Category «Legal Technology»

Correcting The Legal Industry’s Bad Turn On Lean Thinking

Ken Grady’s commentary focuses on the challenges to successfully operationalizing “lean” in the legal sector. He states – “to understand why lean thinking is struggling in the legal industry, we need to understand who is teaching lean. Most of the people who “teach” lean in the legal industry have little experience implementing lean. They have read books, consulted, taught, and advised, but they haven’t been on the front lines doing thousands of hours of lean.”

Subjects: KM, Legal Profession

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues May 31 2018

Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health/medical, to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways our privacy and security is diminished, often without our situational awareness. Note – this week Pete highlights the privacy issues concerning using Google to learn about personal and or family medical issues.

Subjects: Congress, Cybersecurity, Financial System, Healthcare, Privacy, Search Engines

Finding Experts Using the Internet 2018

Marcus Zillman’s guide provides multi-disciplinary researchers a wide range of internet sources to assist in identify, reviewing and engaging the talents of subject matter experts, in the U.S. and abroad. In addition, this guide links to numerous sites and forums that provide answers to a range of questions, from the simple to the complex, from topical matters to technical issues.

Subjects: Business Research, Distance Learning, Expert Witnesses, Internet Resources - Web Links, Reference Resources

Pete Recommends – weekly highlights on cyber security issues – April 29 2018

Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health/medical, to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways our privacy and security is diminished, often without our situational awareness.

Subjects: Blockchain, Cybercrime, Cyberlaw, Cybersecurity, Email, Email Security, Privacy

Pete Recommends – weekly highlights on cyber security issues – April 15 2018

Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health/medical, to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways our privacy and security is diminished, often without our situational awareness.

Subjects: Email, Government Resources, Privacy, RSS Newsfeeds, Social Media

Can Legal Research Be Taught? Part 3: Pushing Ourselves Further

In the conclusion of his three part series, Paul Gatz joins the themes of the first two articles, the teaching of metacognition, legal bibliography, and legal analysis and argument to his conclusion that “to be the experts in legal research we must also be leaders in developing knowledge in our field, furthering the understanding of the legal domain and of our own place within it.” The accuracy of Gatz’s conclusions can enrich our work as we teach students on range of expert subject matter that aligns with and overlaps legal research.

Subjects: Legal Education, Legal Research, Legal Research Training

Misinformation Overload

Librarian John Hubbard’s extensively documented article is timely and prescient, with its first publication on March 9, 2017 prior to: the release of James Comey’s book; a long series of departures from the White House and even more from Congress; with a backdrop of a rising storm of controversy about purported misconduct by the current U.S .President – in the decade prior to his election and during his campaign. Hubbard’s introduction: “We live in uncertain times. With big data and a boom in our ability to transmit ideas comes a seemingly greater amount of erroneous information, and therefore the need for everyone to be able to properly identify, discredit, and prevent the spread of falsehoods. What follows is a tour of how much the misrepresentation of reality pervades our world (from whimsical pranks and well-intentioned hoaxes to full-blown propaganda intended to defraud and manipulate), concluding with a discussion of tactics for taking a rational and scientific view so that we may both decrease our susceptibility and improve our ability to detect misinformation.”

Subjects: Communications, Ethics, Internet Trends, KM, Social Media

Can Legal Research Be Taught? Part 1: The Relevance Paradox

In the first of a three part series, Paul Gatz articulates the importance of acknowledging the “learner’s paradox” that “legal research is the process of identifying and retrieving the law-related information necessary to support legal decision-making.” Expert legal researchers conduct their work within the territory of the known and the unknown, the facts, the suppositions, and the possibilities that skilled and strategic students seek to learn and thereafter apply within their course of studies, and subsequently bring forward to support their respective practice of law. [Link to Part 2 of this series]

Subjects: Communication Skills, Law Librarians, Legal Education, Legal Research, Legal Research Training

Can Legal Research Be Taught? Part 2: Varieties of Relevance

In Part 2 of his series [see Part 1 here], Paul Gatz takes a deeper dive into the challenges of effectively teaching the “why” of a document’s relevance to assist students to understand the reasons a given document occupies the role it does within the subject literature. Gatz focuses on the concept of how knowledge in a particular discipline is created, disseminated, and organized (subject knowledge relevance). Gatz states that knowledge content of a discipline is helpful in determining the relevance of a particular document, but an effective relevance determination relies upon a theory of what counts as knowledge, or, in legal practice, what counts as legally valid.

Subjects: Communication Skills, Law Librarians, Legal Education, Legal Research, Legal Research Training