather contrary tone, an over-detailed approach to cost-effective legal research instruction, and an overwhelmingly BigLaw background, far from the much more common small-firm law practice environment. Any one of those issues would be worrisome. Given all three factors, I think her perspective is somewhat unrealistic.

I do have some student-tested solutions of my own:

• a more general approach relying on a general cost-benefit comparison, perhaps;
• running some Westlaw and LexisNexis numbers with law students, clerks, and new lawyers;
• explaining, with examples and numbers, that Westlaw and LexisNexis are all but prohibitively expensive for small-firm use;
• teaching free and low-cost resources (where possible, except for citation indexing)
• the new flat-rate subscription plans Westlaw and LexisNexis are offering to solo and small-firm lawyers
• not to mention a realistic view of the contribution of BigLaw firms to the exorbitant, increasing price of computerized legal research and the lack of any responsiveness from the Westlaw and LexisNexis duopoly.

But I will go into more detail about these ideas, and examine some other possibilities later, especially after I can examine Ms. O’Grady’s proposed solutions.

Resource of the Day: The Bluebook Online

Today's resource of note is the interactive online version of the gold-standard citation tool The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.  Not only does the Law Library & Technology Center keep several print copies of the current edition in Reserve readily available for patron use (see Novacat entry for holdings), the LLTC also maintains an organizational subscription to online versions of the 18th (2005) and 19th (2010) editions. 

Easy to navigate and updated to reflect immediate changes, the online Bluebook provides users with great search functionality and allows them to bookmark often-used sections.  To learn more, visit http://www.legalbluebook.com/Public/Tour.aspx.



Access is restricted to Shepard Broad Law Center faculty, students, and staff.  Please contact your friendly neighborhood Law Librarian for the login details.

Freedom of Information Law: Opportunity and Threat?

A New York Times article this last weekend described a novel use of freedom of information law. The new owners of CourseRank.com (a course information website for college students like ratemyprofessors.com), requested aggregate grade data by course and professor from some 533 colleges nationwide, including Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, and the University of Florida. (Nova Southeastern University is included on the website, but does not seem to include grade distributions, which makes sense since it is not subject to Florida open-government law.)

Lisa A. Phillips, the author of the New York Times story and a SUNY New Paltz journalism professor, has ethical qualms about the impact this will have on grade inflation. She quotes experts who say both that it will contribute to grade inflation, by directing students to classes and professors with “better” grade distributions, and discourage it, but revealing which professors grade too leniently.

But what I (and my most excellent colleague Becka Rich, who brought this to my attention) think is more interesting are the implications of this.

First, there are the ethical issues, some of which are raised above. Second, there is the conflict with FERPA. The second question Becka asked me was, “Could this happen in Florida?” We now know that the answer is “Yes.”

This type of open-records request can be used in public-policy research: see Richard J. Peltz, From the Ivory Tower to the Glass House: Access to “De-Identified” Public University Admission Records to Study Affirmative Action, 25 Harv. BlackLetter L.J. 181 (2009). It has also been used by mainstream journalists, as with a recent Chicago Tribune series on politically preferential admissions at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (see all Chicago Tribume articles about the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

Law School Exam Tips: A Followup

As a follow-up to my post about exam tips, a quotation from an article about law school education I had intended to use to introduce my previous blog post:

"Studies have shown that the best way to learn is to have frequent exams on small amounts of material and to receive lots of feedback from the teacher. Consequently, law school does none of this."

 – James D. Gordon III, cited in Lynn C. Herndon, Help You, Help Me: Why Law Students Need Peer Teaching, 78 UMKC L. Rev. 809 (2010).

Law School Exam Tips

Two 1Ls here at NSU asked me the other day for tips for dealing with exams. I felt like I didn’t have a lot of insight. Law school was a long time ago for me, and I didn’t deal with exams too well myself.

So I consulted my awesome colleague Becka Rich, the NSU law library’s new Reference/Faculty Services Librarian. She provided some links and some advice, which I am passing on here.

First, some blog links to blog posts about exams.  Most of the posts (the first post is a collection of links) are very short, so don’t stress over reading them:

CALI’s Law School Exam Advice Post — CALI gives a list of links to essays and podcasts on how to do well on both essay and multiple choice law school exams.  There’s also a lot of great advice from good sources linked to.

A Common Law School Exam Mistake — The Volokh Conspiracy blog is helmed by a number of very down-to-earth law professors.  This post talks about how to organize your exam answers and how not to organize them.  If you’re only going to read one link, Becka suggests this one.

Law Career Blog’s Exam-Taking Advice:  Law Career Blog provides a list of their own best advice and a couple of other links. Very short, but helpful.

Lawyerist’s Tried and True Advice for Law School Exams: This is a round-up of their best posts on taking different types of law school exams.

Jurist’s Law School Exams page: The Jurist has a round-up of advice from law professors while noting that the best advice on your exam will come from your professor.

Beyond IRAC: Law School Exam Taking Tips (Law Profession Blog):  Advice from a law professor grading exams on how to write law school exams.  

University of Washington Law Library Law School Exam Page: Includes a bibliography of exam prep sources.

Law Crossing: Grade A Advice on Acing Law School Exams:  A recent grad shares law school exam tips.

Becka also said that candy and toys (which she and Carol Yecies, library associate director, both have) are useful if you need to sit and play for a minute. “But in all seriousness…. Tell them to take a deep breath, if they’ve been paying attention all semester it’s not that bad.  Eating and sleeping and showering are as important, if not more so than studying.  Get some exercise.  I meant it about the sleep.“

So, break a leg on your exams–and don’t stress or obsess!